For Yar Mohammed, a poorly educated farmer, a convicted criminal, and a proud Pashtun man, the loss of his promised wife was a grudge against Abdul Ahad’s branch of the Karzai family that he refused to let go. It was an affront to his honor and reputation, a reason for badal, revenge.
“So the problem started there,” Mohammad Jan Karzai, his brother, told me.
One day in late May 1984, Khalil visited Yar Mohammed where he was living in Surkhab. Khalil carried two guns at the time, a Russian-made Kalashnikov and a Smith & Wesson pistol, purchased in America, a gift from one of his brothers. They talked for a bit while Khalil’s bodyguards waited outside. The exact circumstances of what happened next have been in dispute ever since. According to Khalil’s son Hashmat Karzai, who would search for answers for years, Yar Mohammed acted intrigued by the Kalashnikov. Russian-made weapons were rare. “Yar Mohammed asked, ‘Can I see the weapon? This is a beautiful weapon you’ve got.’ He took the weapon. He turned around and he just stood up and pointed the weapon toward my father. He said, ‘I want my woman back.’
“My father said, ‘Hey, these things are past. She’s married. She has two children. She’s in the States.’ ‘No, people are teasing me. I can’t take it anymore.’ ” The gun fired from point-blank range, and Khalil Karzai fell to the ground.
With Khalil’s death, the family lost a charismatic leader: brash, funny, violent, brave, a rough Pashtun tribesman in Italian loafers, a man who’d taunted his jailers and cared for his followers. The grief traveled as far as the Karzai relatives had been scattered around the world. In a three-bedroom apartment in Silver Spring, Aziza Karzai, one of his sisters, sobbed at the news. “When I came home from work she was doing something crazy,” her son remembered. “She was hitting her leg. I saw her leg was bruised. She was hitting too much. Before that day, my mother used to be young, strong, working. I’ve never seen her strong after that day.”
“If he were alive,” one of Khalil’s brothers told me, “the story would be different.”
Eighteen years later, once his nephew became president of Afghanistan, Khalil’s remains would be exhumed from his Pakistani grave and returned to the family plot in Karz. His headstone reads:
Martyr Khalil Karzai, whose body was temporarily buried in the refugee cemetery in Pishin, was moved to Afghanistan as the new sun rose by his son, Hashmat Khalil, and his dear friends, on January 2nd 2002, and he was buried in his ancestral cemetery may God bless his soul.
The eyes of flowers are brimming with tears.
There is no laughter but only crying in this garden.
The one I was visiting with used to smile;
now I am carrying him to his grave in tears.
—
“Watch your head,” Farid Karzai told me. We ducked off a crowded Kandahar sidewalk, passed through a low metal door, and walked down a dark concrete corridor that opened up into a narrow courtyard. The apartment felt like a safehouse. He didn’t know who might be looking for him, and he didn’t want the “Big Karzais” to know where he lived. Farid, the son of Yar Mohammed Karzai, was engaged to marry, but his mother, Farida, was so worried for his safety that she’d asked him to postpone the wedding. Sonia, his fourteen-year-old sister, now rarely slept through the night. We sat down in the concrete courtyard on a yellow patchwork carpet festooned with roses.
“Thank you for coming,” Farida told me. “Thank God there are still people who come and listen to people and take their messages and their voices.” Then she started to cry.
Farida had met Yar Mohammed in the Iranian border town of Zahedan, after he had fled Pakistan following Khalil Karzai’s killing. They met through relatives, married, and lived in refugee camp squalor, surviving for a time by selling flour and cooking oil out of their home. For a long time they wandered in exile, welcome neither in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan nor outside it. Then one day American fighter jets appeared overhead, their contrails tracing a white script altogether different.
“My cousin is the president of Afghanistan,” Yar Mohammed told his wife. “How long are we going to live in a foreign country?”
By then, Farida had borne Yar Mohammed two sons, Farid and Waheed, and a daughter, Sunita; their youngest daughter was still to come. The family rented a truck and filled the bed with their meager belongings and drove back to Karz. The village was almost unrecognizable. The only thing that remained from the buildings where Yar Mohammed and other Karzai relatives had grown up were the weathered ruins of a few mud walls. The area around was sunbaked dirt and a trash-filled swamp that smelled of sewage.
Yar Mohammed and his sons set about building a new home, living in a tent on their plot of land while the work progressed. Yar Mohammed was too old and gaunt for much physical labor, so Farid and Waheed worked on the house after school. They supervised the work of local masons and builders as they fashioned a small, one-story, L-shaped concrete house with a flat roof. It had four small bedrooms, each with its own door facing the main gate leading into the yard, and a concrete staircase near the kitchen that rose to the roof. The house was simple and crude, but in a village of decrepit earthen homes, a sturdy white concrete house amounted to a status symbol.
Credit 9.2
Farid Karzai with his mother, Farida, and sister Sonia in the courtyard of an apartment they were renting in Kandahar City after fleeing Karz
Yar Mohammed sometimes sold sundries such as wheat and sugar but often spent his days sitting around the house, his rifle propped next to him. On rare occasions, when his boys were at school, Yar Mohammed would walk out through his yard of dirt and pebbled rock, past the hand-pump well and beyond the gray metal gate. He might pass black-and-white goats, so dirty both colors converged toward gray, or shirtless kids splashing in a fetid canal. In the fields, farmers bent to their grapes. He sometimes saw men riding dirt bikes, their turbans enveloping all but a slit for their eyes, to keep out the dust. Generally the path was empty, the only sound his footfalls. The trail ended where it abutted the main road through Karz, the one paved road in the village. At that intersection there was one house unlike all the others. From the outside, nothing was visible but its perimeter wall, a twenty-three-foot-high unbroken façade that ran for nearly a quarter mile along the main road. At the corners of the wall stood forty-foot turrets, manned by gunmen. The front door looked fit for a castle, a huge wooden slab embedded in a brick archway, protected by a metal bar. It was less house than fortress, visible from anywhere in the village, and it literally loomed over Yar Mohammed’s tiny home. It belonged to Hashmat Karzai, the son of the man he shot.
Hashmat was a quintessential Afghan striver, an unabashed war profiteer. He’d been an immigrant selling car loans in suburban Virginia who had returned to his homeland and traded on his family name to amass a fortune of American taxpayer cash and command his own mercenary army. By 2007, he’d founded the Asia Security Group with former U.S. military officers and old friends of President Karzai’s, and he was soon earning tens of millions of dollars from government contracts to provide private security to U.S. military bases across the country. With his new riches, Hashmat wanted to establish himself as the political heir to his slain father, to challenge Ahmed Wali Karzai as the preeminent power in Kandahar. Karz had become Hashmat’s domain, the castle his headquarters. He had hired many of the villagers into the private army—he claimed to employ two thousand men—paying monthly salaries of a few thousand dollars a man, far more than could be earned in the grape fields. Once Hashmat came back to town, you couldn’t go anywhere in Karz without seeing the image of his slain father; he’d erected a giant billboard on the main road with a black-and-white photograph of Khalil, who looks down on passersby with his turban and bushy mustache and an expression almost bemused.
—
On the few occasions when Yar Mohammed passed Hashmat’s castle, he would bear right, onto the main road. He would pass the three-story village school where his sons studied, then the Karzai family cemetery, continuing on until he
reached the cluster of roadside shops. He made few trips beyond the market, sometimes to the village mosque, the butcher shop, or the family vineyards. He once dressed in his two-toned blue turban and flew to Saudi Arabia for his pilgrimage to Mecca. But for the most part, Yar Mohammed didn’t venture far. “He would hardly ever leave the house,” his wife recalled.
October 16, 2009, was a Friday, the Muslim day of rest. Three weeks shy of his eighteenth birthday, Waheed Karzai put on a shimmery denim jacket over a white button-down shirt and left for a picnic. Waheed was thin and handsome, with high cheekbones and delicate features, a fine graze of stubble on his cheeks. Some of Waheed’s cousins had made money on American contracts, providing construction materials for U.S. soldiers at Kandahar Airfield, and they’d bought new cars they liked to race along the sandy banks of rivers outside the city. That day, as Waheed watched them tear across the sand, he posed for a photograph with a couple of his cousins. He sat cross-legged and held his hands together in his lap. His lips curled into a slight smile.
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Photograph of Khalil Karzai that was converted into a billboard and erected in Karz
Credit 9.4
A photo of Waheed Karzai
His cousins with him that day were among his best friends. Waheed spent hours with Bilal and Zalal Karzai, the sons of one of Yar Mohammed’s brothers. They lived next door in Karz, their houses separated by an eight-foot mud wall. Bilal and Zalal worked for an American company that provided generators at Kandahar Airfield. They would see each other in the evenings after work. Sometimes they would talk until the morning hours in Bilal’s room; other nights they explored the city. “We would come home very late, like three or four or five a.m.,” Bilal recalled. “Since the doors would be locked, we would come over the wall. Many times Yar Mohammed almost mistook us for thieves or his enemies. He would always curse us.” The boys laughed off his worries. “We would go wherever our friends wanted to go. We liked to sleep during the day and chat at night,” Bilal said. That Friday, Waheed felt tired and Bilal a little sick. That night, while Farid went out to a friend’s wedding in the city, the other two headed home early.
As the sun set, Waheed knelt for evening prayers, touching his forehead to his prayer rug in his bedroom. The space was cramped, an austere and unadorned concrete nook, carpeted in brown. A window near the door looked out onto the dirt-and-gravel yard, empty but for the odd pile of sticks, discarded tires, and a yellow plastic bucket. In the back of Waheed’s room, away from the door, a thin mattress lay on top of a rope bed, known as a charpayee. His Koran rested on the bedside table. At night, the sky provided the only illumination, by moon or stars. Electricity in Karz was still an unfulfilled wish. Evenings were quiet and only rarely interrupted by the lonely patter of a distant motorbike or a barking stray.
Yar Mohammed had taken his nightly sleeping pill and gone to bed on a floor mat under the window in the next room. Waheed decided to read verses from his Koran before going to sleep. He was the more studious of the brothers. “He loved education, reading and writing,” Farid recalled. “He would always tell me that the only way to change our lives was to go to school and go to university and become either a doctor or an engineer.”
Waheed took off his shirt. He shook out his blanket and placed it on the mattress. It was at that moment, just before nine p.m., when the visitors arrived. In the story Waheed would later tell several relatives from his hospital bed, the ensuing moments unfolded in confusion and fear. Men broke the lock on the gate and came in fast: at least two Toyota Surf SUVs and about seven men with black military-grade assault rifles. Most of them wore gray uniforms, common among police and security guards, but two were dressed in civilian clothes. One of them, a stocky, balding man, wore a crisp white shalwar kameez with a black vest and combat boots. The other also wore a shalwar kameez, in greenish-gray. These two men carried pistols with silencers and laser sights. They approached Farid’s room, the one closest to the front gate, but it was empty, because he was still at the wedding. They found Waheed in the next room. When they entered, he froze, ducking into a crouch next to his bed, his body turned toward the wall.
“It’s not him,” one of the men said.
“Shoot him anyway,” the other replied. “Don’t let him go.”
The man in white opened fire. One bullet missed Waheed and lodged in the wall about a foot off the floor. Another pierced his left calf, and he started to scream. The next shot struck him in the gut and he fell over, writhing and bleeding onto the carpet.
The commotion woke Waheed’s mother and Sonia, who were sleeping nearby. The two shooters entered their bedroom. The green dot of the laser danced across their faces. Sonia screamed, “It’s the Taliban!” and they ordered her to shut up.
“As we started screaming and shouting, one of them raised their gun again and pointed it at us,” Farida recalled. “And that’s when my daughter held up a Koran and begged them not to shoot. When they saw there were only two women, they left the room.”
Yar Mohammed had by that point grabbed his Kalashnikov and staggered into the yard. Bleary from the sleeping pill, he couldn’t see well as he sprayed gunfire at the intruders. “Window glass was shattered. Bullets were flying everywhere, as he was exchanging fire with these two men,” Farida said. “After a few minutes, they escaped, the car engines roaring.”
The gun battle woke Bilal Karzai next door. His first thought was that the shooting had come from the direction of the grape fields behind his house. When he went outside to look, he saw nothing. As he was coming back, he heard more shots from the direction of Waheed’s house. He knew that one family in the neighborhood bought and sold weapons, and Bilal thought that the American soldiers might be doing some type of raid on that house. He hoisted himself up the dirt wall that separated his house from his cousin’s and peered down into their yard. He saw a welter of commotion: Yar Mohammed firing his Kalashnikov as uniformed men ran through the yard, jumped into their vehicles, and drove off.
When they left, Yar Mohammed helped his injured son into the yard and examined his body. Waheed had taken off his shirt before bed, and now blood streamed from his stomach wound. The cell phones were out—the Taliban would not allow cell phone companies to provide service at night—so a neighbor ran to the nearest police checkpoint to summon help. The police loaded Waheed into the back of a truck. As it pulled away, Farida ran after it, shouting and crying for them to take her along. But as a woman, she was not allowed, and she wouldn’t see her son again. They drove Waheed to Mirwais Hospital, the lime-green clinic in Kandahar City that had become the main collection point for the war wounded in southern Afghanistan.
As word spread of the shooting, Farid left the wedding and drove to the hospital. He found his brother lying on polka-dotted sheets in the second-floor emergency room. The sight of his brother’s wounds caused him to wretch. He got woozy and fainted, and someone splashed water on his face to revive him.
The doctors removed bullets from Waheed’s leg and abdomen. He was able to speak to his relatives, and he described the shooters to them and the sequence of events in his bedroom. But over the next day, his condition deteriorated, and by Sunday morning, Farid knew that Waheed needed more help. He called Fazel Mohammed, the chief of security for Ahmed Wali Karzai, and told him his brother was dying. Ahmed Wali sent another aide to the hospital, and he arranged for Waheed to be taken by ambulance to the U.S. military hospital at Kandahar Airfield. He arrived on a Sunday afternoon.
According to his medical records, by the time Waheed was transferred to the American doctors’ care, his heart rate was racing at 145 beats per minute. His blood pressure was 45 over 21, and vacillating wildly. He had massive blood loss from the abdominal trauma. Despite the intravenous fluids, he was unable to urinate. “Overall condition is not good,” a doctor wrote. They performed a laparotomy, opening up his abdomen, and inserted a chest tube to help him breathe. He received a dopamine injection for his failing blood pressure and hydrocortiso
ne to stave off renal failure. By then, Waheed had drifted into a coma. His heart stopped beating, and he was revived by defibrillator paddles and an adrenaline shot. Antibiotics—Metrogyl, ciprofloxacin, imipenem—coursed through him. By one a.m. on Monday morning, his blood pressure was “indeterminable,” and the doctors were called to his bedside. Yellow pus seeped from his chest tube. Purple bruises had appeared on his skin, signs of internal bleeding. His medical records would later list the cause of his demise as acute tubular necrosis, or kidney failure, the result of septic shock from severe blood infection. By four-thirty that morning, Waheed Karzai was pronounced dead.
Within the family, the question of who shot Waheed Karzai was not much in dispute. On his gravestone in the Karzai cemetery, it says that Waheed was killed “by the enemies of Islam” when he was in his house, sleeping. But most people believed Hashmat Karzai was the killer. The theory went that Hashmat was enacting revenge on Yar Mohammed’s family for the killing of his father a quarter century earlier. Perhaps he meant to kill Yar Mohammed himself but took advantage of the first target he found, then fled in the ensuing gun battle. Waheed’s relatives believed that the other gunmen in their house that night were Hashmat’s guards from the Asia Security Group, the American contractor. Given the risks of accusing the village’s most powerful man of premeditated murder, the subject became one that most of the relatives wanted to avoid. “They were not among the people we knew” was all Waheed’s mother would tell me. Farid offered a bit more: “Everyone in my family, including my dad, saw those men wearing the same uniforms that Hashmat Karzai’s security guards were wearing.”
Over the months I spoke with the Karzais, I would always ask about people’s thoughts on this incident. Some gave credence to the rumor that the killing was a conspiracy by supporters of Ahmed Wali Karzai to frame Hashmat and drive him from Karz. But most of the relatives I spoke with believed Hashmat was ultimately responsible. Yar Mohammed’s brother Mohammed Jan put it this way: “According to Waheed himself, it was Hashmat who went to the house and shot him. He told us that he was wearing white clothes, a white shalwar kameez, with a black vest, and he had recognized him. Everybody that night was saying Hashmat had attacked Yar Mohammed’s house and shot at Waheed. The next morning, people stopped saying that, because they were scared.”
A Kingdom of Their Own Page 27