Horse Soldiers

by Doug Stanton

  Nadir was on the verge of tears. He thought, From now on, Afghanistan will be free—I will be free!

  PART FOUR

  GATES OF MAZAR

  Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan

  November 10, 2001

  Thousands of people, many clutching paper flowers and candy as gifts for the Americans, were soon rushing past Nadir Shihab’s carpet shop, raising clouds of dust as they ran, shouting, “The Ameriki are here. They have taken the city!”

  Shihab watched as one man ran past. Unlike the others, there was a frantic look in his eyes. This man, he guessed, was a Taliban policeman. Or had been, until about five minutes ago, when he’d probably ducked behind a building, removed his black turban, torn off his black smock, and started running, hoping to blend in with the rest of the inhabitants of Mazar-i-Sharif.

  And now the people whom he had tormented as a Taliban policeman wanted to kill him. Soon enough, several men rounded a corner, carrying knives, shovels, and clubs. They pressed him against the wall of a fruit shop and beat him. Swiftly. One, two, three blows. He slid down the wall, leaving a vertical red stripe as he dropped, then slumped to the ground, dead.

  It is over, thought Nadir. It is finally over.

  News of victory in Mazar raced through the cities of Afghanistan, borne by walkie-talkies and radio news reports. Only two days before, on November 8, Osama bin Laden had been granted Afghan nationality by the struggling Taliban government, led by Mullah Omar.

  “Now he is not [just] our guest,” announced the Taliban spokesman. “He is a citizen of Afghanistan, and [we] will not hand him over the U.S.” When people heard this news, they wondered when their country would be free of monsters.

  Young men and women in places as far away as Kabul, 200 miles to the southeast, now knelt close to their small TV screens wired to bootleg satellite dishes, and watched as Dostum, Nelson, and Dean entered Mazar amid the cheering crowds. This was thrilling. They had feared the powerful weapons of the United States, but they had also prayed the Americans would bomb their country back to a new beginning, so it could be rebuilt from the ashes.

  After more than twenty years of war, this had seemed the only way to start over. A return to zero.

  Up the road from Nadir Shihab’s carpet shop, still on the outskirts of the city, Atta’s pickup truck had broken down. His men pushed it to the roadside. Dean was worried about Atta’s safety amid the crowd. Atta assured Dean that his bodyguards could fix the truck and he would soon be driving again. He urged Dean to continue on without him. He would follow shortly.

  Atta, meanwhile, was worried about something else—the sudden rumor of several hundred Taliban holdouts barricaded in a school located in a neighborhood of cinder-block apartments. The buildings, two to four stories high, were within sight of the Blue Mosque, a little over a half mile away.

  These Taliban, he told Dean, were hard men. Soldiers from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Chechnya. They were refusing to surrender. Atta said they would fight to their deaths. He warned Dean to be careful. Trust no one. And make sure none of the fighting harmed the Blue Mosque, the city’s most sacred religious site. The Taliban had shut it down when they took control, believing its ornate domes and gilded walls were too flashy and inappropriate as a place of worship. Its beauty was an ugliness to them.

  Dean reluctantly drove on with his team. They had to get into town, fast.

  About 500 of Atta’s men had already entered the city. The streets were empty and strewn with trash, the curbs stacked with dead bodies. The air rang with the cellophane buzz of flies.

  Most of the Taliban soldiers who’d occupied Mazar had abandoned it just several hours earlier. In some houses cooling tea still sat in cups, untouched. Articles of clothing—scarves, smocks, sandals—lay scattered. The Taliban had left in a panic.

  The city, the men knew, was akin to a giant chessboard, where the opponent was simultaneously losing, resisting, or even advancing, depending upon which square or neighborhood he inhabited. You had to be careful. There were still pockets of frightened fighters hiding in houses, on rooftops, in barricaded storefronts throughout the city. These were men who had been left behind when the majority of the force fled.

  Upon entering Mazar, half of Atta’s men raced in their Toyota pickups to the airport, on the western edge, and claimed it for their leader. A message was sent out over the radio: “Atta has captured the airport!”

  This made Atta an immediate player in the city. Anyone wanting access to the airport was now going to have to deal with him.

  Dostum was traveling through the Tiangi Gap when he heard the news. He was not happy. He was still several hours from entering the city, leading a tired string of some 1,500 men on horses and on foot.

  He decided not to dwell on the loss. He would redouble his efforts to get to the enormous fort known as Qala-i-Janghi. From there, he would rebuild his own power base. At the height of his control in the early 1990s, he had printed his own money, operated his own commercial airline, and even programmed his own TV station. He had funded schools and insisted that women attend. Children had flocked to movie theaters on weekends to watch the latest love story pumped out by India’s “Bollywood” movie studios. The city had one of the few sanitary water systems in the country and residents found themselves supplied with electricity twenty-four hours a day. Dostum had supported a burgeoning middle class, liberal by Afghan standards, and the city of 300,000 souls had been a thriving, if backwater, metropolis.

  Those were the good old days. Dostum was convinced they would return.

  While Dostum schemed and fretted in the Gap, Atta’s men continued to probe the heart of the city, street by street. Firefights broke out, carried out around corners, small-arms fire raking the sides of buildings. The families who lived inside hid in closets, under beds, praying the Taliban were finally gone. The gunfights were furious and deadly. Atta lost thirty men over several hours of shooting. But they had the Taliban and Al Qaeda soldiers on the run.

  The enemy had retreated to a girls’ school, a plain-looking, four-story structure built of gray steel with tall walls of classroom windows. Students hadn’t filled its hallways for at least three years. The Taliban didn’t believe in educating girls. They had taken knives and scratched out the eyes on all the photographs and pictures hanging in the building. They believed the Koran prohibited the display of such images.

  In the late morning, Atta’s men snuck across the sparse grass bordering the front. They looked up and down the building, about 100 feet in either direction. They were standing in the middle. They planned to go inside and confront the men, who were suicidally refusing to surrender.

  Suddenly, a group of Taliban soldiers rushed out of the doors.

  Both sides opened fire.

  When they reached Atta’s men, the Taliban soldiers pulled the pins from grenades and blew themselves up, taking some of their enemy with them.

  More Taliban poured out the door and Atta’s men opened fire again, trying to drop them before they drew close.

  Atta’s men quickly retreated a safe distance to nearby houses and carried on the firefight from there. The Taliban shattered the windows within the school and started firing down at the street.

  The neighborhood popped and rattled with gunfire.

  As the shooting raged around the school, Dean’s convoy entered the town and made its way through the cheering crowd.

  The team was shocked by the hundreds of men, women, and children clapping along the road, the women peeking shyly over the men’s shoulders through the eye slits in their blue burkhas. Children ran along the street kicking soccer balls; others stood in nearby fields flying kites.

  “What are the people saying?” Dean asked Wasik, one of the translators Atta had provided the team.

  “They’re shouting blessings,” said Wasik. “They like you!”

  The carpet shops, the tire repair stations, the innumerable food stalls selling lamb kebobs, these and every other establishment had been shuttered in a
nticipation of a final battle with the Taliban. Now shop owners were reopening them, sweeping the doorways. Barbers moved their wooden chairs out into the street and men lined up impatiently to have their Taliban-required beards shaved off.

  Dean watched as the smiling men stepped fresh from the chair, rubbing their smooth chins in wonder. He could hear Indian pop music being played on a boom box carried along the street. He would later learn that a commercial radio station had begun playing music as early as 3 a.m. that morning. The day before, the purveyors of this entertainment would have been imprisoned.

  Dean stopped the convoy, and the team stepped out to shake hands with the people. One of the children ran up and hugged James Gold, who swung the child up in his arms and held him to the sky. Gold was filled with a longing for his own children back in Tennessee as he put the child down, tears in his eyes.

  Gunfire suddenly broke out and the team scrambled back into the vehicles. Dean scanned the crowd, looking for the shooter. He saw a man with his AK raised in the air. He had been firing off harmless rounds in celebration. Dean breathed a sigh of relief.

  From his second-story office on Mazar’s main street, Najeeb Quarishy, twenty-one years old, saw that the rumors of the Taliban retreat were true.

  The streets were empty of the usually grim, sanctimonious policemen twirling their leather batons, members of the city’s Truth and Prevention of Vice Squad. Certainly, the policemen had been less bold these past several days as the fighting intensified in the mountains south of the city. Good riddance, thought Najeeb.

  Najeeb had always found sport in making fun of the overly serious Taliban. When he was a few years younger, he’d had the legs to outrun them when they chastised him for cutting his hair in the wildly popular “Titanic hair” style, named after the haircut worn by Leonardo DiCaprio in the eponymous movie.

  “Why do you have the Titanic hair?” the Taliban policemen had pestered Najeeb.

  “Because I like it, damn you!” And then he’d run away, taunting them over his shoulder.

  Najeeb had learned English by listening to the BBC and conversing with any foreign NGO worker who happened to come through Mazar during its war-torn years. This meant that he spoke with a slight British accent, in a reedy voice verging on sarcasm. He’d grown up in Mazar during the long Soviet occupation and the civil war that followed, and he’d witnessed nearly every manner of savage misanthropy, yet he maintained in his jaunty step an irresistible joie de vivre.

  He had never been happier in his life than now, when the Taliban were leaving. Earlier that day, his father, the mayor, had told him that their home had been chosen as a safe house for some American soldiers.

  The chance of a lifetime! Najeeb dreamed of being a TV news correspondent. He dreamed of visiting America. What better way to practice his English than by making friends with American soldiers!

  He jumped on his motor scooter and, borne along the stream of celebrating neighbors, hurried home.

  Amid the continuing celebrations, General Dostum and Captain Mitch Nelson rode into Mazar several hours after Atta.

  Following close behind were Major Mark Mitchell and his team, led by Lieutenant Colonel Bowers.

  Mitchell and the team had turned their horses over to Dostum’s men at the south end of the Gap. Burt Docks, Mitchell’s combat controller, could barely walk from his horse to the two-ton truck that was to carry them through the Gap. He winced as it jounced over the road through the canyon.

  Docks’s teammate, fellow combat controller Malcolm Victors, looked around at the dozen Afghan soldiers riding with them, and because they couldn’t speak English, he thought they were dumber than him. He knew they weren’t, he knew this was an ignorant thing for him to be thinking, but he couldn’t help judging them.

  One of the Afghans, standing at the front of the truckbed and facing ahead, yelled something Victors couldn’t understand.

  A translator told him the guy wanted everyone to keep their arms and legs inside the truck.

  Yeah, right, thought Victors. What’s this guy talking about?

  A few minutes later, Victors looked up as the truck passed between two rock walls with only inches to spare on either side. Holy smoke. I’ve got to pay attention.

  Cal Spencer, wearing his son’s student baseball cap, the bill now frayed, embroidered with a maroon “F.C.” for Fort Campbell, was overwhelmed by the crowd’s reception. He couldn’t believe they had captured Mazar so quickly. He was driving one of the Gators loaded with the team’s rucksacks. General Dostum approached, having stopped his truck up ahead and walked back to Spencer.

  “Take me for a ride,” he said.

  Spencer understood that Dostum wanted to be seen riding alongside the Americans as they entered the city.

  “Hop in, General.”

  Dostum waved to the crowd as they sped along.

  He suggested that they hoist an American flag on a pole attached to the buggy. Spencer and Nelson thought it was a good idea.

  Max Bowers disagreed. “This is their victory,” he said. He explained that the Afghans shouldn’t perceive the Americans as victors. Both Spencer and Nelson realized that Bowers was right.

  Dostum, after a short ride, returned to his vehicle. His security detail worried that the crowd had grown too large—nearly 5,000 people. It would be easy for a Taliban soldier still lurking in town to take a shot. Up ahead loomed a strange building, a towering fortress made entirely of mud. It resembled something out of Arabian Nights.

  “What’s that?” Spencer asked, pointing down the road.

  “Our new home!” shouted Nelson.

  The convoy of victors rumbled through a tall gate and entered the fort.

  Spencer asked if the place had a name.

  Someone in the group—an Afghan—answered, “Qala-i-Janghi.” He explained that in English it meant House of War.

  Leaving his carpet shop, Nadir Shihab started running like everyone else to welcome the Americans as they passed through the gates of the city.

  Nadir remembered the first time the Taliban appeared at his house in 1998, looking for his father. The elder had been an officer in the Northern Alliance army, and the Taliban suspected that he was still a loyal soldier after his retirement (which he had not been).

  Nadir had heard a Toyota pickup pull up in the dusty street and several Taliban policemen got out and walked to his house. Nadir waited for the knock, then swung the door open.

  “Is your father in the house?” asked one policeman.

  His father had warned him to bite his tongue and not criticize these men. They had killed neighbors who lived nearby and then had the audacity to move into their house. Every day with them was like waking in a land of ghouls. Only you were never sleeping.

  “What do you want with my father?”

  “We need him to talk.”

  Nadir called his father on his cell phone. “They are here. They want you to come home.”

  “We’re supposed to search your house,” the policeman told Nadir’s father when he arrived.

  “What are you looking for? Guns? Ammunition? We don’t have anything!”

  The Taliban soldier raised an ax and started smashing their closets. He threw their clothes in a pile in the street and set them on fire. Then he barged out of the house and returned shortly, carrying a shovel.

  He announced that he would find weapons buried in the dirt floor, weapons that Nadir’s father was hiding as a favor for the infidel General Dostum.

  He drove the shovel into the dirt and started digging. He found nothing in the kitchen. Nothing in the bedrooms. He walked from room to room, leaving piles of dirt everywhere he went.

  Finally, he left. Nadir and his father stood in the house and surveyed the damage. Then they retrieved shovels of their own and started filling in the holes. Life was like that, thought Nadir. Somebody keeps digging holes in your life and you keep filling them in.

  A week later, the Taliban policeman returned.

  He told Nadir�
�s father, “You said you don’t have anything, but someone has told me that you do.”

  He started digging again.

  “Oh, brother!” Nadir’s father cried. “We do not have anything buried in our house!”

  After the man had dug several holes, he walked up to Nadir’s father and slapped him across the face.

  “We know you have ammunition. We will take your car and your money.”

  Nadir’s father was silent with rage as the Taliban police officer lectured him on being a proper Muslim. “Do you want to scandalize Islam? Do you want to discredit your family?”

  The officer said to Nadir, “Brother, tell your sister not to go to school. Otherwise, we will kill her.” The man was serious. Recently there had been a chilling message broadcast on the radio in Mazar: “There are only two places for an Afghan woman,” the radio announcer had said. “In the husband’s home. And in the graveyard.”

  Nadir had studied English at Najeeb’s language school in Mazari-Sharif, and he was proud of his education. And he was proud of his sister’s.

  “We must study,” he told the policeman, “because this country needs the educated person!”

  “Tell your sister, if she goes to school, we will kill her.”

  Nadir just shook his head.

  One day he was walking down the street when he felt that he was being watched. He spotted a Taliban soldier who was pointing an AK-47 at him, holding it at waist level.

  “Boy, come here,” the man barked.