Days of Fear (18 page)

 

Minutes pass, then hours. There are problems concerning our transfer from the military post to the nearby base, where it is possible for aircraft to land. More telephone calls, more pressure, further delays. Then, finally, a helicopter arrives and we board in a hurry, together with several British soldiers. It's a ten minute flight to the base, which is situated in the middle of the desert. There's a C-130 bearing the Italian colors on its way in. All together there are a dozen or so people in our group: me, Gino Strada, some Emergency staffers plus the two Italian military intelligence agents. Upon arrival there are handshakes, a few weak smiles that betray the tension. A group of British soldiers, their guns leveled, some of them walking backwards covering our backs, accompanies us to the rear door of the military aircraft.

We take off and fly through the darkness that has descended over all of Afghanistan. We land in Kabul, where Gino Strada would like to hold a press conference, but there's no time: the prime minister's executive jet is waiting on the runway, engines running. I barely have time to greet and hug the ambassador, Ettore Sequi. I hold him tight. He is a friend.

The jet is small but comfortable. I am met by the two pilots. I try to decipher their gazes, to get some sense of what has been happening in Italy during our detention. In the turmoil of the past several hours I have had very little news. I know that there was a massive mobilization, one that I could never have thought possible. I sit down on one of the eight comfrtable leather armchairs arranged around two small tables in the front cabin. On board, in addition to the female flight attendant, there is a man. I presume he is a member of our secret services. Both want to shake my hand. “Welcome back,” they say, smiling.

The small plane lifts off. The turbo jets are at full throttle as we clear the mountains surrounding Kabul. Six hours later we will be landing at Ciampino airport, Rome. I relax, finally. My thoughts are of Afghanistan, of the months that I have spent in this country, of the snowstorms and the suffocating heat. I know that I will never come back. It is something I feel within me.

 

Now I am truly free. Safe. Alive. I have to write something for the newspaper. Ambassador Sequi handed me a laptop belonging to one of my colleagues, Attilio Bolzoni, still on assignment in Kabul, and a letter with some indications from my editor-in-chief. I ask the hostess if I can smoke. “I know it's prohibited,” I say. “But I really need a cigarette.” The captain has no objections. They close the curtain that separates the front cabin from the cockpit and offer me every kind of drink. I need water more than anything else but I allow myself a beer and a gin and tonic.

I concentrate on the article. I write everything, a spontaneous stream of memories regarding the Taliban, their life, our conversations, the fears and anxieties that assailed us time and time again. I write and I think. Perhaps I am really dreaming with my eyes open. My mind fills with images of the series of rooms in which we were imprisoned, the dashes across the desert, the rifles, turbans and dirty walls. I hear the sounds of our abduction and smell its odors.

I ask how long until we land. Three hours. I will not be able to deliver the article by hand. I'll have to send it in. But that proves impossible: the jet is well appointed but the Internet connection is acting up. My article on the Taliban has encountered one difficulty after another, and this is just the latest. The idea was simple enough: an interview with a Taliban commander. But the road has been full of obstacles, right to the very end. I ask if there's a telephone on board. I resort to what is by now an outdated method: I will dictate my piece. The newspaper can then publish it in tomorrow's edition.

I phone the call-corder and dictate the report. Those listening to me are happy, they heap words of affection on me. I hang up. I am stunned and still confused. I try to relax but the adrenalin coursing through my veins, the joy of feeling myself free and alive, alternating with moments of anguish for the violence and the blood I have witnessed, do not allow me sleep. I wander into the cockpit, talk with the pilot and co-pilot, ob­serve the starry night and the lights of the cities dotting the land beneath us, and then go back to my seat. My head is completely empty. Exhausted, I no longer feel capable of thinking about anything. I'm caving in.

We land. The door of the executive jet opens and the stairs are lowered. I stand. I don't want to make my exit looking tense and crushed. I refuse to step out there looking like I have been defeated by the Taliban who kidnapped us. Ajmal and I fought for our freedom. We have to demonstrate this to the world, we have to proclaim our joy, and cry our pain for the murder of our driver, Sayed Agha. I raise my arms above my head. I'm in Italy again, alive. I have escaped from a slaughterhouse.

 

 

 

 

M
y stupor lasts for hours. The airport is full of people: the authorities, Prime Minister Romano Prodi, agents from SISMI, carabinieri from the special Ops division, the director of my newspaper, Carlo De Benedetti, my editor-in-chief, Ezio Mauro. And then my wife, Luisella, and my children Michele and Alice, who break the tense and awkward protocol and run to embrace me with a liberating cry as I come down the stairs. And friends, colleagues, my brothers and sisters, my mother, who always remained firm in her conviction that I would return home. I wave and embrace everyone. I need human contact, tenderness and support. I need to feel that I am alive. There's a festive atmosphere, a celebration for my rescue. This ordeal has kept tens of thousands of people holding their breath, torn between anguish at having lost me forever and hope for a miracle.

I think about Sayed, the boy I knew for only a few hours and whose throat was cut right before our eyes. An atrocious, absurd, incomprehensible death. It will haunt me during the long nights to come; I will wake with a start, in a cold sweat, my heart beating madly again. I think about Ajmal, who I imagine is already in Kabul, wrapped in the warmth of his loved ones' affection.

Two days of parties and joy as I desperately try to return to the real world, incapable of fully understanding what happened in Italy and elsewhere. I avoid asking myself too many questions: prison has made me taciturn. I try to interpret fragments of sentences overheard, allusions half grasped amid the rumble of voices I am incapable of fully deciphering. These voices now feel extraneous to me. I feel extraneous to myself. Everything appears extraneous and different. But the real storm is yet to arrive. It comes in waves that grow more and more powerful. Ajmal is still being held. They released him and then abducted him again when he was on the road back home. As they planned to do with me. Nobody was talking about Ajmal: the arrest of the mediator became a priority. But for me, the nightmare is not over. It continues, stronger than ever.

Mullah Dadullah considers himself invincible. He is arrogant, contemptuous. He sends a video to al-Jazeera and thus plays his final card. He wants to put the governments of Afghanistan and Italy in a difficult position. He wants to divide us, wound us, exasperate the relationships between our two countries. He has already lied once by not upholding his side of the agreement with Gino Strada. He makes an announcement: “Ajmal is in our hands.” And then he raises the stakes: “Karzai must free a further six prisoners.” Then comes the sentence: “If our requests are not met we will kill him.”

A chill creeps over everything and everyone.

 

I try to understand what might have happened. I see the final scenes of the movie frame by frame. Our liberation, the chains being broken with blows from stones and awls, our embrace, the tears that wet our stricken faces, the promise to see each other again in Kabul, Rome, London. I see his smile as he leaves in a convoy of pickups and cars, his hands raised as he waves to me and heads off in the opposite direction.

It was mere theatrics. The same things happened many times during our captivity. With Sayed, for example, when they took him away to be tortured and told us he had been freed. The celebration turns into a drama. Then there is anguish, and finally mourning. I think back to the arrest of Rahmatullah Hanefi. I now interpret it as a form of retaliation, a vendetta being played out between the twin souls of the Afghan secret services. The mediator in exchange for the nephew of a high-ranking member of the Kabul police force. The orchestrator of our abduction makes things very clear. He has uncovered what Ajmal managed to keep hidden for fifteen days, and the fact that Ajmal is related to a police officer is an aggravating factor. He is a dangerous and inconvenient witness.

I concentrate on his liberation. I work day and night, constantly on the phone to Kabul, talking with the local BBC journalists. I write, then record an appeal that I address to his captors. I mobilize local newspapers, participate in the campaign organized by
La Repubblica
, talk to the Afghan ambassador in Italy. But the sentence has already been handed down. The trap has become a vise that is growing tighter and tighter, inexorable and unstoppable. It is Easter, April 8, 2007. The news reaches me and strikes me brutally like a knife to the stomach. I vomit the few pieces of roasted baby goat that I have eaten with my family in celebration of a day that is sad and full of anguish as it is. Ajmal has been decapitated in some deserted stretch of land. I've lost a colleague with whom I shared five years of my life and two weeks of terrible imprisonment. I've lost a co-worker, someone with whom I spent entire evenings dreaming, fantasizing about an infinite number of projects and plans.

 

Two years have passed. It seems more like ten. Time mends the soul's wounds and attenuates the pain associated with the loss of two collaborators, people who depend on you and to whom, in theatres of war, you entrust your life. This kind of relationship creates an indissoluble bond that no controversy, above all the kind that results from opportunism, can break. What remains is regret at not having been able to save them. They were unwittingly part of a game that was much, much bigger than they were.

You have the chance to reflect on what happened, calmly, coolly, free of the inevitable sense of guilt, and to reflect on how and how much things have changed. In Afghanistan, Italy, America, the world. You reflect on the ways of keeping up with world events, of being a journalist, has changed as a consequence of the increased speed of information delivery and the quantity of information delivered.

I often think about Ajmal and Sayed. I know that their families are doing well nowadays. They received support thanks to an appeal organized by Italian journalists. My interpreter's young wife went back home and found work as a nurse. They tell me that she has big plans, and that she showed strength and dignity during the period of her mourning. Sayed's wife, meanwhile, was able to buy a store and a house with the money collected in Italy, and she still lives in Lashkar Gah with the five children her husband left her. She is part of a great tribe that protects her and makes sure she has everything she needs. Ajmal's brothers are scattered around the world, studying and working.

 

After three months in jail and the complete dismissal of all charges against him, including the accusation that he orchestrated our abduction, Rahmatullah Hanefi returned to direct the Emergency hospital in Lashkar Gah. Then he left his position and moved to Europe. The men who were released from prison in exchange for our liberty were killed in battle or were arrested again some time later. The man who did orchestrate our kidnapping, the man we were supposed to interview but who instead played with our lives in order to shift the balance of power in the Supreme Shura in his favor, Mullah Dadullah, is dead as well.

 

Many consider this episode merely a terrible and bloody story. I prefer to remember it as an experience that cast me down into the depths of my soul, that made me stronger, more convinced of the vital importance of many things: my relationships with loved ones, life's small everyday moments, basic human values, my profession. To have left this story prey to the memories and phantoms that have haunted me for such a long time would have been selfish. Sayed and Ajmal would have wanted me to tell the world our incredible story. I owed it to them. It was something I promised I would do.

Two years later, I have kept my promise.

 

Daniele Mastrogiacomo has covered national and international affairs for the Italian daily
La Repubblica
since 1980. He has worked as a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places: Kabul, Tehran, Palestine, Baghdad, and Mogadishu. In 2006 he reported on the war in Lebanon between Israel and the Hezbollah. He lives in Rome.

Notes:

 

 

 

[1]
Surgeon, author, and founder of the humanitarian aid organization Emergency [Trans.]