For about 5 years before I was able to purchase https://gr.af, I had https://mgr.af – it was the shortest possible domain name to register (3 letters before the tld). At the time gr.af was registered to a man living in Afghanistan, and had some construction equipment displayed, and then at one point went dark. The domain was extremely desirable to me, because it allowed me to issue emails to my family and have a really beautiful scheme (firstname@gr.af)… I would email the owner every few months and ask if he would sell… I never got a response. I contacted the Afghan NIC, and they explained that two legged registrations were impossible anyway, so I should just give up.

One day I emailed the registered address with an offer, and to my surprise, I got a response. The owner was in trouble with the law and needed money. I made an offer that I considered to be very fair and was pleasantly surprised to see that he accepted it. The whole process was pretty amazing at this point, we had to fill out the forms by hand for the Afghan NIC and scan them in, I had to wire some money to the Afghan government directly in order to get this whole thing working they talk to me on the phone and I think I use Skype at the time in order to communicate with them and they spoke English very well and they had to hand fill out all the registering details for the domain. This is before the Taliban to took over Afghanistan and I continue to pay to the Afghan Nick to this day so I always joke, and say that I’m loosely funding the Taliban.