‘You need to speak to his cousin Nazzak,’ he replied, ‘they were inseparable’.
We followed his directions to find ourselves bumping over a rutted lane amid the crumbling earth walls and dried canals of the Ajarab district just as the sun was swelling crimson in the sky ready to disappear below the horizon. Either side of the road were small brick kilns and bombed-out shells of buildings that in the dusty light and smoke of people cooking on dung-fires looked like the remains of an ancient city. A little way off I could see a tall grape-drying tower with slotted windows just like that which was blown up by Soviet tanks when the mullahs were firing on the airport and I had hidden in the trenches.
‘It’s too late,’ said Ahmed Jan, ‘there must be al Qaeda everywhere here. Perhaps it’s a trap. We better go back.’
Darkness had fallen quickly and heavily and the pallid glow of the moon gave the ruins a ghostly appearance. The area seemed deserted apart from a man with a donkey cart loaded with freshly cut grass. Then a small boy, who looked English with a white freckled face and red hair, appeared. When we told him we were looking for the house of Abdullah, he told us to leave the car and beckoned us along a track between mud-walled compounds, one of which had a satellite dish perched on top.
The young boy, who we later discovered was Abdullah’s son, disappeared behind a pink-flowered curtain across the doorway. A whispered discussion ensued, then I was shown into the women’s quarters. A kerosene lamp was brought in and, as my eyes accustomed to the dim light, I could just make out a handsome woman of about forty on the floor surrounded by a group of small children, and in one corner a much younger woman, head wrapped in a black shawl, sobbing softly as she rocked a gaily painted wooden crib inside which a baby girl with rosy cheeks and black olive-pit eyes lay still, wrapped in thick swaddling. She turned her head away and I realised she was pregnant.
Ahmed Jan, mortified at being dragged into the women’s quarters, explained why we had come. The older woman nodded, took something out of an envelope and silently handed me a photograph. For a moment I studied it blankly, seeing only a crowd of robed men and a few cars in Herat Chowk, just in front of the bakery where I stopped every morning to buy hot nan. Then I realised what the people were all looking at. In the centre was a tall makeshift gallows made of bamboo poles with someone hanging from it. It was a medieval scene so vivid that I could almost hear the poles creaking as the body swung slowly back and forth. The date scrawled on the back in Pashto was 6 December 1422 or the year 2001 in our western calendar. One day before the fall of Kandahar and the end of the Taliban.
Abdullah’s widow and children.
Tea was brought and the woman whose name was Bibi Zahra, Abdullah’s sister, began to tell his story while in the corner his widow Latifa snuffled quietly, eyes expressionless as she held her daughter Rahmana who was eight and wore a turquoise veil sewn with gold sequins and rocked baby Roxanna, named after the Afghan wife of Alexander the Great. The orange-haired Rahmatullah sat alone, watchful, the man of the house at just eleven. Latifa had been only fourteen when he was born.
In my travels across Afghanistan I had heard many stories but none mirrored the tragedy of Afghanistan more than that of Abdullah. ‘We were just two,’ began Bibi Zahra, ‘I was the elder and Abdullah younger, born in 1973 just before King Zahir Shah was overthrown. Our father Habibullah was a civil servant here in the Governor’s office but when the regime changed he was sacked because our family were from the Barakzai tribe and royalists. He was forced to work as a carpenter, which he wasn’t very good at. I remember people coming to the house, complaining about their tables or chairs falling apart, but he always made sure we were well-educated.’
As she spoke, a little boy, younger than my own two and a half year-old son, plucked at her silver bangles and turquoise beads, whimpering for attention, but his older brother yanked him away, throwing him towards the doorway where he sat tracing the flowers on the curtain with his fingers. There was nothing in the room that might constitute a toy and the plaster walls were bare apart from a mirror in a red frame the shape of an upside-down heart.
‘We watched the Russian tanks come into Kandahar, Abdullah and I. We were standing on the main street holding hands and wondering what it meant, then our father went away and we knew then it was bad,’ continued Bibi Zahra. He had joined the forces of Haji Latif, a white-bearded bandit leader who despite being spoken of derogatively as a ‘dog-trainer’ was one of the most powerful mujaheddin commanders in the region, and whose son Gul Agha later became Governor of Kandahar after the fall of the Taliban. Like Abdullah’s father, Haji Latif was from the Barakzai tribe, the branch of the Durranis from which some of Afghanistan’s kings had come such as Dost Mohammed. The two children and their mother stayed in the compound with their widowed aunt and her children including Nazzak, the man we had been told to look for. The area was heavily bombed by Soviet planes, but somehow the family survived and Habibullah occasionally returned for snatched visits, sometimes wounded.
‘One day, after the Russians had left, he went away and never came back,’ said Bibi Zahra. ‘We heard he was kidnapped by Hekmatyar’s men and stoned or maybe torched to death. That was about ten years ago.’
Abdullah was determined to avenge his death, even though his father had been angry when he left school to join Gul Agha’s forces at the age of fifteen. Like most children of his generation he had learnt to use a Kalashnikov by the time he was eleven and had grown up expecting to fight.
Yet his sister described him as a gentle soul whose greatest joy was to sit under the mulberry tree in the courtyard writing poetry, unlike the other boys who spent their time flying kites and trying to steal birds. ‘Everybody loved him,’ she said, ‘he would stop to help anyone in trouble. Look at this.’ From one of two tin trunks in the corner of the room she took out a photograph album. Inside were numerous photographs of a young man with earnest eyes who always seemed to be smiling. One showed him laughing with delight as he bit into a watermelon while picnicking with friends by the local dam. In another he stood surrounded by the white doves outside the blue shrine of Hazrat Ali, cousin of the Prophet Mohammed, in Mazar-i-Sharif, two doves on his head, another in his hand. Afghans believe that one in seven of the doves is a spirit so they feed them hoping to win favour, and it is said that the site is so holy that if a grey pigeon joins the flock it will become white in forty days.
‘He would spend one or two months here then the rest of the year fighting,’ said Bibi Zahra. ‘We would be very worried. When the mujaheddin took power and Gul Agha became Governor the first time, Abdullah was made head of the Afghan Wireless Communication Company, then was transferred to Kabul. He was working there when the Taliban took Kabul and they arrested him because they found faxes in the toolbox in his car to be sent to the Americans. But they couldn’t prove they were his so they released him and he joined them so they wouldn’t be suspicious. But all the time he was still working for Gul Agha. I was the only one who knew what he was doing and I tried to stop him. I knew it would only end in tragedy.’
It was getting late so we arranged to come back the next afternoon to hear the rest of the story from his cousin Nazzak who lived in a room across the compound. His name was actually Hamidullah but everyone called him Nazzak which meant skinny because he was so thin, his khaki uniform hanging off him and though he was only twenty-two, he had an important job working in the Governor’s office in charge of disarming the local population. There was respect in people’s voices as they spoke of him.
Commander Nazzak.
There was a collection of dusty shoes outside Nazzak’s room and inside he was lounging on cushions surrounded by five of his men in combat fatigues all glued to a large television, presumably booty from one of the Arab houses, run off a car battery. The programme was a concert by the English teen pop group, Steps, on the satellite music channel MTV. They looked up in bored irritation at the interruption.
Nazzak said something to his men who got up, each spitting noi
sily into a silver spittoon before swaggering out, their eyes red and unfocused. I asked him to tell me about Abdullah and he took a small red notebook out of his pocket. ‘This is one of his poems,’ he said, opening the book. ‘It’s called “A Quiet Scream”. He used to publish them under the pseudonym Khayal which means ‘‘The Contemplative One” and we would distribute them in the town.’
I have been screaming but no one can hear me
All the people who can hear me have died
The country I am living in I thought was a garden
But it turned out to be a forest full of snakes
Fate brought me where I can find no one
I lost all my relations, all my friends
The laws are torn up, all I could hear is screaming
Blood is pouring out of my pen
How can I write?
I cannot say anything
Because if I write the truth
I will join the other ghosts
I watched Nazzak’s face as he read it in his soft voice. He looked so innocent, his beard and moustache out of place in his gamine face, and he wiped away a tear with a hand adorned by a thick gold ring and jewelled gold watch.
‘Since childhood we were inseparable,’ he said. ‘I did everything Abdullah did. Nobody could differentiate between us. When he joined Gul Agha I did too. And when he joined the Taliban I followed him. All our family are supporters of His Majesty.’
He showed me a card with Abdullah’s photograph on one side and on the other, a picture of the king and the old red, black and green royalist flag of Afghanistan with the Herat citadel in the centre. ‘Both of us grew up always with fighting. I was born just six months after the Taraki Revolution. My father and his father, my uncle, were famous commanders with Haji Latif. They wanted us to study but when I was fourteen I left school and became a builder to support the family as my father and uncle had been killed. I built this room. Then like Abdullah I became a fighter. I’ve taken bullets in almost every part of my body.
‘When the Taliban first emerged we were very happy because they brought peace to the city. It had been very bad with different groups controlling different parts. Just in one small stretch of the main street there were five different checkpoints. Our women were frightened to go to market. Gul Agha was Governor but could not even move about the city. We thought with the Taliban at least the whole city was under one hand.
‘For a while it seemed better. Then we kept seeing Pakistani military. They brought in Chinese and Arabs and we did not know who was running things. Abdullah and I talked a lot and decided we would join the Taliban to see what was going on from the inside.’
The discovery of the faxes to the CIA in Abdullah’s car and his subsequent arrest meant that Abdullah had little choice. To prove his allegiance he volunteered for the front line, fighting the Northern Alliance, north of Kabul. ‘It was perfect,’ said Nazzak. ‘Being on the front-line and fighting bravely no one could suspect he might be working against the Taliban.’
Abdullah used his position to start collecting information and building a network of extremely trusted people. ‘Over time we amassed an enormous dossier of atrocities by the Taliban, but also crimes by the Northern Alliance.’ He showed me some photographs of Abdullah standing by a mass grave in a sandy desert near Mazar-i-Sharif where he said General Dostum’s men had massacred hundreds of people.
The following year, 1998, on his cousin’s advice, Nazzak also joined the Taliban. ‘I went to the Taliban and said I’m a fighter and you need fighters. I had my own car so I joined the patrol team going round the city looking for people doing actions they said were against Islam such as scissoring their beards or having long hair or listening to music as well as looking for those with membership cards showing they were supporters of Zahir Shah. All the time I was carrying my own card in my pocket.’
I asked him why he supported Zahir Shah as by the time he was born the king was living in comfortable exile in Rome. ‘I support the king because my relations tell me that there was peace and calm in his time and there were schools for girls and boys.’
Dusk was falling and Nazzak looked at his watch. ‘Excuse me, it is time to pray,’ he said. He splashed water on his hands and face from a jug in the corner, lay his patou on the ground, then prostrated himself on it as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
After a few minutes he got up and sat down next to me again, carrying on the conversation as if it had never stopped, telling me that his duties as a Taliban included stints in Kandahar jail. ‘In my whole life I have never slapped a man but I had to watch my own friends and my uncle being beaten. We used the clutch cables of motorcycles as whips.’
He made notes of who was carrying out the most gruesome tortures and added the information to Abdullah’s swelling files in the trunk under his bed. The more he had to do with the Taliban the more resentful he became of the Arabs in Kandahar, who by then numbered 3000–4000, and would roar around the city in Japanese Land Cruisers with black windows, Dubai number plates, and machine guns mounted on the roof. ‘The Arabs entered our city and acted as if they were rulers. Sometimes even when we were on patrol they would stop us and check our pockets.’
By 11 September 2001 they had about a hundred trusted people in their network and a hundred and twenty files but no idea what to do with the information. ‘We had all sorts of files both on the Taliban and Northern Alliance, usually between two to five pages long on incidents and people. Abdullah used to cry sometimes when he was writing the reports. They weren’t just about torture and killings, some were on Pakistanis that Abdullah had seen in Samangan who were pretending to be fighters but were actually digging in the mountains for minerals. We also had a video that Abdullah made, interviewing Rabbani pretending to be a journalist. It was all in a hidden compartment of a big black briefcase that we were going to try to get to Gul Agha or Zahir Shah.’
Gul Agha, who was in exile in Pakistan, had long been discussing military action against the Taliban with King Zahir Shah’s office in Rome but without outside help it seemed an almost impossible task, particularly as he had no great desire to work with the Northern Alliance. ‘The king had lobbyists in Washington and his grandson Mostapha Zahir had long been travelling around the West warning of what was happening to our country but no one cared,’ said Engineer Pashtun, advisor to Gul Agha.
Two planes flying into a building that neither Abdullah nor Nazzak had ever heard of changed everything. The Pentagon, desperately short of Pashto speakers and without a single agent of their own on the ground in Afghanistan at the time of the attack, found a ready-built resistance network in the Kandahar area. Abdullah had been working as assistant to the Governor of the northern province of Samangan but after September 11th, he knew the Americans would be searching for Osama so he told the Governor he was suffering from kidney disease and needed treatment, then returned home.
‘Gul Agha still had plenty of arms from the jihad and I knew where there was an arms cache and decided I was going to start killing Arabs for the black name they had given our country,’ said Nazzak. ‘Just one week after September 11th, I threw a grenade at three Arabs in the Kabul bazaar [in Kandahar] at the place where the buses and taxis leave for Kabul and killed them. There was a huge house and office where Osama bin Laden himself used to come and plan missions and one evening about 6 p.m. I drove past with a friend on a motorbike, stopped just in front and threw three grenades over the wall. We later heard three Arabs were killed and two injured. Another time I shot eight Arabs in a house in the New Town.
‘Then Gul Agha announced he was planning an operation and needed volunteers so we went to him in Quetta and he provided us with satellite phones and GPS positioning and laser devices and showed us how to use them so we could give coordinates to the Americans of where the Taliban and Arabs were living. It was about a week before the American bombing started. We were supposed to call in their movements and they gave us a special phone number for the US air force.
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‘Usually the places I pointed out were then bombed. It was incredible. For example I gave them the coordinates of the house north of the city where Mullah Omar was hiding and they bombed it and wounded him and killed his son. Then when he escaped in a rickshaw and fled to Sanghisar, his old village, I told them.’
Their English was limited so the cousins mostly passed their information to Gul Agha or Engineer Pashtun, a fluent English speaker. He would then speak to the Americans directly or to General Abdul Wali, the king’s son-in-law and military strategist in Rome. They were taking an enormous risk. The week the bombing started the Taliban issued an edict that anyone caught with a satellite phone would be hanged. When I later spoke to Engineer Pashtun about the operation he told me, ‘People like Abdullah and Nazzak were the real unsung heroes. They were volunteers who were risking their lives. One day we will erect a statue in Kandahar to Abdullah.’
The only member of Abdullah’s family apart from Nazzak who knew what he was doing was his sister. ‘I knew as soon as he came home with the briefcase and I tried to stop him,’ she told me, ‘but he said, “The Arabs have blackened the name of Afghanistan in the world and they will never leave unless someone sacrifices himself.’’ I told him to at least get his wife and children out to Pakistan and he planned to do so.’
Abdullah’s words were horribly prophetic. Suspecting the Taliban were on their trail, Abdullah and Nazzak stayed up night after night organising to take all their files to Quetta in the large briefcase. The day before they were due to leave, Abdullah was on his motorbike outside an Arab house, talking on his satellite phone, when a man came past on a bicycle. As Abdullah turned to go he was surrounded by Taliban, arrested and taken to the jail.
While he was being tortured and interrogated, four pick-ups of Taliban soldiers drove at high speed to the family compound and burst in. ‘They turned the place upside down and went through everything,’ said Bibi Zahra, ‘they even opened the Holy Korans looking for things. I knew then that they must have caught my brother.’
The Sewing Circles of Herat Page 24