Sarwar Ahmedzai was born in the Logar Province of Afghanistan. At the age of 7, his family moved to
Pakistan due to the Soviet-Afghan war. He completed his education in Pakistan. At the age of 16, Ahmedzai was the first Afghan refugee to be sent to the U.S. as a foreign exchange student, and graduated from a high school in Virginia. He earned a
bachelor's degree in
political science at
Edwards College,
Peshawar and a
master's degree in
international relations from the
University of Peshawar. He received a law degree from the University of Peshawar's Law College. During his time at Peshawar University, Ahmedzai was elected central chairman of the Afghan Students Union (ASU) in 1990, and served until 1996. According to a profile prepared by the
Pajhwok Afghan News, under his leadership, the organization aided thousands of Afghan students with books. Ahmedzai led two delegations to Afghanistan, in 1993 and 1994, to try to mediate between the warring factions
Burhanuddin Rabbani and
Gulbadin Hekmatyar, in the civil war that followed the overthrow of the communist regime in 1992. Rabbani and Hekmatyar were then the nominal president and nominal prime minister of a fractured Afghanistan. ==Political career==