by Rod Nordland
Zakia and Anwar’s first stop was to the aunt’s house, where Zakia borrowed a full-length hejab,1 something she almost never wore. As a getaway costume, it was hard to beat; all that anyone could see were her eyes and her high-heeled shoes. The blue burqa would have been even better, but as Zakia often said, she wouldn’t be caught dead in that thing. Anwar told his sister to take Zakia down into the city, and the two women wended their way between the mud masonry houses parallel to the river, high up on the hill. Zakia had no idea where anything was in Kabul and could not move around alone without arousing suspicion, so the sister agreed to help guide her, but she made it clear she was not happy about it. Anwar went straight down the steep path to the river.
“It was a difficult day for all of us,” Jawad later said. “They kept calling me, calling me. ‘What can you do for us?’ Shah Hussein called me, Zakia called me. Anwar called me, and you could feel the pain and helplessness in his voice, and then he started crying, ‘What should I do, what can I do?’”
Jawad called me again in Doha. “What should I tell them?”
“There’s only one solution. You have to persuade them to take her to the shelter before the police find her. Have they left the house?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you meet them in your car, get them off the street, and drive around until they can decide what to do?”
Jawad agreed, and thus began a scramble in which the three of them tried for hours to find one another. Jawad still doesn’t know if that was by accident, because they had such a poor knowledge of the city, or because Zakia and Anwar feared that he would somehow force them to put her in the shelter and therefore were avoiding him.
Zakia and Ali’s aunt soon managed to meet up with Shah Hussein, who did know the city, and the aunt gratefully went home, leaving Zakia with Ali’s cousin. “See what you have brought to us?” the aunt said on parting. Stepping out with Shah Hussein, however, was perilous enough in itself, because he was not proper mahram to Zakia—not a close enough male blood relative, or husband, to be allowed to escort her, although Ali had asked him to do that for them. Should they be arrested, those would be additional charges the police could bring: attempted zina, that novel Afghan offense of attempted adultery, in which a non-mahram couple are assumed to be on their way to have sex simply on the basis of their being alone in each other’s company, even on a public street.
Complicating matters, Shah Hussein was under strict instructions from Ali, who had whispered them to him as his cousin left PD1: Take her back to the mountains and under no circumstances let her go to the WAW shelter. Zakia had relayed that message to Jawad, and for much of the day her only purpose in talking to him was to implore him to somehow use our supposed powers to get Ali out of prison. She refused to let Jawad come and pick her up, again because of the impropriety of being with an unrelated man. So Jawad concentrated on finding Anwar, thinking he could talk sense to Zakia, and also so she would have an acceptable mahram along. “He’s an idiot. My son is stupid,” Anwar said angrily in one of his many phone calls to Jawad. “Why was he going to a wedding? He never listens. How can I take her now? I don’t have anyplace to go.”
Jawad let the folks at WAW know what had happened, and the lawyer Shukria also called Zakia, trying to persuade her that going into the shelter was her only safe option as a woman alone and that it would not be the sort of prisonlike situation she had endured in Bamiyan.
At last Anwar told Jawad he was near a bridge across the Kabul River and there was a hospital nearby—that could only be the Ibn-Seena Hospital, so Jawad went there, parked in front of an abandoned police traffic kiosk on the bridge, and told Anwar where he could find him. Several calls later the old man climbed into his car. With Anwar along there was someone present who could be Zakia’s mahram, so Jawad was able to persuade Zakia to let him pick her up, and she would be safely off the streets. He found her not far from the Allauddin Crossroads, in a Hazara neighborhood in western Kabul, standing beside the road with Shah Hussein, who was now in his full army uniform.
Zakia still wanted no part of the shelter. She removed her veil in the car, and her face was streaked with tears, slashing paths through her ruined makeup, mascara smeared to make raccoon eyes. “Let us go into the mountains, Uncle,” she said to Anwar. She had taken to calling her father-in-law “uncle” as a token of affection and respect. He called her “daughter,” as he had that first night she came into his home. He said okay, and they asked Jawad if he would take them to the edge of town. There was a minibus station there where they might find a late ride past the Paghman Mountain, which hems in the Kabul plateau from the west, and then into Bamiyan. That road was risky at night; the danger of the Taliban was compounded by the danger from Zakia’s family, who might be lying in wait for them, knowing it was the most likely way for her to flee. Shah Hussein could not go with them; the next morning he had to report to duty, which he, unlike his cousin, took seriously, so it would just be Zakia and the old man. They would not be able to stay in Bamiyan city or their own village with the police looking for her; the authorities were no doubt alerted in Bamiyan as well that Ali had been arrested, and they would expect Zakia to go back to the valley.
Jawad was distressed at how upset Anwar seemed. “He looked so tired and beaten down.” He realized that escaping into the mountains would mean they would have to leave cars and roads and climb, and he just felt too tired to do that. Their escape on the Shah Foladi mountain had nearly killed him, he felt, and he could not face it again. Still, he held his tongue and did not object overtly to Zakia’s escape plan, except to say that he was worried about his high blood pressure. And, he added to Jawad, “Zakia is pregnant. She shouldn’t be running in the mountains.”
Zakia got the message that Anwar couldn’t handle it; perhaps she felt the same way. She turned in her seat to face Anwar and spoke to him. She seemed quite calm and determined to be strong. “Uncle, don’t worry about me. I’ll be safe, and I’ll stand by your side, and we will get the boy out. I will go to the shelter.” Jawad could see that she was doing it for Anwar more than anything else; she knew that her husband wanted her to keep running, but she couldn’t do that if it meant doing it without the old man or leaving him behind somewhere along the way.
Shukria had left her office at WAW and gone home, and reached there by phone at first she was reluctant to come out, but finally, in the middle of the night, she called the shelter. They sent her a minibus, and she rendezvoused with Jawad. Everyone piled into the minibus for the ride to the WAW shelter. Speaking quietly, Zakia kept reassuring her father-in-law that it would be all right. The gates of the shelter’s compound swung open, the men dismounted, and the minibus drove in with just Zakia and Shukria. Jawad got his car and dropped Anwar off in a neighborhood where Anwar thought he might know someone. “I felt sorry for him,” Jawad said. “He lost everything, he had no place to stay, his son was in jail, his daughter-in-law in the shelter, and they all thought this shelter was going to be like the one in Bamiyan and that she would be there for months and months.” Jawad called Shah Hussein once more, to let him know where he had dropped his uncle. That phone did not ring, so he called Ali’s phone, which Shah Hussein still had.
There was a new ringtone on it now, the song “Majnoon” by the Iranian singer Moein.
In my soul I bear
The pain and sorrow of your love:
Do not let me wait any longer
Watching for you by the roadside!
I am crazy, I am possessed,
Wild with love, I sing:
I am Majnoon!
Layli, without you
I cannot live.2
“Zakia is in the shelter,” Jawad told Shah Hussein. “Your uncle is safe.” That night, though, Anwar would sleep on the street.
At the police station, Ali had been in for a rough time. As far as the police were concerned, he was at the very least a sex criminal for running away with a woman without her family’s permission, quite possi
bly a kidnapper, and perhaps a murderer. “They beat me with rifle butts,” he said. “Over and over until I grabbed the rifle butt and said, ‘Please stop, you’re not allowed to hurt me, and I’m just here because I love her and she loves me.’” The beatings stopped for a while, but he was refused food or the right to use the bathroom. Sharing a cell with four other men, he was obliged to soil himself and lie in the wet.
The next day detectives from the Criminal Investigation Division came to question him again, and he persisted with his story that Zakia had stayed in the mountains somewhere in Bamiyan and he had come alone to Kabul. “They didn’t believe me. They already knew so much about my case,” he said. Someone had been talking. They knew what house he had lived in with his aunt, that the couple had recently moved to another house nearby and where it was. Zakia and Anwar had been able to escape only because police bureaucracy had moved too slowly to follow up on Ali’s arrest.
I suggested to Jawad that he go to the police station the next day, Saturday, to try to see Ali, while I wrote an article from Jawad’s reporting about what had happened to the couple; there was just enough time to make the early deadlines for the Sunday bulldog (the print edition that comes out on Saturday afternoon), and I had a head start because I’d already written a tentative lede for just such a story when we’d begun to suspect both that Zakia was pregnant and that Ali would get caught.3
When Jawad and Anwar got to PD1, Zakia’s family was there in force, hanging around outside the station, glowering and jeering at them as they walked past. At the lockup the jailers said that only the old man could visit his son, but this gave Jawad a chance to talk with the PD1 police chief, Colonel Jamila Bayaz. She was famous as the first female police chief of an Afghan police district.4 I had interviewed her when she was appointed earlier in the year; it was something the Ministry of Interior liked to boast about,5 since the lack of female officers,6 especially in key positions, was an issue that was important to the international community. I had heard that Colonel Bayaz was quite good—later in 2014 she was promoted to brigadier general, one of only four female general officers in the Ministry of Interior and its police agencies at the time. There had been a fifth one, in charge of gender issues, Brigadier General Shafiqa Quraishi, but she fled the country and sought asylum abroad.7 During my earlier interview with Colonel Bayaz, her deputy, a man, a senior official who wouldn’t be named, another man, and two or three other policemen all crowded into the room. When I asked Jamila questions, they answered for her. “As things like my promotion happen, it motivates other women to do more,” she said when she managed to get a word in edgewise on her own interview. She did say something else, though, quite unbidden and, as it would later turn out, quite plaintive. “I am sure our international friends will not abandon us,” she said. I later learned, from Western diplomats in Kabul, that she had applied to the Canadian government for asylum.8
At the time of Ali’s arrest, though, Colonel Bayaz had been on the job for six months and was earning a reputation as a tough advocate for better treatment of women by the police, and she seemed very much in charge of her station. Jawad found her sympathetic to Zakia and Ali’s story—although unaware of Ali’s mistreatment in her lockup by the detectives (she was in direct charge of the uniformed officers only). “I know it’s a love story and the boy eloped with a girl who loved him. Higher-level officials have told me, ‘Please make sure he doesn’t escape.’” As everyone in Afghanistan well knows, escapes from Afghan lockups and prisons are routine and not very expensive, an opportunity for guards to supplement their incomes.
No one was more aware of that than Zakia’s family members, on their stakeout of the district police station. “We know you want to bribe that woman police chief to get him out, but we’re not going to let you,” Zaman told Anwar as he came out. “We have friends, too, you’ll see.”
Shukria came to the police station later that day, carrying a signed statement from Zakia that she had not been kidnapped. The bigamy charges had gone away—perhaps her family did not feel they could make that charge stick, although they were still claiming she was married to a cousin she had never met. Or perhaps the attorney general’s office just didn’t believe the bigamy charge, since the judges in Bamiyan had themselves attested that Zakia was engaged, not married—and breaking an engagement is a civil matter, not a criminal one. But the detectives handling the case were not interested in the fine points Shukria presented to them; they were treating it as a criminal kidnapping offense, and they deemed an exculpatory letter from Ali’s wife and supposed victim insufficient.
For a second day, Ali said, he was beaten by officers and denied food and use of the toilet. Later in the day, he was moved along with some of the other detainees into a steaming-hot shipping container that served as their temporary jail cell due to overcrowding in the PD1 lockup. “We were five people in the container, and they brought a crane in to move the container to another place.”
“Don’t you want to take these detainees out first?” the crane engineer asked the detective in charge.
“No, these people are criminals and not to be considered human. Just move the container with them inside it.”
The prisoners were just banged up a little, but for a terrifying few minutes they thought Kabul was being destroyed in an earthquake. Afterward Ali would always think of this ordeal whenever he had to move a birdcage with a quail or a canary inside. Nothing is more unsettling than a prison that moves, with the inmates having no idea where they’re going.
Ali was philosophical about his rough treatment by the policemen at the PD1 lockup. “Life is not easy for any of us. I’ve undergone a lot of hardship, but I care about my life.” Regarding his tormenter, he said, “Perhaps he is a person who doesn’t care much about his life. Perhaps he just doesn’t love his wife. He might have married someone he didn’t love. It could be that his father or mother forced him to marry his wife. I am thankful to God that I don’t have that problem.”
At the time, though, Ali thought his life was over. Zakia thought her life was over. Anwar was sure that their life together, at least, was over.
I was relieved. Now the couple had no choice but to let Women for Afghan Women take their case to court. Once they were no longer fugitives from the law, they could easily get passports. Also, Zakia was safe. Her pregnancy was no great surprise; we’d been hearing that she was sick on this or that day or off to the hospital because of nausea—the usual sort of first-trimester complaints. Like most Afghans, Zakia and Ali were not interested in family planning, unless by that one means planning a very large family. Ali had laughed when we asked him if they wanted children. “I don’t mind. Yeah, why not? A person has to have children for when he dies, so someone will remember him.” Under different circumstances we might not have found out so soon. Pregnancy is not something many Afghan couples are willing to divulge outside the family, especially when it doesn’t show, but Anwar had accidentally confirmed it in the excitement of the night before. Now Juliet was with child and her Romeo was in jail, indirectly in the figurative clutches of the Capulets and their sympathizers. If that was not going to win the lovers some serious support, in and out of Afghanistan, perhaps nothing ever would.
10
RELUCTANT CELEBRITIES
It was a variation on the riddle of whether a falling tree makes a sound if there is no one in the forest to hear it: Could Zakia and Ali really be celebrities if they scarcely knew about their celebrity? What could modern celebrity possibly mean to someone who had never used a personal computer or gone on the Internet? Who could not read or write, had never watched television, and did not own a radio? Who in short was unplugged from electronic society (the single exception being cell phones, which they only partly knew how to use)? Many Afghans now saw the couple as celebrities; nearly every Afghan radio and television station and newspaper covered their capture, especially the Dari outlets, and young Afghans began starting Facebook pages and Twitter campaigns in their support. Jawad wa
s besieged by Afghan journalists who were enlisted by the BBC or 60 Minutes, or Australian, Canadian, and German television to cover the story. But locked up without cell phones, Zakia and Ali had little idea of the storm of attention building around their predicament.
At Women for Afghan Women, Shukria was working hard to find a resolution to their case, and because she had already started working on it before Ali’s arrest, she was well along. Her first legal move was to petition the attorney general’s office to move the case to family court, as a dispute between families, not a criminal case. Then she worked out an arrangement for the police to come to WAW’s shelter to interview Zakia. “They won’t arrest her and take her to the detention center,” Manizha Naderi of WAW said. “They will allow her to stay in the shelter until she’s convicted in court. And we won’t let that happen. Fingers crossed!”