The Sewing Circles of Herat

by Christina Lamb

  Amongst the things they found were the briefcase and Nazzak, who had been waiting for Abdullah so they could leave and did not have time to escape. ‘They tore off my turban and used it to tie my hands, then took me to their car and beat me with Kalashnikovs,’ he recalled. ‘Then they took me to jail and put me in a cell so dark that I could not even see my hands or fingers. I was arrested at 2 p.m. and beaten at 8 p.m. They used to have timetables for beating, always starting at 8 p.m. at night. That first night they beat me with cables and logs across my soles from 8 p.m. to 2.30 a.m. then poured acid on the wounds. They were trying to get information about who we were working with. That’s when I knew they also had Abdullah though I never saw him again. I couldn’t see him but I could hear his screams.’

  For two weeks the pair were beaten day after day. Nazzak got off lightly as many of the torturers were people he had worked with, though he insisted, ‘I really believed they would torture me to death.’ To him the most painful part was having the soles of his feet beaten with wet logs. ‘It is six weeks since they left and I have still not been able to wash my feet,’ he said, pulling off his socks to show me his scarred swollen feet. ‘As they beat us they would abuse us saying you are not Muslims, you are infidels, you are being supported by infidels and you will die an infidel’s death. I could hear the bombings every night and that gave me hope but I couldn’t believe the Taliban could be ended so quickly. I thought I would be killed first.

  ‘One evening there was a strange atmosphere in the jail and people started saying the Taliban were going to surrender and might kill us all. The next morning some of my friends came and bribed the prison superintendent Mullah Wali Jan with a car and one lakh rupees (£900) for my release. I was taken to a friend’s house and three or four hours later the Taliban collapsed.

  ‘I said to my friends let’s go and free Abdullah, but they said no you must rest, there’s lots of confusion in the city, it’s better to wait till tomorrow. The next morning I again insisted. By then it was clear the Taliban had surrendered and everyone was rejoicing. I was so happy and couldn’t understand why we didn’t just go and find him. Eventually in the afternoon my friends agreed. We got in the car. But instead of taking me to jail, they took me to a freshly dug grave. Abdullah had been hanged the day before I was released.’

  Abdullah was the last person to be executed by the Taliban.

  The last person to be executed by the Taliban, Abdullah’s body had hung over Herat Chowk from 4.30 a.m. in the morning to 6 p.m. in the evening. Doctors at the Chinese Hospital to which his friends took the body certified that he had been tortured to death before hanging.

  As we talked late into the evening, the depths of horror in Nazzak’s eyes made him seem much older than his twenty-two years. I asked him if he hoped that now the fighting had finished, his and Abdullah’s children would be able to grow up in peace. He shook his head. He might have been in charge of disarming the local population, but he was already teaching Abdullah’s son Rahmatullah to use a Kalashnikov. ‘Our family has sacrificed a lot,’ he said. ‘The son should be like the father and grandfather.’

  MARRI’S DIARY

  February 2002

  The university is reopening, there are entrance exams, my friends Farishta and Najeba went all dressed up in make-up and high heels under their burqas, they were very happy, but I could not go as I am the eldest and my family need me to work. They said it was hard to do the exams after years with no school but it was like a party seeing many friends after a long time. The university was in a bad state, the Taliban had taken all the books from the library and there were some anatomy textbooks displayed in a glass case which they had shot through with bullet-holes!

  Karzai has announced that schools will reopen on March 21st, new years day. We will get our jobs back. It will be so good to see the children in the streets maybe even with uniforms and books like it used to be.

  They say the king is coming back. I wonder how he will feel after so many years away to see his country all ruined. Where will he live? It must be very dangerous. The Northern Alliance make clear every day they don’t want him.

  Outside the city in Gardez and Paktia in the south and in Mazar and the north there is still fighting between warlords. Father says it is easier for ten poor men to sleep on one rug than two kings to share one clime.

  My brother saw a man selling trees today in the road and people were buying them which is a good sign. Soon it will be spring, there will be cherry blossoms, maybe we will hang up our burqas for good and even start to love again.

  1 The Pakistan youth football team that went to play in Kandahar in summer 2000 were dragged off the pitch by religious police and had their heads shaved for not wearing long trousers.

  9

  Face to Face with the Taliban

  ‘The Game is so large that one sees but a little at a time.’

  Mahbub Ali’s advice to Kim, in Kim, Chp. 10,

  RUDYARD KIPLING

  THE PHONE-CALL CAME EARLY in the morning. I was back in Quetta and luxuriating in the feel of crisp white sheets on a proper bed, and a heated room. ‘The carpet has arrived,’ said a voice. ‘It’s a very valuable one and we can’t keep it here long for security reasons.’

  For more than five months since the attack on the World Trade Center, I had been in Pakistan and Afghanistan talking to people about the Taliban regime and meeting one after another of their victims. This mysterious phone-call meant I would soon be coming face to face with some of the regime’s key members in their hiding places in Pakistan.

  Four hours later, after more phone-calls informing my go-between that the carpet had ‘changed shop’, and a complicated journey round town which involved switching cars so that my friend ended up driving a taxi, bargaining for an Azerbaijani kilim I didn’t want, visiting an aid project I wasn’t interested in and hurtling round a labyrinth of mud-walled lanes, scattering underfed donkeys and bicycling Afghans, we finally seemed to have lost the two Pakistani agents on motorbikes who had been tailing us in the usual conspicuous way of the ISI.

  Down a rubbish-strewn alley, I entered a house through the purdah quarters. To provide me with the cover that I had been interviewing women, I sat for a while impatiently drinking tea, admiring babies and toddlers with runny noses and silver bells round their ankles.

  Finally a bearded old man in a swan-white turban summoned me through the curtain into a room where the two Taliban ministers were sitting on floor cushions along with our go-between. For a moment I was confused.

  With their beards trimmed short they looked surprisingly young. I knew the Taliban leadership were mostly in their thirties, but somehow I realised that over the months I had built up a picture of them as less youthful and more demonic.

  One of the two men, Maulana Abdullah Sahadi, the Deputy Defence Minister, was only twenty-eight and looked vulnerable and slightly scared, greeting me with a wonky Johnny Depp-like smile. It was the first time he had ventured out of his hiding place since escaping Afghanistan after the fall of Kandahar two months earlier.

  The other minister, a burly man in his mid-thirties who agreed to meet only on condition of anonymity and was responsible for some of the acts that had most horrified the Western world, looked defiant. It seemed fitting that we should be meeting in Pakistan’s western province of Baluchistan, a vast smugglers’ land of desert and mountains, much of which is governed by tribal law, where women are kept locked away and federal government officials fear to tread.

  ‘We shaved off our beards, changed our turbans from white Taliban to Kandahari, got in cars and drove on the road across the border,’ said Maulana Sahadi, adding, before my beard was as long as this.’ He gestured down to his chest. His family – three daughters of seven, three and two and a son of five – he had already moved to Quetta when the bombing started.

  The Pakistani authorities turned a blind eye and in some cases even helped. While US Special Forces based at Kandahar airbase were going on daily operations scou
ring the mountains north of the city for al Qaeda and Taliban, it was an open secret that just across the border senior Taliban ministers were sheltering in madrassas and houses. Among them were Mullah Nuruddin Turabi, the Justice Minister, Abdul Razzak, the Interior Minister, Qadratullah Jamal, the Culture Minister, and the spokesman for Mullah Omar.

  The two men had agreed to meet me because of my past connection with the Mullahs Front (many of whom had later become Taliban) and the trust they had in my friend, a doctor and long-time financial supporter of the jihad, who acted as our go-between.

  ‘You see we don’t have two horns,’ smiled one of the ministers, as he poured me tea from a brass pot and offered me boiled sweets in place of sugar. ‘At the moment anyone can say anything about us and the world will believe it. People have been saying we skinned their husbands alive and ate babies and you people print it.’

  We started off talking about how they had joined the Taliban. Maulana Sahadi’s story was typical. His family moved from a village near Kandahar to a refugee camp in Quetta when he was just five after his father, a mujahid with Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami, was killed fighting the Russians and the village bombed into ruins. The family was very poor; living in a tent, which let in all the cold in winter, and in summer became unbearably hot as the burning desert sun was reflected off the rocks and mountains. They survived largely on bread begged or bought with the few rupees earnt from his mother and sisters sewing carpets. His family were delighted when he got a place at a madrassa in Nowshera in Frontier Province at the age of eight as his food, board and books were all provided. After that he saw his mother only once every other year; it was too far and expensive to travel back in the holidays. At some point he learnt to use a Kalashnikov though he would not say when or where, claiming ‘a gun is such a thing one day you use it, the next day you master it’.

  In mid-1994 a delegation of elders and ulema or religious scholars from Pakistan came to the madrassa. ‘They told us we must join the Taliban and fight jihad. Our fathers had all been in jihad and we had worshipped them, then seen it go wrong, people becoming warlords and raping and killing but they said this time it would be different, that the others had lost their way and been corrupted by all the Western things they had seen here in Pakistan. This time we would be really fighting for Islam. I joined with a group of friends from the madrassa so we were there right at the very beginning in the first attack on Spin Boldak [a town just over the Afghan border on the way to Kandahar] that October. At that time we were only about a hundred people.

  ‘We were killing men and many of our companions were martyred, but that is part of fighting and we were happy because we were doing it for Islam. We were the soldiers of God. We captured Boldak easily then we moved on to Kandahar where the people were pleased to see us and laid down their arms.’

  I asked if he had thought at the beginning they were fighting in order to restore Zahir Shah to the throne and he looked astonished. ‘We were never fighting for Zahir Shah. What did he do in the jihad? We were fighting for the ulema who supported Mullah Omar as Amir.’

  For the next few years Sahadi went on to fight in battles all over Afghanistan including Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz and Bamiyan, commanding a force of five hundred then, two thousand five hundred people, then becoming Director of Defence as by 1997 the Taliban had captured ninety percent of the country. ‘I would motivate my troops before fighting by telling them if they were martyred they would go to Paradise and could take with them seventy-two of their family members. I also told them they could take a bride in battle.’

  He got on well with Mullah Omar, whom he described as ‘a very nice good-natured person with good morals. He treated me like a son. Whoever came to him he treated with respect.’

  In 1999 he became deputy Defence Minister under Mullah Obaidullah who was the main linkman between the Taliban and the ISI and as such said he had frequent personal contact with Osama bin Laden, though he insisted, ‘The Arabs were not controlling things. Anyone who supports Islam was welcome in our country; we had British, Americans, Australians.’

  According to Sahadi, bin Laden had still been in Afghanistan when the Taliban fell and the two of them had laughed at the failure of the Americans to catch him. ‘I spoke to him on the telephone the day we surrendered Kandahar and he was in Paktia and he was fine. I briefed him and he wished me Godspeed. I suppose he was going to Pakistan. Now we think he is in Saudi or Yemen.

  ‘The last time I actually met him was in November during the bombing in Herat. We met there to talk about finances; he was helping us buy cars. He may have been thinking about going to Iran at that time.

  ‘He seemed well. A couple of years ago he had some health problems linked to his kidneys but he seemed better. The Americans were bombing the military installations around Herat while we had lunch in the Mowafaq Hotel and we were laughing that if only they knew he was just a few miles away. He was taking anti-anxiety pills, some kind of sedatives, but he was not hiding.’

  Although Sahadi admitted he personally had to keep changing houses in Kandahar to avoid being bombed and had lost several of his close friends, he said the Taliban never contemplated handing over bin Laden to save themselves. ‘He was a guest in our country and we gave him refuge because hospitality is an important part of our code of behaviour. Besides he was supporting us, giving us money, when no one else was.

  ‘The Taliban leadership do not believe the Twin Towers attack was carried out by al Qaeda,’ he continued. ‘According to my own opinion the attack was wrong. It is not Islamic to kill innocent people like that. We investigated the attack and it was evident it was not done by al Qaeda.’

  How did they explain the videos in which bin Laden talked of the attack? ‘We do not believe those videos, they were fake,’ he replied, ‘it’s easy to make such films.’

  Having listened silently up till then, the other minister interjected. ‘What this war really is about is a clash between Islam and infidels. America wants to implement its own kafir religion in Afghanistan. We are the real defenders of Islam, not people like Gul Agha and Hamid Karzai. They are puppets of America.’

  ‘We’re not broken, we’re whole,’ insisted Sahadi. ‘We weren’t defeated, we agreed to hand over rather than fight and spill blood. Our people went back to their tribes or left the country. Now we are just waiting. Already the fighting for power has begun in Gardez, Mazar, and different provinces. The Presidential Palace is being guarded by foreign troops. We are regrouping, we still have arms and many supporters inside, and when the time is right we will be back.’

  ‘Thank God this war happened because now we really know who are with us and who are against us,’ added the other minister. ‘Hamid Karzai went to the other camp, once he pretended he was with us but now we see he just wanted power. They will all be brought before justice and punished according to Islamic law.’

  What kind of punishment would that be, I asked. ‘They will be killed, executed, hanged,’ he said, before correcting himself, ‘they will be punished according to Islamic law.’

  Tucked inside my notebook was the photograph I had been given in Kandahar by the family of Abdullah, the medieval scene of his body hanging on a wooden frame over the busy crossroads of Herat bazaar, and I asked how they could possibly justify such acts.

  ‘These so-called atrocities were carried out by Communists who infiltrated us and committed these cruelties under our turbans to deface the name of Taliban,’ said Sahadi.

  But I had seen for myself the bare shelves of Herat library after Taliban had taken away the books and burnt them, the ripped-out figures in the oil paintings of the Presidential Palace, and the empty plinths in Kabul Museum after the Culture Minister himself had led a group of Taliban to take axes to all the ancient statues and prehistoric pots. And what about the giant Buddhas of Baniyan?

  ‘Photographs and images are against Islam so we had to destroy them and any books with these in,’ said the minister. ‘The Buddhas were destroyed because they
were against our faith and that’s what our court decreed. Like the things in the museum it was not our history but the history of unbelievers and should be wiped out.’

  Why did they close girls’ schools? They gave the same answer as Maulana Sami-ul Haq had defending Haqqania. ‘We were not against girls’ education. My own daughters go to school here in Pakistan. The condition of Afghanistan was so bad we could not properly educate boys so how could we educate girls?’

  I wondered what they thought of me. ‘Women should be completely covered. If you were my wife I would lock you away.’ There was no humour in his statement.

  I asked why the Taliban regime issued so many edicts such as banning kite-flying and seemed determined to deprive its people of any pleasure. ‘Kite-flying was banned for peoples’ own protection,’ he claimed. ‘So many children fell off roofs. Chess was banned because it encourages gambling and is not useful. There were so many other things to do. People could read Koranic texts and walk in parks and appreciate nature. And we did not ban football or cricket as long as players were properly clothed and bearded.

  ‘The world now is so interested in Afghanistan but why did they forget us before? All you did is apply sanctions, which deprived our people even more. The West gave us no option but to accept what Osama was offering us as they gave us nothing.’

  I wanted to go on asking questions but the men were looking uncomfortable. We had been talking too long already and the old man in the white turban who turned out to be a pir, or holy man, said we might well be traced.

  ‘By whom? Surely the ISI are your friends?’

  ‘At the moment we have no contact with them,’ said Sahadi. ‘ISI is working with the Americans. Pakistan has betrayed itself. How can it call itself an Islamic country?’

  I asked him if he had seen the pictures of Camp X-ray in Guantanamo Bay where America was taking its Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners and feared ending up in one of the cages undergoing interrogation, but he insisted he was not worried.