in America at the time the letters were written, will one day read them. Hassan conveys his dismay with the current societal conflicts in Afghanistan, indicating that people there "cannot escape the killings" and that "kindness is gone from the land." He also expresses his deep desire for Amir to one day meet Sohrab, Hassan's son.

When Amir finishes reading the letters, he asks how his childhood friend is currently doing. Rahim Khan begins a halting response, indicating that the letter was written six months prior to Amir's visit. Rahim Khan explains that while he was away from home for a few weeks, he received a horrific phone call from one of his neighbors. The Taliban had come to investigate reports that a Hazara family was living alone in "the big house in Wazir Akbar Khan." Hassan, who was Hazara, had long feared that the return of the Taliban would prove disastrous for his people. On the day of the investigation, Hassan insisted that he lived with Rahim Khan and had permission to be there. The Taliban looked at the house "like wolves looking at a flock of sheep" and asserted that they would be moving into the house to safeguard it for Rahim Khan's return. When Hassan protested, the Taliban took him into the street, made him kneel in front of them, and shot him in the back of the head. When his wife came out of the house screaming and attacked the Taliban officials, they shot her as well.

Amir was not in the country at the time of his friend's death but likely could not have prevented such a vile murder.

Hassan is Amir's Hazara half-brother and childhood friend in the story. Growing up, Hassan was Amir's best friend and the two boys spend every waking hour playing together on Baba's estate and in the streets of Kabul. Hassan was also the best kite runner in the entire city and protected Amir from Assef as a boy. Despite their close friendship, Amir was jealous of Hassan because Baba showed him more affection. Amir also refused to openly acknowledge their friendship because of Hassan's second-class ethnicity. As a Hazara, Hassan and his father were discriminated against and lived in poverty as ethnic minorities in Kabul. Following the kite-fighting tournament, Amir witnessed Assef rape Hassan and did not intervene. After Hassan is raped by Assef, Amir becomes overwhelmed with guilt and their friendship is destroyed. As an adult, Amir atones for his past sins of passively witnessing Hassan get raped and redeems himself by traveling to Kabul to save Hassan's son, Sohrab. Amir is also disheartened to learn from Rahim Khan that Hassan was murdered in the streets by Taliban soldiers and his son was sent to an orphanage. Amir also discovers that Hassan was his half-brother and ends up adopting Sohrab after bringing him to America.

Nothing about Assef is courageous. He is the worst individual antagonist in The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, and he is a coward, a sociopath, and a bully.

Assef is a rich, imposing, blond-haired Pashtun boy whose father is an Afghan and whose mother is a German. He is raised in privilege and could have been and done anything good; instead he acts like the worst of privileged kid. Rather than counting himself blessed and making his world better, Assef abuses his position and connections to satisfy his depravities.

Nothing Assef does is courageous. He routinely taunts Hassan and, by association, Amir. He only rapes Hassan, a Hazara who cannot fight back, when Assef gets Hassan alone in an alley with several of his cohorts who, by the way, also think Assef is depraved. That is not a courageous act.

Later, when he comes to Amir's birthday party, he taunts Amir by giving him a biography of Hitler to make his point that the "impure" races (like the Hazaras) should be eradicated--and so should anyone who likes and protects them. Taunting is not courageous, either.

Much later, when Assef is a leader in the Taliban, he abuses--on a much larger scale--those who cannot defend themselves. He takes young boys from orphanages to be his sexual slaves, and he routinely kills Hazaras for fun. Amir has to listen to this gleeful, sick recounting by Assef before he can get Sohrab away from Assef:

He leaned toward me, like a man about to share a great secret. "You don't know the meaning of the word 'liberating' until you've done that, stood in a roomful of targets [the Hazaras in Mazar-i-Sharif], let the bullets fly, free of guilt and remorse, know you are virtuous, good, and decent. Knowing you're doing God's work. It's breathtaking." He kissed the prayer beads, tilted his head.

Assef is a sadistic sociopath who has no discernible redeeming qualities. Usually a villain has something to which we can relate or with which we can sympathize; however, Assef is a pure villainous character who had everything given to him to be a force for good but chose evil at every turn. Assef is not a courageous character.

The privileged, Hitler-loving bully Assef rapes Hassan and later sexually abuses Hassan's son, Sohrab. Not surprisingly, Assef has become a high-ranking official in the Taliban. Sohrab blinds Assef's left eye with a sling shot, unwittingly fulfilling a desire Hassan had; however, at the novel's end Assef is still alive.

That Assef continues living suggests that the force of evil is not easy to eradicate. Justice does not prevail in Afghanistan, and Assef will continue to sow evil. Amir's best option at the novel's end is remove both himself and Sohrab from harm's way by leaving Afghanistan and returning to the United States.

Assef, the on-going antagonist in the novel, is a caricature of evil, helping to make him a foil to the perhaps overly saintly Hassan. Assef embodies the problems with Afghanistan's hierarchical society, in which people like Hassan are denied respect and opportunity simply because they were born to the despised Hazara ethnic group. Assef buys into and perpetrates a system in which people like him benefit from oppressing other ethnicities. Although Amir initially is like Assef in the sense of enjoying unearned privilege from being born to the right caste, he is eventually able to embrace the Hazara as his own through Hassan and Sohrab.