The Lovers

by Rod Nordland

  Matters came to a head in their hideout, and the aunt demanded that Zakia leave as soon as possible. Zakia had been feeling ill for several days and wanted Ali to take her to a hospital. Relations had soured with Ali’s aunt to the point where the aunt would not take her, and Zakia could not hope to find her way there alone. Moving out would also require a man to escort her; social norms made it nearly impossible for her to find another place on her own, and anyway Ali had unwisely—but typically—taken most of their money with him.

  Ali said he would try to get permission to leave the base, but the next day when we spoke to him, he was even more despondent. Turned down for a leave because of his unit’s pending deployment, he had tried to get a guard on the perimeter to let him sneak off the base but had been rebuffed. He had called his father to come down from Bamiyan to take care of his wife, but Anwar would need a couple of days to travel, and Zakia was increasingly frantic about leaving.

  “It’s because of my bad luck that these things keep happening,” Ali said, and he told Zakia on the phone that he would try to escape. In a more levelheaded moment, much later, he was more honest about himself. “You buy danger for yourself by the things you decide to do.”

  We pleaded with Ali not to try to escape from Bagram, saying it could only end badly. He might not have known that base well, but I did. The largest American base in the country, Bagram was heavily guarded, with patrols, high-tech monitors, trip wires, pressure sensors, video cameras, surveillance blimps, and fences within fences. The Afghan National Army billets were within the broader American perimeter. Not only would escape be nearly impossible, but Ali risked being shot if he tried it.

  We offered instead to arrange to take Zakia somewhere safe ourselves, perhaps to a guesthouse or to the home of a woman. I called an Afghan-American woman who lived outside Kabul with her Afghan family—educated, Westernized people who were sympathetic to Zakia and Ali’s plight—and she agreed to put Zakia up until Ali could join her. Ali refused the offer flatly, and we argued about it; I asked him why he didn’t trust us. “I trust you. I even trust your dogs,” he said, which is a common expression, invoking Afghans’ almost universal contempt for canines. “But Zakia would never agree to stay with someone she doesn’t know.” Meaning he would never agree to let her. We suggested that she go to the WAW shelter until he could join her, but he rejected that out of hand.

  It was two days before we heard from him again; his phone had stopped answering, and we suspected, rightly, that he’d gone ahead with his escape plan. He and two friends had climbed the main fence, carrying a blanket to drape over the rolled concertina wire that lay on the other side of it. He was crawling over the wire when a patrol came along and caught him.

  “They nearly shot me when they saw me in the wire,” he said once we got him on the phone; he had been locked up in solitary confinement during those two days when we could not reach him. “I was given a hard time, accused of being a spy. They told me you haven’t spent one month in the army and now you want to sneak away from the base?” Taliban infiltrators were a constant worry in the Afghan National Army.

  In the coming week, he tried twice more to escape the base and was each time punished. “I told them if you stop me a hundred times, I will still try to escape.”

  Anwar reached Kabul several days later after a dangerous journey. Hazaras need to take great care on both of the two main highways connecting Kabul with the Bamiyan Valley, one through Wardak Province slightly to the south, and the other through Parwan to the north. Both roads have stretches that go through Taliban territory, and while the roads are normally under government control, the Taliban do occasionally manage to set up flying roadblocks, as they are called, and Hazaras often do not get through alive when that happens. Reports of roadblocks ahead forced him to turn back twice. Anwar was delayed, too, by the funeral of someone in their village; however urgent his son’s and his daughter-in-law’s entreaties might have been, funerals take precedence over nearly everything, and Anwar was an old man, inclined to the long view.

  Once in Kabul, though, he calmed his sister down. She agreed to give them a few days to find another place to stay. I passed Anwar a little money to help with that—Ali was still in the army lockup, so he could not go to collect money from WAW—and the last thing we wanted to see was Zakia and her father-in-law wandering the streets of Kabul, inviting arrest.

  Ali was calmer when he heard that his father had arrived, and he thought he would soon find a way to get off the base to join them. In the meantime he had a request. Once they moved Zakia out of his aunt’s house, how about if we got WAW to give them all the money they had received, and he would buy a house in Kabul so they did not have to rent any longer? A few thousand dollars would, he thought, be enough for a smaller home.

  “Ali,” we said to him, “your wife is in hiding. The police are searching for you both. Zakia’s family is looking to kill you. You’re in jail on the base. And you want to buy a house?”

  That day Jawad got a call from Anwar, who also thought fugitive homeownership was a dumb idea. Jawad had called Anwar before, usually through one of his sons, but the old man had never before called him, and he did so now with Bismillah’s help. He wanted to thank us for all we had done for his son, and he wanted us to know that he thought his son was wrong and foolish to have spurned offers of help and rejoined the army. Unless they were able to make a deal with Zakia’s family—and even if they did—the couple’s only hope to really live in peace was to leave Afghanistan. Anwar also wanted to meet us in person; it turned out he had lugged down from Bamiyan a hand-woven felt rug, which he said was a thank-you gift for helping his son. It was probably worth a month’s earnings, yet I had no choice but to accept it.

  Ismatullah called as well. “Ali does not realize what he has to do,” he said. “He is too young to understand what is good or bad for him. Tell him he needs to listen to you. He needs to go outside the country. His life is in danger.” Jawad asked Ismatullah why he didn’t tell his brother that himself. But Ali was not answering his phone to his older brother. “He is tired of listening to everyone tell him what he has to do,” Ismatullah said.

  Then, to our surprise, a few days later Ali was freed from the base lockup and even managed to get out of Bagram on a leave, determined to desert for good this time. When we met Ali in Kabul, Jawad and I spent most of the time trying to persuade him to find a better hiding place, one where we could visit them more safely than if they were sharing a house with an Afghan family. They needed to not stay with relatives; relatives provide a trail to them. In response Ali was his usual blend of nervously insecure and unreasonably cavalier. He was hopeful that the mediation that Shukria was running with Zakia’s father was going to bear fruit; in addition, Ali’s aunt’s son, Shah Hussein, had been meeting with Zakia’s brothers to talk about a deal. “Didn’t it occur to you,” we asked, “that her brothers might follow his aunt’s son or figure out where he’s living, find her, and then find the two of you?” Again he brushed that aside. We said we would be willing to get them a private house with a wall around it and a driveway, which would make it possible for us to drive off the street and not be noticed by neighbors when we made a rendezvous with them. We would pay the four hundred dollars a month it would cost. Finally Ali agreed, as he often did, just to get us off his back, but instead of moving to the sort of place we’d suggested, he moved out of the aunt’s house in Chindawul and into another house a few hundred yards down the hill. It was only a hundred dollars a month, so he suggested we could give them the three-hundred-dollar-a-month savings over what we had proposed; we refused to pay any of it. We had an ally in Anwar, and Jawad set to work persuading the old man that moving again, away from Chindawul and into a secure house, would be a good option for them as well as for us. The last thing I wanted was to feel responsible for their capture.

  Reconciliation was starting to look less likely, too. Shukria was having a hard time with Zaman and his sons and supporters. Initially wil
ling to talk, Zakia’s father had become aggressive and uncooperative. He accused Shukria of hiding Zakia in the WAW shelter and demanded to be allowed to look for her there.

  “That man used such bad language,” she said. “It was unacceptable.” Amid her shouting and his cursing, she drove him from her office and WAW’s administrative compound. Something had happened to make Zakia’s family less willing to negotiate a settlement, and we would soon find out what that was.

  There were many times when I marveled at my growing involvement with this couple. The line between observer and actor had first been crossed when we helped them escape from the police pursuit in Yakawlang, but now, with each passing week, further compromises seemed easier to make than to refuse: helping them with their housing, giving them advice, trying to talk them out of situations that might prove disastrous, urging them toward a sensible course of action. That’s the thing about stepping over the line; once you do, it’s hard not to do it again. Having helped them get this far, how could I just stop? I knew that if I turned my back on this young and often foolish pair of lovers, it would only be a matter of time before the worst happened, and I would never be able to forgive myself. The more I did for them, however, the more they expected me to do; the more dependent they became, the more independent they wanted to seem; the more I did, the more I felt obliged to do. I felt like their personal Friar Laurence, in an increasingly compromised scenario.

  It’s not as if Zakia and Ali’s case was particularly terrible. On the scale of horrendous abuses of women in Afghanistan, Zakia’s situation, so far, did not rate very high. Consider Lal Bibi, the young woman who was abducted and raped by a pro-government militia commander, who then married her to escape prosecution; or Bibi Aisha, her nose and ear cut off by her Taliban husband; or Gul Meena, chopped up with an ax and left for dead—all were far worse cases.

  There were some cases similar to Zakia’s as well, such as that of Amina, whose family gave the same sort of guarantees and assurances that Zakia’s family promised her if she returned.2 Then they killed her on the way home from a shelter—exactly what Zakia thought would happen to her if she left the shelter to return to her family. Similarly, Siddiqa3 was coaxed home and then stoned to death with her intended by her neighbors and relatives. Even more similar was the story of Khadija and Mohammad Hadi, who were also from Bamiyan, also a Tajik and Hazara couple. When Khadija was taken into custody, her lover’s angry neighbors drove his entire family out of Bamiyan and he lost touch with Khadija, until she disappeared and lost touch with everyone.4

  So while there are many worse cases, they are expressions of the sort of fate that awaits Zakia and Ali if events were allowed to follow their natural course. While things had not gotten as bad as they could have, it was still possible that they would. Like it or not, their story had become mine, and I could not turn my back on it as I nearly had after that first encounter in February 2014. It had become clear that no one was going to step in and rescue them, whisking them away to safe lives in America or Sweden. I realized I would have to start thinking seriously about getting them out of Afghanistan myself. I had already stepped across the line; why not follow the story to its inevitable conclusion? If they ended up dead, I would always regret not having tried harder. In this effort I had one supporter, Rabbi Shmuley. During one of our late-night talks, he started in on me after he finished with the American government. “You’re the only one who can make this happen. You have to make sure this story has a happy ending, and a happy ending is not living in a cave in Afghanistan.”

  9

  BIRDS IN A CAGE

  An Afghan woman alone is easily run to ground, and suddenly, one day in June, Zakia became that woman, her husband ripped away from her, his aunt ready to disown her, and the police actively searching the Chindawul area for her. Her family had finally caught up to the couple, capturing Ali and turning him over to the police. This all happened just days after Zakia had learned what everyone had begun to suspect: she was pregnant.

  Gentle-spirited Jawad would later describe that day as the most stressful of his life. I’m not sure what was worse, being there in the middle of it, as Jawad was, or not being there at all, as I was. When the call came that Ali had been arrested, Jawad was enjoying his Friday off out of town, an hour away from Kabul, while I was in Doha, Qatar, working on a Taliban story. Jawad got the news in a call from Shah Hussein, Ali’s cousin and the son of the aunt who took the couple in and then kicked them out; both Shah Hussein and Ali had been picked up by the police. It was about 1:00 P.M. when Jawad heard, and he raced back to Kabul, spending most of the next eight hours continuously on the telephone; all I could do was check in from time to time and nudge matters along. “I must have made fifty phone calls that day and gotten another fifty,” Jawad said; he had phones on two of the country’s cell-phone networks, and he kept them both going, along with the bureau landline. The first call he made was to Anwar, who was with Zakia at their new home when the arrest happened. Shah Hussein had already called them with the news, and both of them were in tears. “Can you solve this for us, please?” Zakia asked Jawad.

  Jawad called me in Qatar, and said, “What should I tell them?” I asked him where Ali had been taken. It was to the headquarters of Police District 1, and he had been arrested not far from where Zakia, Anwar, and he were staying in Chindawul, among the squatter dwellings that every year creep farther up the side of the steep little mountain above the Pamir Cinema. Surely if the police caught him near the Pamir, it would only be a matter of time before they canvassed the hillside neighborhood and found Zakia as well. For Ali it was just an arrest and possibly some jail time; for Zakia it was quite possibly the end of life as she knew it, with disgrace and defilement waiting for her in a police cell and the real possibility that the police would then hand her over to her family, which would be the end of her life, full stop.

  “There’s only one thing to do. Tell them they both need to get as far away from there as possible, and they should split up and go different ways.” Jawad relayed the message.

  Ali had thought his cousin Shah Hussein would be his guarantee of safety, and they stayed friendly after he and Zakia moved to the new house and away from the aunt. Shah Hussein often visited them, partly out of friendship, partly as protection. He was a senior noncom in the Afghan National Army and very much the older brother to his cousin, seven years his junior, and he tried to rein him in. Ali had started going out frequently, to visit friends or just to get air, and it was driving everyone in the family crazy, most of all Zakia. Shah Hussein had taken her side and tried to lay down the law.

  “Don’t leave the house,” Shah Hussein told Ali. “If I come back and find you are out, I’m going to shackle you to the furniture.” He was in the military police and produced a set of handcuffs to back up the threat.

  But that day, June 6, 2014, Shah Hussein was on leave and suggested that he and Ali go together to a wedding. Zakia said she was okay with that, that as a man he could not be cooped up indoors all the time. She had a house to keep, food to cook, laundry to do—the men had no work to do inside. Shah Hussein was tall and well built, an imposing man. “He thought if he was along, then I would be okay if we ran into her family,” Ali said. They set out in civvies and had only just walked down the hill and turned in to the road along the Kabul River (more an open-air sewer than a river, where heroin addicts hang out under the bridges) in front of the Pamir Cinema. Suddenly Ali heard someone shouting at him and turned as Zakia’s little brother, Razak, the nine-year-old, flung himself at him, grabbing his lapels and screaming, “You kidnapper! You eloper! Now you’re finding out it’s not so easy!” Ali pushed the boy away only to see a policeman come up right behind him, leveling an AK-47 assault rifle at him.

  “Don’t move. If you do, I’ll kill you,” the policeman said, adding, as if to establish his credentials for violence, “I’m already answering one charge for killing someone, so another one won’t matter much.”

  Right behind him
was Gula Khan. They had all been lying in wait, probably staking out the neighborhood. The policeman ordered his two prisoners to a guard shack nearby, and by then six of Ali’s male in-laws were all over Shah Hussein and Ali, manhandling them and demanding to know Zakia’s whereabouts, until more police arrived and restored order. They were soon transferred to the Police District 1 station house, where there was a lockup.

  “The police wanted to know where she was, and I said in Bamiyan,” Ali told me. “I didn’t care how much they beat me. I wasn’t going to confess and betray her.” Her hiding place, as he well knew, was only a couple hundred yards up the steep hill nearby. The police said his father-in-law had accused him of kidnapping and murdering Zakia, and they wanted to know where he’d dumped her body. Believing the worst, they beat him with the butts of their rifles, then threw him into a cell and beat him some more in an effort to make him talk.

  At some point Ali managed to pass his phone to his cousin, so that he would be able to call Anwar, Zakia, and Jawad, since Shah Hussein didn’t have their numbers himself. After Zakia’s relatives confirmed that Shah Hussein was not involved in the case, police freed him, but when he went outside the PD1 station, a gang of Zakia’s relatives jumped him, beating him with bricks until he managed to run off. He regretted not having worn his uniform—they could never have treated him in public that way if he had. Once he was sure no one was following him, Shah Hussein climbed the hill to Ali’s new house, but by the time he got there, Zakia and Anwar had fled; at Ali’s aunt’s house, his cousin changed into his uniform and went looking for them.

  No one ever found out for sure how Zakia’s family tracked them down, but some theories emerged. The extended family in Afghanistan is a powerful organization in its way and is normally so large, with relationships maintained over such a distant degree, that even the poorest family will have relatives far and wide, high and low. One of their distant relatives was a taxi driver, and before this whole affair he had driven Shah Hussein from Bamiyan to a house where Ali’s aunt had previously lived. Although the aunt moved later, it was not far away from her previous home. That was Ali’s theory anyway. Another possibility was that Shah Hussein, who had been meeting with Gula Khan and some of Zakia’s cousins in an effort at reconciliation, might have been followed home. Anwar’s theory was that someone had followed him down from the mountains when he came to town the week before. He’d had that creepy feeling that someone was following him, he said, though he could never spot anyone. My own theory? The aunt gave them up. Their relationship had soured, she was tired of being responsible for them, and she did not get along with her new niece. They had fortunately moved out of her house just before the capture, but it was to a place not far away, which would explain why the family had the neighborhood staked out, but not the actual house. Whatever the real explanation, it was a lesson in how hard it is to hide in Afghanistan, even in a city of 5 million people, many of them stuffed into dense slums. With its strong family networks, Afghan society is just not anonymous enough.