Former US Army Reservist Ramiz Brahimaj Reacts to UFC Victory, Situation in Afghanistan

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The Fortis MMA representative went through a rough couple of years.

It took two years before Ramiz Brahimaj could finally celebrate his first victory inside the Octagon. The 28-year old’s path to the Ultimate Fighting Championship was dotted with life-changing experiences, starting with his scrapped clash with Miguel Baeza at Dana White’s Contender Series due to an eye tumor. After recovering from the subsequent surgery, the grappling ace should have made his promotional debut against Takashi Sato in June 2020 before one of his cornermen tested positive for COVID-19. In his UFC debut, he found himself on the losing side of one of the most gruesome ear injuries in the Octagon when he was declared unfit to continue 2:03 into Round 3 of his welterweight affair with Max Griffin. Once he overcame that last hindrance, he put Sasha Palatnikov to sleep with a rear-naked choke in the first round of their welterweight pairing at UFC on ESPN 29.

While talking with Sherdog, Brahimaj (9-3, 1-1 UFC) opened about his long path to victory and his UFC misadventures, in addition to sharing his opinion as a former military man on what’s going on in Afghanistan after the U.S. Army’s withdrawal.

“Anytime any country in the world is in conflict, it’s sad because ultimately the loss of innocent lives is going to occur,” said Brahimaj. “Then you have a lot of displaced people. Realistically, what happens is post-war you have a lot of anarchy, right? It’s never usually the bad guys who get in trouble. Usually, you’re going to find that a lot of good people end up suffering. It’s one of those things that my heart truly goes out to any and everybody who’s suffering. It doesn’t matter, be it in Afghanistan, be it what’s going on in Cuba and Venezuela, anywhere. Any country that’s affected with conflict, my heart automatically goes out to the innocent people. I just hope that these issues can be resolved fairly quickly for the sake of those innocent people so that people can go back to hopefully living in some form of normality.”

Tudor Leonte started writing about mixed martial arts in 2013 for Italian media outlets. His journey with Sherdog begun in 2018 and now he covers One Championship and countless European shows. You can follow him on Twitter @MrTudorLeonte.