Is This Your First War? (9 page)

My favourite destination was the one teahouse in Khodja Bahuddin. It wasn't open all the time and rarely served meat. The building was a concrete box about the size of a truck trailer. The few windows had no glass, only dirty plastic sheeting that kept out the worst of the weather. Inside there were no chairs, plates, or cutlery. Patrons, all men, sat on the floor and ate greasy rice with raisins off plastic mats on floor. On good days they'd also serve kebabs of mutton, goat, and beef. When the customers were armed, they would simply lean their Kalashnikovs on the wall behind them before squatting on their heels or sitting cross-legged to eat.

Since Khodja Bahuddin was situated so close to the front lines, and there was some very basic medical care available, it was home to many soldiers and civilians who had been injured by the war. Most of them, it seemed, had lost their legs or their limbs had been mutilated. Tens of millions of landmines lay all over the country. More than a decade after the Soviet withdrawal, Russian munitions continued to kill and maim. Mines scattered since by feuding warlords and by the Northern Alliance and the Taliban added to the carnage. In Khodja Bahuddin's cramped hospital, built and supplied by Iran, Dr. Ashraf Aini told me he received so many landmine victims that medical staff with no formal medical training were forced to perform amputations. Aini himself worked almost continuous twelve-hour shifts. He had a wife and children and saw them once or twice a week.

Victims typically loitered on the steps of a nearby mosque, which is where I met Ghullam Ali as he sat cradling aluminum crutches in his lap. His legs were covered in stitches and thick scabs from toes to thighs. His right ankle was wrapped in a dusty bandage, now discoloured by blood and pus. Only two weeks earlier, Ali was a commander in the Northern Alliance with men under him. He led an attack against Taliban positions. One of his men stepped on a mine and blew off his leg. As Ali and another soldier carried the wounded man to safety, they stepped on a second mine. “He was martyred. I survived,” he said. Next to him sat Abdul Khalil, a civilian. He had stepped on a mine near the city of Taloqan two years earlier. One leg was sheared off by the blast and the shrapnel. The other was left useless, now kept straight with metal rods. “When I pray I feel better,” he said.

There was a prison nearby. Here captured Taliban fighters were squeezed into dark cells with walls made of mud and straw and a few rugs and blankets strewn on the ground. There was a pit latrine at the end of the hall. The cells were clean, though, and there was no stench, unlike the choking smell that enveloped overcrowded prisons I would later visit in Haiti. Outside each cell the prisoners' plastic sandals lay stacked. They sat on the ground with bare feet and crossed legs.

The Taliban prisoners here were luckier than many Afghans who were captured by their enemies. Despite the fraternal radio banter back and forth across no-man's land, prisoners were often shot. Forces loyal to Abdul Rashid Dostum, a warlord and unofficial leader of Afghanistan's Uzbeks, who had switched sides with dizzying frequency since the time of the Soviet occupation, are said to have suffocated to death hundreds of Taliban prisoners while shipping them across the desert in truck containers. The 140 or so prisoners in Khodja Bahuddin's prison avoided such atrocities. They were locals, most of them, who said they had been forced to fight and had surrendered easily. The came from nearby villages and towns, rather than from the Taliban's Pashtun heartland south of the Hindu Kush. One, Najmuddin, was sixteen with a downy wisp of a moustache. “I want to go home,” he said. “My family has no idea where I am.” As he talked, he nervously fingered his prayer beads. A rhythmic clicking sound filled the darkness of the cell.

Only one of the prisoners, Naeem Hussein Shah, was Pakistani. He was young, with high cheekbones and a hollow face. He looked hungry. He said he had crossed into Afghanistan from near Chitral, in northern Pakistan, close to where Adam and I had hiked the previous year. He was captured before he had a chance to fight and claimed, implausibly, that he had only come to observe the situation in Afghanistan. He said the imam at his mosque in Pakistan had urged worshippers to a fight a holy war in Afghanistan.

“I didn't know. My mullah cheated me,” he mumbled.

I wrote in my notebook. Shah kept staring at me.

“Do you have any money I can have for medicine?” he asked. “The others are Afghans. They have families nearby who can help them. My family is far away. I have no one.”

North of the prison the ground dropped away in a long slope toward a river. The flats flanking the water were among the few green areas near town. Three or four skinny cows grazed, watched by boys with shaved heads carrying switches of wood. Beyond this patch of green, Afghans who had fled fighting or Taliban occupation had set up camp on a stretch of trampled-down dirt.

Since then I have seen established refugee camps overseen by the United Nations — row upon orderly row of tents, with proper latrines, visits from doctors, and regular deliveries of food. This camp had none of those things. Families slept in shallow holes that had been scraped out of the ground and were covered with branches, scraps of cloth, plastic, and woven grass. None stood more than a few feet off the ground. Those inside could only crouch or lie down. When it rained, these shelters flooded.

Most of the refugees had once lived in Kunduz and left when the Taliban took the city the previous year. Taliban murdered Rezwan Qull's father and burned his farm after he refused to give up his youngest son to fight with them. More than 100 children and old people died during the trek north, and more perished during the first winter. Qull waved his arms at the desolation around him. “How can I be expected to raise children here?”

I walked deeper into the camp. It was full of children. Women peering out from their tents wore no burkas but pulled loose cloth across the bottoms of their faces when our eyes met. I wanted to talk to people there about September 11. The attacks happened thousands of miles away, but with American bombers visible almost every day from Khodja Bahuddin, even the residents of this refugee camp were affected. “It was an act of terrorism by Osama bin Laden, the man who killed Ahmed Shah Massoud,” one man told me. Over his shoulder I saw another man, much older, walking toward us. His beard was long and white, his brown face a mass of creviced wrinkles that radiated away from his eyes like bicycle spokes. He tapped the ground in front of him with a walking stick and the crowd parted as he approached. He told me his name was Mullah Abdul Samad. “We're tired of living here, and we're tired of this war,” he said. His voice was raspy, like paper tearing. I asked him about the attacks in New York. “I haven't heard anything about this,” he said.

Shortly after arriving in Afghanistan, I met and then hired as a guide and translator a young man named Zaid Jan. As is not unusual when people live through dangerous moments together, we became friends. Zaid was intelligent and only twenty-two. He liked to say he had been born in the midst of war and it had been part of his life ever since, but he had never fought for any of the factions in Afghanistan's civil wars. His English was excellent. Until about a month earlier, he had taught the language in Kunduz, which was under the control of the Taliban.

There is a character in Martin Amis's novel
House of Meetings
who is sent to a Soviet prison camp in Siberia for the crime of praising “The Americas,” by which he meant a woman whose hourglass figure resembled the shape of the two continents on a map. Zaid was similarly condemned because fanatics misunderstood what he said. One day he was teaching his students the English words for religious terms such as Christianity, Judaism, and Sikhism. One of Zaid's students informed on him. A Taliban soldier came to see him the next day. The gunman was uneducated, dirty, and drunk on power. “I told him I was just using the words. I said I was an English teacher, not a political person,” Zaid said. It didn't matter. The soldier concluded Zaid opposed the Taliban regime, beat him, and threw him in jail.

When Zaid was released, he fled north. He now slept in the back of a friend's shop but still met me every morning with his hair brushed and shiny, and his shalwar kamiz clean and without wrinkles.

During one of our many trips to the front lines, Zaid and I stopped at Dasht-e-Qala, the closest still-inhabited village to the front lines. It was often necessary to get permission here before proceeding farther, though it was never refused, and the few guards who bothered to look at our papers later on didn't seem able to read. There was a madrassah here, and we poked our heads inside. Twenty or thirty boys and girls aged five or six sat cross-legged with Qurans in their laps. They mumbled verses in Arabic, rocking their heads back and forth while their teacher, a young man aged seventeen or eighteen, walked up and down the rows and tapped those who weren't paying attention with a long stick.

Zaid Jan.

Young boys at a madrassah in Dasht-e-Qala, Afghanistan.

Girls at Dasht-e-Qala madrassah.

Dr. Awwad was also there, frowning. “They have no idea what they're saying. It's just noises that they memorize and repeat from memory,” he said. “It's what allows Islam to be abused. It opens the door to people like bin Laden.”

Dr. Awwad walked behind one of the students, a young boy, kneeled and wrapped his thick arms around the student's tiny shoulders. He selected a passage from the page of the Quran the boy was holding and sang it rhythmically. His clear voice, high and musical for such a big man, floated through the room and silenced the mumbling children.

“The Quran should be read like poetry,” he said.

We got the necessary form signed and drove out of town. A Northern Alliance soldier with a wiry grey beard and an infection or injury that caused one eye to bulge out of his face peered at it and waved us through. We passed beneath the hilltop strongpoint where Mohammad and Wali had asked me to write letters to their mothers, left the car behind and, soon after, our horses. We approached the Northern Alliance positions closest to Taliban lines on foot.

Our path was sheltered by trees. This was a low-lying stretch of land. Above us the hills were barren, but what little water fell here flowed downhill and fed poplar trees and scraggly brush in the lowlands where we walked. We could see the forest open up ahead of us into a grassy field. Before we got too close, a teenager with a gun over his shoulder and no uniform appeared ahead of us, raised his palm, and motioned for us to crouch over as we advanced the final few metres.

“The Taliban are across the field,” he said, pointing to a cluster of trees and brush opposite us, about 500 metres away. He shrugged and tapped the top of his turban. “Head down.”

The teenager beckoned us into one of two bunkers that flanked the path and faced the open field and, beyond that, the Taliban. Ten men and boys were inside, sitting on their heels as they squatted on rough mats that covered the earthen floor.

“
Salam alaikum
.”