Demographics of Afghanistan
As of 2016, the total population of Afghanistan is around 33,332,025, which includes the 3 million Afghan nationals living in both Pakistan and Iran. Afghanistan's Central Statistics Organization (CSO) stated in 2011 that the total number of Afghans living inside Afghanistan was about 26 million and by 2017 it reached 29.2 million. Of this, 15 million are males and 14.2 million are females. About 22% of the population is urbanite and the remaining 78% live in rural areas.
Afghanistan
The PDPA prohibited usury, declared equality of the sexes, and introduced women to political life. During this war from 1979 until 1989, Soviet forces, their Afghan proxies and rebels killed between 562,000 and 2 million Afghans, and displaced about 6 million people who subsequently fled Afghanistan, mainly to Pakistan and Iran. Many countryside villages were bombed and some cities such as Herat and Kandahar were also damaged from air bombardment. Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province functioned as an organisational and networking base for the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance, with the province's influential Deobandi ulama playing a major supporting role in promoting the 'jihad'. Meanwhile, the central Afghan region of Hazarajat, which in this period was free of Soviet or PDPA government presence, experienced an internal civil war from 1980 to 1984. Faced with mounting international pressure and numerous casualties, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, but continued to support Afghan President Mohammad Najibullah until 1992.