The Sewing Circles of Herat

by Christina Lamb

  By the windows was a series of cardboard boxes piled with candlesticks, vases, dishes, water cups for birdcages and goblets twisted and sculpted into the strangest shapes and sorted into colours – bright mermaid blue, deep cobalt and jade green. I tried to pick out a set of six glasses but no two were even remotely alike, all different heights and shapes and thicknesses with strange bumps and bulges. They were layered with dust and when I took them to the doorway and wiped them with my sleeve they glittered in the sun as if tiny particles of dust were trapped inside the glass.

  I was holding up one that I particularly admired when a papery voice behind me whispered, ‘Do you know the secret of glass?’

  I turned around to see an old man in white shalwar kamiz with a short waistcoast and a long white beard. His face was smooth and unlined yet his milky green eyes told of times long past. This was Sultan Hamidy, the owner of the shop.

  ‘The secret of glass?’

  ‘We once made glass for all over Afghanistan. All over Persia too. Kings and queens drank from Hamidy’s glasses. We were the biggest glass factory in all Oxiana and Transoxiana. Look.’ On the wall were framed yellowing certificates of awards won for his glassware in exhibitions in Tehran, Istanbul and Karachi.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘War. Killing. Who is there to make glass when the men are all fighting? And who will buy glass when they don’t even have a roof over their heads or bread to feed their children?’

  The old man shook his head and turned in from the doorway as if the light was burning his eyes. ‘Mine is a country where all the beauty has died. Look around you. This was a beautiful city of poetry and painting and pine trees famous as far away as your country. Foreigners loved this place. It was green and lush, the stalls were all piled high with pomegranates, figs and peaches bigger than your fist. Now it is brown and dry, a dead place.’

  He walked back towards the depths of his shop and I feared he would disappear. Instead he picked up something wrapped in yellowing newspaper from inside a drawer and handed it to me. It was a wooden pencil box varnished in lapis blue with the Herat citadel delicately painted in the centre surrounded by a border of tiny star-shaped red roses and gold edging in the style of the old miniatures. The price he quoted was the equivalent of six months’ salary in Afghanistan and, I knew, far too much, but it was little to me and it seemed wrong to bargain over something so exquisite, so I took the box along with half a dozen of the turquoise blue glasses which he wrapped in straw in a box as if they were tiny kittens in a bed.

  ‘You mentioned a secret,’ I said after counting out several large bricks of tattered afghanis, considerably lightening the load in my rucksack.

  ‘Each glass is individually made. We used to say a line of poetry for each one so that it would have its own soul. You see them there in the grains of sand trapped in the glass. Then when my first son Rahim was killed by the dushman [Russians] in 1979 I whispered his name into the glass as I blew it over the flame. Then we did the same every time a son or brother or neighbour was made shaheed but we could not keep up – you see how many glass pieces we have made but there were hundreds, thousands of dead. First we had no more customers. Then after a while we no longer had the workers or the materials. Our colours were from crushed jewels, you see the tiny splinters. Now the glasses just sit there, waiting to be found. This is the secret of Sultan Hamidy’s glass.’

  Back at the Mowafaq, Ayubi was waiting in the restaurant, wrapped in a soft woollen cape over a shalwar kamiz of embroidered white cotton. He had the same uncanny ability as Hamid Karzai of walking through dust and dirt without any of it clinging to him. I was horrified to find he had been waiting there for several hours.

  ‘You should have let us know you were coming,’ I said as he beamed as always at my pronunciation of ‘haletun chetor e?’, Dari for ‘How are you?’

  ‘It is of no consequence. I am here to serve you. If I wait a day for you, it is like the tick of a clock. If I wait a week for you I am too happy. One month is not even a shadow across the moon. But now we must go, Tora Ismael is expecting us.’

  We took a taxi to an avenue lined with stumps of trees and after some negotiation with the guards were allowed into the driveway of a large two-storey house with a terrace. This was the Foreign Ministry guesthouse and, as I got out of the car, I recognised the building. It was where I had stayed when I visited Herat in 1989 on a trip organised by the Najibullah regime. Even the pomegranate tree in the front garden where every evening a cuckoo sang was still there. It was the first time the regime had allowed journalists who had travelled with the mujaheddin to come and see the war from the other side and I had somehow ended up with a Canadian journalist who had never before travelled to the ‘Third World’ as he called it, stretching out the vowels and widening his eyes. He had a rucksack stocked with water filters, energy bars and vitamin pills and refused to eat any local food, once pointing out to me little white maggots in a bowl of mutton from which I had just eaten. The Canadian was horrified by children playing in dirty canals, which in those days had water, and terrified of straying near the Green Line, the shifting division between areas controlled by the regime and the mujaheddin which I was always trying to get to. We spent all week being shocked by each other and got little sense of the city. All I knew from snatched conversations with locals in the golden half-light under the arches of the covered carpet bazaar was that it was a place of fear.

  The fighting at that time had been so intense that we ended up trapped in Herat for days and were finally sent by tank to the airport, stopping for most of a morning in a pine grove after a rocket narrowly missed us and a firefight crackled across the road up ahead. A former Governor of Herat had planted the pines, 32,000 of them, in the 1940s to escort the traveller out of the city so that they would leave with the scent and always remember Herat and though many had been chopped down, I knew the smell of pine would always bring back that day. When we eventually got to the aircraft, an old Antonov, it was like a furnace inside with no air conditioning. A large section of seats had been taken up for wooden coffins bearing dead soldiers back to the capital, requiring many passengers to stand. We were held up inside the plane on the runway for hours as the battle raged on around us, getting hotter and hotter with the stench of the dead bodies overpowering.

  I was remembering all this and wondering if Ismael Khan was even in town or we would just wait outside the house all evening, a common occurrence in Afghanistan, when Ayubi suddenly whispered reverentially, ‘Tora Ismael.’ A Datsun pick-up with heavy chrome bumper bars and darkened windows roared into the driveway followed by two more packed with heavily armed mujaheddin, heads wrapped in black and white keffiyehs, their guns trained Top-Gun style on either side of the road. The gates closed behind them and out of the first car jumped Ismael Khan, legendary commander and the man whose forces had almost killed us that day at the airport.

  He was instantly recognisable from the swashbuckling poster of him astride a horse that festooned the shops and buildings in Herat as well as the windscreens of all the Dubai-numberplated Taliban jeeps that had been purloined by the mujaheddin. On the posters he looked like Charles Bronson and even in real life, though his beard was white rather than jet-black and his eyes a little less soulful, he had something of the movie star about him.

  Ismael Khan in Herat, November 2001.

  He hugged Ayubi warmly, smiled a welcome to me and we found ourselves whisked into the house in his wake and taken to a side room where a man brought plates of almonds and small glasses of tea flavoured with cardamon. Every few minutes the man returned with new glasses of tea until I had four in front of me and I wondered if we were going to be received.

  Then Ismael himself came in, apologised for keeping us waiting and invited us to join him for dinner upstairs. ‘You will not ask your questions while we are eating,’ he said as he led us to a table covered by a flowery vinyl cloth on which were laid out a plate of scrawny chicken pieces, a large plastic bowl of pilau
rice, lamb kebabs sprinkled with ground grape-seed and greasy chips. It was more food than we had seen for over a week.

  Ismael sat at the head of the table. On his left was Haji Mir, his military commander for the south who briefed him on the latest position with the Taliban who were negotiating a surrender in Kandahar, their last stronghold, and he feared might flee north towards Herat. On his right was his newly appointed head of schools with whom he was discussing how to restart female education and whether boys and girls should be educated separately.

  Ismael Khan was one of the most charismatic leaders that the resistance had thrown up. There was a famous story about him receiving a letter from the Soviet General Andrushkin in Herat warning Ismael that he had dealt with ‘bandits’ before and would make sure he suffered the same fate as the Uzbek bandit Ibrahim Beg who had resisted the Russians at the start of the twentieth century but been defeated. Ismael’s reply was uncompromising. ‘You Russians do not forget Ibrahim Beg after seventy years. I want you to remember the name Ismael Khan for two hundred years.’

  Watching him gnaw on his chicken bones, the juices dripping into his beard, I could picture the relish with which he would have sent off the messenger on horseback, galloping across the plains to Andrushkin.

  Of all the warlords who had emerged and prospered during the years of fighting, with the exception of the late Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, Ismael was probably the least tainted. He was often described by journalists as having an elfin appearance despite his fifty-four years but his puckish eyes were clearly deceptive. Clean-living, religious, and according to his men, an inspirational orator, he could not have been more different in personality or appearance to the other prominent figure, General Dostum, the Uzbek warlord, based in Mazar-i-Sharif. There was no love lost between Heratis and Uzbeks and although the two men were working together in the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, they hated each other, Ismael blaming Dostum for his own capture by the Taliban. A former wrestler with a fondness for dancing girls and Scotch whisky, Dostum was more than six feet tall with almost no neck, and the glowering expression of one who liked nothing better than to go out and kill a few people after lunch. He was known to have crushed his enemies under tanks, and it was claimed by the Uzbeks that his laugh had frightened people to death. As Governor of Mazar, he had filled the grounds of his fort with peacocks, declared himself the ‘Pasha of the North’ and started his own airlines – Balkh Airlines – known as BA.

  Ismael Khan had been less showy. He could also be ruthless, but during his three years as Governor of Herat after the fall of the Communist regime in 1992, he had sought reconciliation rather than revenge and was not linked to any massacres such as those that had occurred in Dostum’s realm. His main weakness was that he adored power, calling himself the Amir of Western Afghanistan where he controlled five provinces and liking his men to refer to him as Excellency. The wording under his official portrait was ‘The model of bravery and piety’. Every year he held an annual military parade in which his troops sat astride camels bearing Stinger missiles and loaded rocket-launchers, and special forces parachuted into the midst and skinned live snakes with their teeth.

  Unlike Dostum who had initially fought with the Soviets, raising his 20,000-strong Uzbek militia under Najibullah, fighting mercilessly against the mujaheddin in the battles of Jalalabad, Gardez and Khost, then gone on to ally himself with – and betray – most of the mujaheddin factions, Ismael Khan had never switched sides. He came to prominence when as a major in the Afghan army, he led a mutiny in March 1979 against the Soviet advisors who had appeared in the city ordering shopkeepers to display red flags and photographs of President Taraki. When the Heratis rebelled and rampaged through the city attacking the Communist party headquarters and dragging Soviet advisors and their families from their homes, the Russians ordered the Afghan army to shoot. Ismael Khan and his men refused and fled to the hills where they started gathering supporters and preparing resistance, making contact with Burhanuddin Rabbani, one of the seven mujaheddin leaders in Peshawar, and like Ismael a Persian-speaking Tajik, as well as the Iranian regime which was to supply arms. His band of thirty men grew to five thousand called the Amir Hanza Division, which he ran on strict army lines, dividing them into five regiments, each then organised into battalions of about two hundred men which in turn were divided into companies of about twenty-five.

  Throughout the Soviet occupation there was more or less a stalemate between the two sides with the citadel under Russian control but the Green Line cutting off areas of the city to them. The Russians saw nothing to be gained in trying to win the affections of the Heratis and viewed everyone as potential enemies and everything as targets, bombing villages and laying mines in farmland, while by night they barricaded themselves in as Ismael’s mujaheddin took to the streets. So dangerous was it that one and a half million people, almost a tenth of the country’s population, fled western Afghanistan to Iran.

  Eventually in 1992, two years after the Russians had left, Ismael’s men took Herat and he declared himself Amir of the West for the first time. Education was one of his priorities and he managed to disarm the population so that compared to other parts of Afghanistan beset by fighting between groups, Herat was peaceful. But he was seen as a weak ruler whose administration was riddled with corruption and nepotism, with his own family swelling the ranks. Soon customs officials were demanding $300, equivalent to a year’s salary, for trucks to pass through the city.

  By March 1995 the Taliban had captured the two south-western provinces of Nimruz and Farah. They then advanced on the former Soviet airbase of Shindand south of Herat but Ismael’s troops were able to push them back, helped by Massoud who was then Defence Minister and sent in planes from Kabul to bomb the Taliban front-lines, as well as by the fact that the Taliban had no food or water or medical facilities in the inhospitable desert. The victory made Ismael Khan overconfident and a few months later he marched south and launched an offensive against Kandahar. But after their defeat the Taliban had spent the summer regrouping and training with ISI advisors and their numbers had been reinforced by thousands of new volunteers from the madrassas in Pakistan. At the same time Dostum had changed sides again and started bombing Herat. Ismael’s men were not only forced to retreat but were completely overrun by the Taliban. They fled from the city to take refuge in the hills or across the border.

  The commander belched and excused himself from the table to carry out his instructions, a secret mission, and I wondered if they were planning another attempt on Kandahar. Ismael Khan finished carefully peeling an apple that he ate without speaking, then pushed his plate away and turned his full attention on me. I asked him what effect he felt the Taliban had had on Herat and he shook his head sadly.

  ‘Life under the Taliban was altogether a tragedy. A man can deal with hunger, poverty, cold and other hardships but dealing with an ignorant person is much harder. We were the captives of ignorant people and for Heratis that was probably the worst thing of all.

  ‘Herat is different to other places in Afghanistan. The historical monuments you see here show that the people of this city are richer with respect to science, knowledge and culture and have a deeper awareness. The Taliban knew that the people of Herat were mad at them and remembered the uprising against the Russians and were worried that the same would happen. They thought they could stop it by spreading fear but they were wrong. The Taliban used to think that by killing people and hanging them in the city for all to see that the population would be scared. Not a week or two went by without a citizen of Herat being hung from lampposts. Yet every day a new slogan was painted on a wall demanding “Death to Taliban” or “Open our Girls’ Schools”. There was a constant flow of secret nightly papers and poems. Unlike in other provinces where many people worked with the Taliban, here people tried to have nothing to do with them.’

  After one year of organising against the Taliban, Ismael was captured in a trap. ‘I was betrayed by General Abdul Malik, one of D
ostum’s deputies,’ he said, bitterly. ‘Like Dostum, Malik had been with Najibullah then joined the mujaheddin for a lot of money, twelve million dollars, so they say. I had been to Mazar to see Dostum to discuss joining against the Taliban, then General Malik came to Herat and sent a message arranging a breakfast meeting with me. The people he brought with him were Taliban and they pulled out their guns, arrested me and took me to Kandahar prison. Later he was also arrested but escaped to Turkey.’

  Remembering Mullah Hassani, the Taliban torturer whom I had met in the orchard in Quetta and his bloodcurdling tales of torture in Kandahar, I asked about the jail.

  ‘Physically they did not touch me,’ replied Ismael, ‘they did not beat or torture me. But I was kept with my hands and legs shackled, sometimes my neck too, chained to a pipe in a dark solitary cell for three years with no facilities. No books, radio, visits, news, nothing. Just a small piece of bread every day so that I did not die. The cell was so small that the few times I was unchained I could only take three paces. I wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone, even my guard.

  ‘Twice I tried digging a hole in my cell with my hands to escape but it was impossible. But among the guards were two former mujaheddin who offered to help me because they had fought in the jihad. They were Pashtuns from Kandahar and I did not know if I could trust them at first. But they seemed genuine and one of them, Hekmatullah, whose father had been a famous mujahid, got in touch with my son Mirwais in Iran and arranged a Land Cruiser and over months they planned an escape for myself and two of my commanders.

  ‘Finally the day came. It was 2 March 1999. First they unlocked our leg shackles. Then at about 4 a.m. when everyone was sleeping they came for us, opened our cells and left bundles of clothes on the floor so that it would look as if we were still sleeping, then led us to the Land Cruiser which was in the parking lot. It was like a movie. We were sure someone would spot us. In the car Hekmatullah’s father was waiting and he gave us black turbans and flowing robes so that we would look like Taliban. We had to sit there for hours in the carpark waiting for the sun to come up and Hekmatullah’s shift to end. He told his colleagues that he was going for a steambath and then he came with us. We had a white Taliban flag on the car so it was easy for us to drive through the checkpoints but then we drove into the Dasht-e-Marg desert from where we would get across the border and got competely lost driving round and round in circles until it was late at night. Finally we came across a goatherd who said he knew the way but then we hit an anti-tank mine which hurled the car into the air. We were lucky none of us were killed but my legs were broken in the impact and so were Hekmatullah’s. The car was completely destroyed and we lay there in pain as Hekmatullah’s father walked off for help. Eventually he found some of my men and they came and rescued us. We got to Iran about 10 p.m. that night – it had taken us almost two days.’