by Fariba Nawa
Herat’s history is wrought with peaks and valleys of war and conquest, of progress and destruction. Various eras have labeled Herat the cradle of art and culture and the pearl of the region. Prominent Sufi poets Khwaja Abdullah Ansari and Nuruddin Jami and medieval miniaturist Behzad all flourished in Herat. Two periods define extreme eras for the city: In the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan held the city under siege after his son was murdered by native rebels. The Mongol leader killed thousands, leaving only forty people alive. Nearly two centuries later, during the Turkic Timurid dynasty, Herat served as the capital of the Turkic Mongol empire and thrived with advancements in art and education. Under the leadership of Queen Gowhar Shad—who ruled for ten years but whose influence spanned generations—magnificent architecture was built that still stands today. The Muslim queen of Sheba, as Gowhar Shad is widely known, also focused her attention on scholarship and diplomacy.
This glorious past was forgotten when bombs rained on the city during the Soviet invasion and wealthy, educated residents began to flee in the thousands. The American-funded mujahideen rebels fought ferocious battles against a ruling Communist government aided by Soviet troops and airpower. The battles occurred a mile from our Behzad Road home, in neighborhoods such as Baraman, Houza Karbas, and Shahzadaha. Of the seven mujahideen factions, Jamiat-e-Islami fought in Herat under the leadership of Ismail Khan, an educated soldier and warrior. Khan was ally to the head of Jamiat, Ahmad Shah Massoud, who became famous in the United States after the Taliban employed two Arab suicide bombers to kill him two days before September 11. The United States gave weapons to the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI, to hand over to the mujahideen, who numbered roughly 200,000. The mujahideen had guns, rockets, and Stinger missiles, but also knowledge of the terrain and, most important, local support. The Afghan Communist government had a shrinking army—Afghan soldiers deserted or defected to the mujahideen—but was reinforced by about 120,000 Soviet troops and Soviet helicopters, planes, tanks, missiles, and mines. The rebels attacked from behind hills, shrines, and even some houses; the Soviets sometimes carpet-bombed in response.
A normal day at our home included the rumble of gunshots and rockets. We ignored the sounds and carried on with life. My sister played volleyball with relatives, I played hopscotch, and my father took his daily walks around the property after coming home from his job as an administrative director at the National Fertilizer Company, an American-funded, Afghan government−owned project that offered chemical fertilizer to farmers. On some days, however, the shots and explosions barely missed members of my family.
One spring day, when I was eight years old, Bibi Assia was extracting rosewater from the pink roses that bloomed on our property when a stray bullet passed just above her four-foot-nine inches of height. (It was hard to place the origin of the bullets because there were always so many of them.) The bullet struck the brick wall of our house and burned a hole in it. After the incident, Bibi Assia hid in a room for a month, coming out only when necessary. And our family developed a morbid sense of humor.
“Assia Jan’s height saved her life. Who said being short is a bad thing?” my father joked. That winter, he nearly met his own bullet. One day my mother (Madar), my sister, and I were playing cards around the korsi—a table warmed by a makeshift heater, with a charcoal barbecue lit up underneath it—with a big blanket covering our bodies, when a bullet fractured the window of our living room. The golden bullet rushed over our heads, ricocheted off a wall, and fell to the floor, just missing my father’s hand—he had been pacing the room, as he often did out of habit. We all thought the Communist government soldiers or the mujahideen were raiding our house, but when my father ventured outside to investigate, he found there had been only the lone bullet.
One attack that still disturbs my dreams occurred at my school, Lycée Mehri, a year later, in July 1982, when I was nine years old. In provinces with heavy snowfall, such as Herat, schools are open in the summer and closed for the winter. Girls from kindergarten up through the twelfth grade attended my school, which was on an unpaved block about two football fields from our home. The day of the attack, Madar let me play hooky, and she and I went to take our weekly bath at the public bathhouse, a few miles from our neighborhood, while Faiza, who was in the tenth grade, went to school.
The bathhouse was a place to strip down, relax, and gossip, though the talk often turned to the war. One of the women there that day, with gold bangles and stringy hair, told my mom that her husband had heard that the mujahideen planned to attack Lycée Mehri because girls were being taught Communist propaganda there. “Haven’t you noticed how there are fewer cars and horse wagons on the road?” the woman said. “People are staying home because they are afraid of a big attack right here in town.”
These rumors were too common to take seriously. Madar shrugged off the news and asked the woman why she had come out if she was so worried about an attack. Later, when we left the warmth of the bathhouse, a cool summer wind hit our faces and we noticed that the streets were empty and the shops that were usually bustling with customers were closed. We walked halfway home because we couldn’t find a taxi, wagon, or bus any sooner, and then we finally hailed a horse wagon.
Madar seemed worried when we reached our house. “I hope that woman at the bathhouse was wrong about the school being attacked.” I remained quiet and set about ironing my favorite fuchsia chiffon dress, which my mom had made for me. I brushed off my mother’s concern and wondered what I was missing at school.
Just then, there was a boom, a much bigger and closer one than usual. Madar and I looked at each other.
“Faiza!” she screamed. She was wearing a colorful dress, without a burqa, so she grabbed a flower-printed sheet, wrapped it around her thin body, and ran out of the house. I left my dress half ironed and dashed out barefoot. It was the first time I’d seen my mother run on Herat’s streets without her burqa and with her small feet in only house slippers. Her face was paler than usual, and her tiny hands were curled in fists. I struggled to keep up with her; I’ve never run faster.
At the gate of Lycée Mehri, an ambulance overflowed with injured students. The ground was deep red, and people were running in and out of the school grounds. I saw Maha—a classmate I often played hide and seek with—carried out by a man in a white coat; her arm was missing and she was bleeding from one eye. I recognized Jaber—the son of a teacher and the only boy in the school—from his clothes; his head had been blown off. But where was my sister? Faiza was skinny and petite, with platinum blond hair that she had to dye black, lest people mistake her for a Russian.
My mother and I frantically searched amid the debris and the dust, shouting Faiza’s name. I found some of her classmates huddled in a corner outside. “She’s okay, but she thinks you were also in school,” Sadia, one of her friends, told me. “She went looking for you. They dropped the bomb over the elementary section.”
Nearly three decades later, Faiza told me what she remembered of the attack:
“It was recess time in the morning for the elementary section, and we were in class. When the rocket hit, there was a huge noise, followed by darkness everywhere for a few minutes. We could tell that we were hit. Nobody could see anything. And all my classmates were screaming. Dust was all over the place. We were thinking we might get attacked again. People got hurt rushing out in a mob. My dress was full of blood and I didn’t know whose it was.
“As soon as I got out of the building, I heard that the elementary school building was hit, and so I ran there looking for you, but the area was cordoned off. The stairway outside the buildings, even the ground and the walls, had blood on them. I saw people, injured hands and legs bleeding, you could see the fear in their eyes. All this occurred in ten minutes at the most.”
Faiza was looking for me, and I was running to find her. I sprinted toward the elementary school building, which was fifty meters from the high school building, but before I got there, I heard her screaming my name. Suddenly the thre
e of us—Madar, Faiza, and I—were embracing.
The violence I witnessed at my school defined the path I have taken in my adult life—the road to war. I became a foreign correspondent so I could keep going back to war zones, witnessing gory scenes again and again, to understand the extremism in humanity, something that both revolts and fascinates me. War can become an addiction for its victims because it provides them meaning at the same time that it strips them of decency.
The rocket at Lycée Mehri killed Jaber, his mother’s only child, and injured dozens of others. The attack shook the neighborhood, and afterward some parents forbade their daughters to attend classes. The school closed for a few months, and my parents started to discuss fleeing the country.
“It’s too dangerous. There are bullets flying everywhere, and our daughters are in danger,” my mother told my father as we ate dinner one evening.
He didn’t argue. “With the school closed, there’s no education. I don’t want illiterate children. I’m working on it. Give me some time.”
My father sold his share of our property, dug a ditch in the ground near our house to hide $3,500 cash, and set about preparing travel documents for our family’s escape.
Two months after the bombing of Lycée Mehri, in September 1982, my father, mother, sister, and I secretly crossed the desert to Iran, then journeyed to Pakistan, where we joined the millions of other Afghan refugees. We did not take any of our family photos or other memorabilia, for fear that, if confiscated as we were fleeing, they would implicate the family members who’d stayed behind. Agha (Father) had no political affiliations, but we had friends and relatives involved on both sides of the war.
Mr. Jawan, our opium smuggler neighbor, was a mujahideen sympathizer. Before we left, he contacted his tribe, who were fighting the Communists on the border of Iran and Afghanistan, and told the men there that we were going to escape to Iran. His oldest son, Shafiq, escorted us to the border. A few of our relatives, mostly uncles, were Communists working for the government and they did not approve of our departure. They knew we would go to a capitalist country and be considered enemies of the Soviet Union.
By the time of my visit in 2000, the Soviet troops were long gone, having withdrawn in 1989, and the seven groups of the mujahideen government that replaced the Communist regime in 1992 had turned on one another and reduced Kabul to rubble. The rest of the country also fell to the mujahideen strongmen—many of whom Afghan civilians began referring to as warlords, because they extorted money and seized land from the poor. A few mujahideen commanders, such as Ismail Khan in Herat, focused on rebuilding their cities, but they were in the minority. Isolated for decades at war, many of the mujahideen commanders turned to pedophilia for sexual fulfillment and fought over young civilian boys in their communities.
In 1994 a group of young Pashtun men trained in Islamic seminaries on the borders of Pakistan paraded into Kandahar and defeated the mujahideen commanders. Some of them were former mujahideen themselves, or sons of the mujahideen. They referred to themselves as Taliban, which in Arabic means “students.” The Taliban bribed their way to Kabul and Herat and fought hard to seize central and northern Afghanistan. In response, the mujahideen reunited under Ahmad Shah Massoud, but they now controlled only 10 percent of the country, in the northeast.
Beginning in the early 1990s, the Taliban, aided by drug traffickers, the Pakistani government, and rich Gulf Arabs such as Osama bin Laden, ruled the country under a mysterious one-eyed leader, Mullah Omar. In the mid-1990s, Afghanistan was facing a severe drought, and the threat of starvation. From 1994, when they seized Kandahar, until 1999, the year with the highest opium output under their control, the Taliban gave carte blanche to the drug business, permitting processing labs to refine opium into heroin, thereby allowing poppy cultivation and trafficking to flourish. The four thousand tons of opium produced in 1999 flooded the illicit narcotics market worldwide, and demand for the drug dropped.
This was bad news for the Taliban, who had up until this time survived primarily on taxing opium farmers. The Taliban were fighting to gain international legitimacy, though only Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan accepted them as the official government of Afghanistan. (Other countries, including the United States, still recognized Ahmad Shah Massoud and the mujahideen.) In July 2000 the Taliban banned poppy cultivation. The ban was a response to the market and a bid to create more demand, yet the Taliban claimed it was for moral reasons—a political move to gain international recognition that failed: the Afghan farmers who had formerly farmed poppies now faced severe hardships and could not afford to pay their debts to lenders. Even after the ban, the Taliban continued to take a cut from opium and heroin traffickers.
The Taliban also focused their attention on enforcing a new code of law that was horrifying to educated Afghans. In the name of religion, they forbade women from going to school or working in most fields, and they forced men to pray. (Until the 2000 opium ban, one of the few jobs women could still perform was to work on poppy farms.) They also closed public bathhouses, outlawed kite flying, and forced men to grow long, scraggly beards. The Taliban government performed public executions of accused adulterers, homosexuals, and killers. Thieves’ hands were severed, as in Saudi Arabia.
This is the Afghanistan I am about to enter in a taxi with Mobin as my mahram.
In pitch dark we pass through Herat’s city gates. My heart is throbbing. Designed like wedding cakes, shiny four-story concrete houses with tinted windows tower over white-painted walls. Downtown is lit up with neon-colored lights. Men ride their bicycles on the unpaved roads. It is ten PM, and there is not a woman in sight.
The taxi stops in front of Mobin’s house, and he hurries to inform his family that they have a guest. I stay behind and kiss the ground, hoping no one on the street will see me. It is a private moment I imagined throughout my years in exile. Jalaluddin Rumi, the thirteenth-century Farsi poet who was born in what today is Afghanistan, expresses the emotions I feel at that moment in the poem “Call of Love”:
At every instant and from every side, resounds the call of Love:
We are going to the sky, who wants to come with us?
We have gone to heaven, we have been the friends of the angels,
And now we will go back there, for there is our country . . .
I look up at the unpolluted sky. The night breeze blows dust in my eyes, but I can still see the constellations, the Big Dipper, shooting stars, and the moon. The sky looks the same as it did when I was seven and slept on the roof next to my mother on summer’s hottest nights. We were alone on the roof. I used to count the stars while she slept peacefully. Few people dare to sleep on their roofs anymore. The bombs and bullets flying through the night sky have driven them inside.
Bibi Assia, who still lives on the same property we once did with my ailing grandfather, is my closest relative in Herat. My mother has many extended relatives here, including her stepuncle Ahmed and her cousin Sattar Agha.
I spend my first night in Herat with Mobin and his wife, Farida, a young woman with full lips and sharp cheekbones, who is hospitable but visibly uncomfortable that I am traveling with her husband. She is not bothered by my surprise appearance. People visit without warning in Afghanistan; calling ahead suggests that the guest wants to stay for a meal and is therefore considered rude. The couple leave me alone in a rectangular room whose floor is covered by a red silk carpet and red spongy mats. Carpeted cushions are arranged against all four walls. The room’s twenty-seven-inch television set is covered by embroidered pink fabric. Farida has left me a large, round tray bearing a plate of steaming rice, lamb stew, and potatoes, and a can of orange soda. I hear Mobin explain to her in the next room that I am here to work and will stay with my relatives for a week. But he has to take me back to Pakistan, because he promised Kamran that he would protect me from the Taliban.
“Why did you make such a promise?” Farida asks. “Don’t you have enough danger traveling by yourself?”
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“I stay with Kamran every time I’m in Iran. I couldn’t say no. She’s a nice girl who only has her mind on her work. Don’t be scared. I have no interest in her,” he reassures her in the same tone with which he told me not to fear the Taliban.
I savor the tender lamb and tangy potatoes, wondering if I should go to Uncle Ahmed’s house right away so that Farida will sleep easier. But it is too late; once the sun has set, women are allowed out of the house only in the case of an emergency, to go to the hospital.
My mother’s uncle Ahmed knows I’m coming to Herat, because Kamran called him from Iran to inform him.
“Is she coming to work as a reporter?” Uncle Ahmed asked him.
“No, she just wants to see her birthplace again. Relax. She will not get you in trouble,” Kamran told him.
My first morning in Herat, I take out the blue burqa Kamran’s wife, Abida, lent me in Iran and place its round hat on my head. The Taliban force women to wear the burqa in public or risk a beating. What if I fall and the covering drops? I am carrying underneath it a handbag filled with illicit equipment: a camera, a notebook and pen, a U.S. passport, and a few hundred dollars.
Mobin drives me to Uncle Ahmed’s house, where his two wives, five daughters, and only son come out to greet me. I kiss Uncle Ahmed’s hand and kiss his wives three times on the cheek, as is customary. The entire family is grinning.
“We’re so glad you’re here. How are your mother, father, brother, and sister? How come you came alone?” Uncle Ahmed’s older wife, Aunt Maria, asks.
The five daughters each take turns kissing my cheeks and squeezing me tightly. “Kheily khosh amadid [welcome, we’re so happy to see you],” the eldest daughter, Sadaf, says.
Uncle Ahmed lives on a small property on Telecom Road that includes a house with two bedrooms, a basement, and an indoor bathroom. There is a separate quarter for his older wife, Aunt Maria, who lives by herself. Across the street from his property is my grandfather Haji Baba’s orchard. Uncle Ahmed owns a bus service, transporting Afghan passengers to and from Iran. His second wife, Aunt Zulaikha, is a schoolteacher who teaches young girls clandestinely in their house. The family is fairly well off; they eat and wear what they want. Their only son, Bahram, is a capricious fifteen-year-old who bosses his older sisters around. He goes to school but says he does not learn anything in the classroom. He studies English and science in the increasing number of private courses offered to boys his age in Herat.