We reached a remote farmhouse, still in Pakistan, and a woman in her forties opened the door and welcomed us into a huge courtyard, which was overlooked by a farmhouse. The men went off somewhere and the woman showed me into a small bedroom with a stone floor, and motioned me to lie down and go to sleep.
I had a snooze again but I shot up with panic and fear after feeling something stab my fingers. A small chicken had wandered in from the farmyard and was pecking at me. I’m not sure whether it thought my fingers were tasty morsels or whether it was trying to wake me to get it some food.
The woman entered again and smiled kindly towards me. She pointed to a traditional Afghan dress lying on a sofa and a blue, silk burka. I got changed. And I couldn’t believe the change in attitude towards me by the men, even Pasha.
They were pretty dismissive of me and I suddenly went from being a Western woman in charge of a project to someone who had no significance at all. I told Pasha we needed to sit down and discuss the plan again now that we seemed to have extra people on board, but he just told me to get in the car.
We took the road through the Khyber Pass and once again I passed the sign warning that no foreigners were allowed beyond this point. The last time, I had had the authority of the political agent – this time I had none. I didn’t even have my passport with me.
By this time we had two cars and we stopped to pick up a woman and two children and her husband. None of them could speak English, so I didn’t know what was going on. I had already become invisible and insignificant. The cars stopped and the men went off to a roadside café, leaving me, the woman and her two young children in the back seat.
The windows were shut and I could hardly see anything through the thick lace grille of the burka, which was beginning to feel like a pressure cooker. My head was raging and I could feel sweat trickling down from my head and on to my back.
If I had been a dog in England someone would either have called the RSPCA or bricked the window. I was cursing and swearing under my breath. For half an hour we were left to bake in that bloody car. I was almost hyperventilating. What I wanted to do was leap out and go over to the men and ask what the hell was going on but that certainly would have blown my cover. Then I remembered one of the flaming Taliban rules about not raising your voice.
Just then, the men returned and we set off again. I said loudly to Pasha through gritted teeth, ‘Why have we got half the members of the Von Trapp family travelling with us? What the hell is going on?’
He asked me what I was talking about and I hissed, ‘Von Trapp, the Swiss Family Robinson, the Waltons, whatever you like. What happened to “let’s keep things simple”?’
He just said, ‘Don’t worry, madam. You are now part of a wedding party going into Afghanistan. It will work much better.’
Before I could add much more, we had stopped and for some reason we had changed drivers. We drove past the spot where I had nearly shot half a dozen members of the Khyber Rifles and in less than ten minutes we were at the Torkham border.
We got out of the car and I lifted my burka to a cowl shape and said to Pasha, ‘I don’t like this. This is not what we planned—’ But I was stopped in my tracks by his sharp words: ‘Shut up. Cover your face – there’s a Talib coming.’
I almost froze with fear and did as I was told. Then the woman gave me one of her children to carry and she gently but firmly guided me towards the border. Shit, shit, shit! I was petrified. As I walked towards a Taliban checkpoint with the two men, the woman and the children a man began shouting at me in Pashtun.
I haven’t even got into Afghanistan, I thought, and they’ve sussed me already. I gently turned around and it was a medical checkpoint, where children were being given some sort of UN vaccine before entering the country. Maybe it was for smallpox or something.
Thankfully, the woman took the lead and she went with her child, and so I followed. The doctor said something to me and I vaguely nodded as he put a couple of drops of the vaccine into the child’s mouth. We then walked back to the men and began to cross the border. I had passed my first test with flying colours but I was still terrified.
So our story had changed. Muskeen was not with me: instead I was still a deaf mute called Shameem, but now I was off to a wedding. Bloody ridiculous, I thought, but what could I do? I couldn’t bail out at this point because the Taliban border soldiers, who were armed with semiautomatics and Kalashnikovs, would probably flog me or worse.
So there I was, Yvonne Ridley, walking across an invisible line between two countries filled with a sense of dread and with tons of adrenaline pumping through my system. I really wanted to shout out and try to run back towards Pasha but, dressed as an Afghan woman, I was trapped in a world of silence and opening my mouth would cost me my life.
The area was bustling with lots of fruit stalls interspersed with lockups that sold motor oils and second-hand car accessories. A line of yellow and white cabs waited for new passengers and ragged children were offering all sorts of services from shoeshine to car cleaning to help fill their hungry bellies.
There were a few refugees but there appeared to be more people arriving that day than leaving, and they were nearly all strong, determined young men who strode purposefully into Torkham wanting to fight for the Taliban. I wondered where they had come from and whether there were any European Muslim volunteers among them who were answering the Taliban call for jihad, or holy war.
I walked obediently behind my two guides, but it was so difficult walking in the burka. My vision was blurred and I couldn’t see anything in front of me. I was scared that I would trip up or do something out of character and be caught.
The little girl squeezed my hand and once again I thought about the children. I didn’t need or want the responsibility of having to watch out for the woman and her two children. The stakes were now much higher and I was angry that I had been compromised like this. I couldn’t understand why Muskeen had bottled out because he seemed so keen and enthusiastic about the idea.
He had come up with my name and the plan to go into Afghanistan as a couple. He had even suggested we take along his 11-year-old daughter but I had rejected the idea. I didn’t want that responsibility and now here I was with two kids and their mother.
The guides negotiated a deal and we all climbed into the taxi to head for Jalalabad. The road, for want of a better description, was potholed and without tarmac and, sitting in the back, we were constantly thrown around. My head kept banging off a handle above the window and it really hurt.
The taxi driver moaned about something and stopped his car. He looked at the rear wheel and shouted, and the two men also jumped out. One of the rear tyres was punctured and so they set about fixing it. Ten minutes later, we were on the road again and I was impressed at how quickly they had changed the wheel. Suddenly, there was a loud bang and the car swerved on the dirt-track road, which was littered with rubble. We had another puncture. How unlucky is that?
As they changed the wheel I wondered just how many spares the driver was carrying. I was certainly impressed with the fact that he was able to deal with two punctures without too much hassle. Still, two punctures in five minutes did not bode well. Maybe it was Fate trying to intervene in my journey.
The dramatic backdrop of the Hindu Kush mountains gave way to flat planes, stretching out before us, where spindly-looking corn and sugar-cane crops grew.
There was no sign of the Scud missile launchers that were supposed to be positioned towards Pakistan. In fact there was no sign of any military activity, which seemed strange for a country that was about to come under attack from one of the most sophisticated war machines in the world. I saw one MLRS (or multilaunch rocket system) just after we had left the border.
As the taxi jumped, lurched and trundled over the 50-kilometre (31-mile) journey to Jalalabad, I began to feel more relaxed and I began to nod off. I felt really exhausted, possibly because of all the tension and adrenaline. I awoke very suddenly on the outskirts of Jalalabad
after banging my head on the handgrip. I panicked for half a second, thinking the knock had damaged my vision, and then I remembered I was wearing the burka.
Ninety minutes earlier my heart had been pounding as I walked across the border and past Taliban soldiers. I had that same feeling again as we arrived in Jalalabad, because every other man seemed to be a Talib and they were all armed and looked very dangerous.
Life looked strangely normal in the bustling town. We stepped out of the taxi and I followed the woman to one corner of the market. She glided gracefully down and balanced herself on the back of her heels while Jan tapped me on the shoulder and hissed, ‘Sit!’ Ignoring all my Western instincts to snap back, I obeyed the order, but, instead of gliding like my female companion, I went butt first and hit the ground like a sack of potatoes.
Thankfully, this ungainly performance did not attract any attention at all and I thought to myself: What do you have to do to get noticed around here? I was gaining in confidence by the minute because I truly was invisible. From my lowly position I began to observe market life.
There was stall after stall of pomegranates, fat apples and other ripe fruit. I’m not a big fruit eater, much to the annoyance of Mum, but it all looked very good. I bet there’s no GM food here and I bet it’s all organically grown, I thought to myself. I bet Mullah Omar would ban GM food and anyone caught selling or eating it would be stoned! I wanted to giggle but then I remembered where I was and how so much as a snigger could cost me my life.
My calf muscles were beginning to ache and I felt wobbly. I looked around at my female companion and she looked completely composed and motionless. I should have joined Pilates classes – you know, that form of exercise that improves flexibility – with my friend Daphne Romney. Daffers, as she is known by her close friends, is a top employment and libel lawyer in London who pays for regular punishing workouts at the hands of man I only know as ‘Mike the trainer’.
I get exhausted just listening to what she’s done. I’ve tried the keep-fit lark before but I get so bored with all that repetitive exercise and treadmills that take you nowhere. Anyway, I bet Daffers could hang round Jalalabad market all day squatting on her heels. I was thankful when I saw my two guides approaching with various bits of produce and rice they had bought.
They then walked straight past, completely ignoring me. There wasn’t a bloody thing I could do but just continue to squat and keep my mouth shut. I followed them in the direction of a meat stall, which was swarming with flies. There was only one joint – it looked like lamb – hanging from a wooden frame. I could barely see through the flaming burka to see what was on the counter, but it looked like minced meat of some sort.
I noticed there were very few women around, but those who dared go out wore burkas. Men lounged around sipping coffee and heavily sugared green tea at one corner of the market while others sipped Coke. The majority chewed a green tobacco-like substance which was spat out indiscriminately at regular intervals accompanied by disgusting throaty sounds.
I think it was a product from the plant khat, which has some sort of hallucinatory effect. I remember because we did a story when I worked for Wales on Sunday about a grocer’s shop in Cardiff’s Yemeni community which sold khat and when the supplier arrived on Wednesdays there was always a huge queue. I hasten to add that at the moment it is perfectly legal to get high chewing the leaves of this plant.
From my little perch by the roadside I watched a typical market, even though I felt completely abandoned. The heat was stifling and I continued to gasp for air while my guides took a leisurely stroll around the market, chewing the fat with old friends and bartering with stallholders.
Eventually they returned and I had a face like thunder, except that no one noticed because, of course, I was hidden by my burka. We took another taxi ride through the town on a three-wheeled, colourfully painted type of motorised rickshaw.
For some strange reason the town appeared to be full of pharmacies and motor accessory shops. Clothes shops were nonexistent. I found out later that Mullah Omar had decreed that women were forbidden from buying new clothes because of the impending jihad. Daffers, who is a complete ‘clothesaholic’, couldn’t survive in a regime like this. In fact she’d take herself out to a field and stone herself!
Afterwards, our party took one of the yellow and white taxis into the countryside four miles east of Jalalabad. The driver stopped his car in the middle of nowhere and we got out. I’m only pretending to be a deaf mute, I wanted to scream. Will someone please tell me what’s going on? But two women were walking past and I could not draw any attention to myself.
As I was about to discover, we were going to visit a village called Kama. It is a tiny little place and it looked very insignificant.
But it was going to have a huge, haunting impact on my life.
6
INTO THE HANDS OF THE TALIBAN
The fields were green and fresh in Afghanistan and the corn and sugar cane looked quite plump and healthy, much healthier than the crops I saw near the border at Torkham. We walked single file over a winding, narrow path through one of the fields. I was acting as tail-end Charley and I could hardly see where I was going because of the lace grille on my burka. I really had to crick my neck down to follow the path and make sure I didn’t tumble or fall over any obstacles.
I also knew that somewhere round this region was one of Osama bin Laden’s base camps, but I was too busy trying to concentrate on following the path to look around. Such behaviour would have been seen as suspicious, anyway.
For all I knew the world’s most wanted man could have been a few miles away. Actually he could have been a few feet away and I wouldn’t have noticed him.
We reached a tiny footbridge, which gently arched over a stream. Suddenly, some mud-caked brick walls loomed from nowhere to reveal Kama, a typical Afghan village.
A woman came rushing out of the village entrance to hug and kiss everyone, including me, although how she knew we were arriving at that moment is beyond me. I have no idea who she thought I was but I found myself being greeted like a long-lost relative. The two girls went off to join the swarms of other children who were playing in a large courtyard.
There was a reedlike overhang adjoining one of the courtyard walls and it gave shelter to the cooking area. On another side was a hand-cranked water pump, and some battered pots and pans were hanging out to dry.
My female companion pulled my arm and we went into a large room. It had the usual Afghan rug surrounded by lots of cushions and mattresses. She motioned to a mattress. I was so shattered I lifted up the burka and curled up on one of the mattresses to go to sleep. For someone who hates sleeping, it may seem odd that I seemed to be fighting off tiredness. Maybe it was down to nervous exhaustion, the heat, the long walk or the fact that I hadn’t really had a good night’s sleep for two days.
Outside, there was great excitement as relatives and friends greeted each other and no doubt gossiped. I managed to drift off to sleep and about an hour later there was a young man kneeling by me urging me to wake up. I went cold with fear because he was speaking to me in English.
I slipped the burka back over my face and sat up, still maintaining a silence. ‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ he reassured me. ‘I know who you are. Jan told me and I think you are a great woman to come here. Take off your burka and let us talk.’
Nevertheless, I maintained my silence, trying to work out how he knew who and what I was, when Jan walked in and said, ‘I have told them and it is safe for you to talk here.’
Shocked and disorientated because my cover as a deaf mute had been blown, I lifted off the burka, pulled on a headscarf and scowled at Jan.
‘Please don’t be unhappy. You are quite safe and your visit will remain secret,’ he said in a kind voice. Jan was a tall, willowy man, around 25, whose good looks were masked by a scraggy bush of a beard.
His uncle, my other guide, then strode into the room. I did not like him at all and have no logical reason for this
instant dislike, because we could not communicate. He had a long, thin face and an unkempt beard and I don’t think I ever saw him smile once. He was about ten years older than Jan.
‘Tell me, why do you come here?’ asked the young man, who was in his early twenties. ‘You know this is very dangerous for you.’
For the first time in about eight hours I was able to talk without being guarded. It was wonderful to be able to say, ‘I am a British journalist and I want to do a story about people like you who are living in Afghanistan. I want to know your hopes and fears, your ambitions and what do you think about what happened on September the eleventh and talk about American reprisals.’
He told me he wanted to train as a doctor but that the schools in the district had been closed, and so it was impossible for him to follow his ambitions. I sympathised with him, and then he said everyone was really shocked about the 11 September ‘mishap’. I don’t know why it is but even in Pakistan the terrorist strike was constantly referred to as the ‘mishap’.
Just then I looked up and around thirty to forty people had gathered, silently, in the room. The young man spoke to them and repeated what I had said. A little girl knelt by me and began fanning me heavily with a fan fashioned from reed.
I asked if I could take a picture and produced my camera. ‘Taliban do not allow pictures to be taken,’ said the young man sternly. So I put the camera back down. I asked what else the Taliban did not like and a woman of about 25 spoke up and talked about being denied an education.
Translating her story, the English-speaker said, ‘She was training to become a doctor when education was suddenly withdrawn from the women.’
Her strong features were masked by hardship and sadness. There is no place for career women in Afghanistan; it’s as though they didn’t exist. She seemed grateful that I acknowledged her intelligence and I got the distinct impression of solidarity between the two of us – two women from greatly different worlds, cultures and backgrounds.
In the Hands of the Taliban Page 10