As I make to leave, the lights go out–the whole city plunged in darkness–and the chaikhana seethes with jokes about Karimov. Their electricity, they say, comes from Uzbekistan–but only when the president is making illicit love in the dark.
A few miles north of Mazar, beyond cotton fields and pomegranate orchards, rears the grim fort of Qala-i-Jangi. It was built over a century ago by the Afghan king Abdurahman, and its walls jut and retract under violent, saw-tooth crenellations. I came here with Tahir, unsure of our welcome. The fort was the regional headquarters of Dostum, and was black with rumour. He himself, Tahir said, had retreated west to Shebergan, to await the outcome of the election, hoping for a post in Kabul’s cabinet (he was not to gain one) and claiming that his private army had all but disbanded.
We circled a scrub-speckled glacis, where the outworks had crumbled away. Children were playing netball in the dry moat. An Afghan flag flew from the ramparts. Beneath the gate-tower, flanked by two obsolete howitzers, Tahir shouted up for permission to enter, inflating my importance, while an officer hesitated on the parapet.
After a long time, and an unsmiling scrutiny of documents, we were granted a hurried half-hour, dogged by a soldier, roaming the wasteland of pines and silent barracks, their inmates gone. Ringed by mud towers and crenellations, we might have been walking through a far past. But on the gateway to an inner ward, a notice in English read: ‘Kal-i-Janghi was destroyed by vicious and devil Taliban-Al Qaida and was again repaired capitally after the downfall of terrorism by the initiative of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, leader of NIMA [the Northern Alliance], deputy defence minister…’
Even among the violences of 2001, the events these words conceal left a bitter question mark. Dostum had returned bloodily to Mazar in the wake of the US–British invasion, and within days of the city’s fall the embattled Taliban had surrendered en masse at Kunduz, a hundred miles to the east. Then their foreign fighters–some three thousand Pakistanis, Arabs, Uzbeks, Chechens, Uighurs–were separated off from the native Afghans. Stuffed into freight containers, more than two hundred to a crate, some were trucked to Shebergan, others to Mazar. About 470 were incarcerated here in an insulated compound. That evening several blew themselves up with hand grenades. Next morning, as Northern Alliance soldiers began tying their hands, they turned on their captors, killed a CIA interrogator, and seized some weapons. For six days they held out from their prison block, surrounded by troops firing down from the battlements, and blitzed by US bombers and helicopter gunships. Eighty-six survived.
Beyond the gateway we entered an enclosure powdered with thistles and cotton. Marooned in its centre, overlooked on all sides by battlemented walkways, the prison block was a riddled shell. Its cemented façades were so shattered that its shape was hard to descry. A rain of bullet holes covered them, thickening round leftover doors and windows. Tentatively we went into a passage, wading through rubble and dust and stray sunbeams. The plaster had cascaded from the walls, the ceiling girders crashed in.
‘We were not maltreating them,’ the soldier said. ‘They just attacked us.’
I asked him through Tahir: ‘What were these people like?’
But he only said: ‘Pakistanis, in a bad way, and some Chechens…’ He was bored, wanted us to leave.
Once or twice the wreckage eased from a painted dado of grey on whitewashed walls, or polished cement floors. A bathroom was still hung with tiles. Here and there Afghan and American names were scribbled on the plaster. And once we came upon the iron stairway to a basement, crashed into debris, where the last defenders had taken refuge. Dostum’s soldiers had poured down diesel fuel there and set it alight. We trod delicately, as if we might disturb something. The soldier’s boots grated in the silence. He started to sing a faint marching song.
We emerged in numbed silence. Across the scrub all around us loomed the ramps and parapets from which Dostum’s militia and US Special Forces poured in their fire. The container lorries by which the prisoners had come were a twisted heap nearby. I brushed the dust from my clothes, catching a tinge of fear. The crumpled fields beyond the ramparts had become the mass grave of the Taliban, some with their hands still bound behind them. A few miles beyond, the desert was strewn with the bones of those they themselves had slaughtered.
Hafizullah is a friend of Tahir’s. He was born in Maimana, where I hoped to go, of mixed Uzbek and Tajik descent, calling himself neither. He has boyish hair and eyes, but his small, cusped mouth says shocking things. In 1997 he was in high school in Mazar when the truckloads of Taliban came thundering through the streets.
‘We lay low in the school,’ he says. ‘Then we heard gunfire that increased all evening. It was the Hazara turning on the Taliban. I think they were afraid they would be killed, so they got the blow in first. In the morning I went up on to the rooftop and saw the bodies of the Taliban lying in the street, and people taking them away in handcarts. I saw a wounded Taliban shoot at a militiaman, then they killed him.’
He speaks these things with excited clarity, sitting in a stark room, looking back on a boy of sixteen who thought he might die.
‘But then the Taliban came back, and it was terrifying. They fired a rocket at the school, smashing an upper floor. We were sheltering below. They came in and ordered us out at gunpoint. ‘Infidels!’ they yelled. ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘We’re just students,’ we said. ‘We’re learning the Koran! The holy Koran!’ We were able to speak to them, because we had learnt some religion and knew as much as them, they were very simple. But they made their headquarters in our school. We were there over two weeks, afraid to go out. We just drank what water we had with us, and ate a little bread, and grew beards as we were told. Our teachers too.’ He touches his chin. ‘Now we saw the bodies of the Hazara in the streets. They threw them out, and they were lying there for days, the dogs eating them. And later we saw the handcarts again, as their people tried to take them away.’ He does not talk about this often, he says.
‘The Americans arrived three years later. They came to the school looking for interpreters, and selected me.’ He is touched by a flash of pride. ‘They took me to the Qala-i-Jangi. I was used as a liaison between an Afghan commander and the American operator guiding the bombers. The Afghan directed them to the centre of the fortress, a thousand metres from us. We’d laid out flags over the ground to give our position, but I saw the plane circle and drop a five-hundred-kilogram bomb wide off-mark. I was crouching under a wall and saw it coming for us. The noise was terrific. It hit the Afghan soldiers round me, and flipped a tank on to its side. I don’t know how many were killed. The wall fell on me’–he cringes against a cupboard beside him–‘and I woke to find myself buried, and a bloodstained body on top of me. I couldn’t move. There was chaos everywhere, and I saw arms and hands lying about. In the end a British logistics team dug me out. I was unhurt, except for my hearing. Then I ran. I just ran away. But that night Dostum withdrew his men from the castle wall, and the American bombers went in.’
Out of this trauma he had become a medical student–he had finished three years of seven–and his English had grown fluent.
‘All my life there’ve been bullets and bombs. We just hoped to stay alive, to have bread. And I thought it would always be like this. But now we’ve had a year of peace, and there’s this hope.’ His face is brimming with the present. ‘Young people are different now. The divide has grown between the generations. My father, for instance, can’t find any work. He’s well educated, but he’s out of date, with a Soviet-type education. No computer training, no languages.’ He grimaces without regret. ‘The future belongs to us now.’
Across stubbled desert through a world of mud–village courtyards and walled fields where small mud-coloured dromedaries stood–Tahir and I drove towards Balkh, which Afghans call the oldest city in the world. The husks of Russian tanks littered the way like dead reptiles: casualties from the Taliban advance of 1998. To our left, in haze, hovered the mud-brown Hindu Kush. Ahead, the horizo
n was feathered by a long, yellow-green oasis.
We went through city ramparts without any city in sight, drenched in the sudden lushness of plane trees and apricot orchards. Balkh was no more than an overgrown village now, shrunk in its seven miles of walls. We reached its centre among a crush of carts and horse-drawn taxis, and glimpsed the broken sheaf of the Khoja Parsa shrine above its parklands.
Balkh’s extreme age–the Arabs called it ‘the Mother of Cities’–is a poetic guess. But as early as 1500 BC, perhaps, Aryan warriors rode their chariots into the surrounding plains, bringing Vedic Hinduism and bronze; and Zoroaster, the founder of Persia’s ancient faith–whose doctrine refined the concepts of purgatory and absolution–is said to have been born here and to have been slain at the city’s fire-altar.
Alexander the Great, advancing east after crushing Persia, turned Balkh into his eastern capital for two years. He found the Oxus river worshipped on its banks–a star-crowned goddess robed in thirty otter skins–and he married the daughter of a Bactrian chief, Roxana, whom his dazzled followers thought the most beautiful woman in Asia after the widow of the Persian king. And here–in that first, fatal softening to the Orient–he enraged his followers by instigating the practice of prostration.
After 126 BC, for almost four centuries, Balkh was the merchant jewel of the Kushan kings, whose Tocharian ancestors I had seen mummified far away in the Taklamakan desert. Their huge, syncretic kingdom straddled the Silk Road between China to the east, Parthia and Rome to the west. A single trove unearthed near their lost summer palace yielded Chinese lacquers, Egyptian bronzes and erotic Indian ivories, with a Parthian sphinx and a shoal of glass dolphins, a statue of Hercules and a bust of Mars. It was the rich and pliant Buddhism of the Kushans which travelled east along the Silk Road to China, and at last to Japan. Still bearing the Hellenistic print of Alexander, their artefacts were to astonish future archaeologists with Grecian Buddhas pulled from the Afghan earth, and acanthus leaves carved in a Chinese desert where none were known.
But of all these centuries, almost nothing in Balkh remained, and the Islamic splendour that succeeded them–a city ringing with the poetry of Persia–was snuffed out by the Mongols. From a later age the clotted fantasy of the Khoja Parsa shrine survived like a traumatised descendant in the garden where we were walking. It was built only in 1461, over a theologian’s grave, but in its lonely endurance it seemed to carry the burden of all the city’s past. Flanking its high portal, two barley-sugar columns twisted up fifty feet and snapped off against nothing, and the drum of its bruised cupola still gleamed with white blossom opening on an indigo field.
In the park where Tahir and I walked for a while in quiet, the plane trees were turning yellow and a few old men lingered to stare at me. The ghostly arch of a seventeenth-century madrasah swung enormously against the sky, and we came upon the spurious tomb of the tenth-century poetess Rabia Balkhi, who in legend was killed by her family for loving a slave, and wrote her last poem in her blood. Sometimes young women murmur here the tangle of their own hearts.
We drove through choked streets until the plateau of the inner city stopped us. Then, climbing through the gap where a gate had been, we looked down on a desolation that choked the breath. Against the circling oasis, immense ramparts of platinum-coloured earth undulated. From the shapeless ridges of the earliest wall, threaded by goat-tracks, the bastions erupted in shattered fangs and stubs, stretching like a worn mountain range toward the Oxus. This inner city must have measured a mile across. It enclosed only bleached earth. Here and there a ruined gate left a gap of sky. A lone horse-cart was travelling across its wastes.
We did not know if there were leftover mines, and there was no one to ask. Most villagers never left well-known paths or even ventured on to verges. Above us the inmost citadel was a gaunt hill, leached by the sun. We followed each other’s footsteps delicately along the tracks winding up it, over a brittle crust of clay. Fifty years before, French archaeologists had dug for Alexander’s city here, and given up. They found nothing beneath the dense Islamic detritus except the vestige of a Kushan platform. Only in 2002 did a local gold-digger stumble on Corinthian columns, which mostly disappeared again. Under our feet the earth was strewn with turquoise and mauve-painted shards. They glistened imperishably in the compacted soil, with fragments of a dark green ceramic, and indecipherable bones. The noises of the little town ascended below us, and the squeaking of birds in the clefts.
When Genghis Khan invaded with a hundred thousand horsemen, the city he devastated was an Islamic cosmopolis still rich in Buddhist and Zoroastrian temples, even a Nestorian cathedral. Jelaleddin Rumi, founder of the great Mevlevi sect of whirling dervishes, was born here, and had departed the city as a boy the year before. All its people were driven into the plain and butchered.
On the citadel the slim clay bricks of a later age were knitting indissolubly with those of the Kushans, perhaps of Alexander. Tamerlane, remembering Balkh’s prestige, crowned himself among its ruins in 1370, and his dynasty restored it. Far to the east and south the parapets of these later walls still ringed the oasis, bulging with towers. I followed them half-heartedly, and came upon two coagulated mounds which were all that remained of the Buddhist wonders visited by Xuanzang in 630. In his day the monasteries were in decline, and vaguely repellent: their jewelled statues and encrusted relics–the Buddha’s washbasin, the Buddha’s sweeping-brush and tooth–guarded by a lax brotherhood.
But a mile or two beyond, on a track between fields, I reached a chance survivor of the Mongol fury. It stood isolated in a grove of plane trees, where an armed sentry slept. Outside its walls the grave of Hajji Piyada, who tramped seven times to Mecca, has lent it his name. Inside I found myself walking among giant, drum-like pillars sunk almost to their capitals in the heaped earth. The nine domes of the ceiling had fallen, and the spring of pointed arches rose to nothing.
But over their sombre strength, over the brute square capitals and all the soffits of the arches, there swarmed a tracery of leaves and rosettes incised in stucco. Here and there the interlocking zones of foliage were tinged with white plaster and a hint of blue. This ninth-century Islamic prayer-hall–the oldest in the country–belonged to the world of an earlier Persia, the Persia of the Sassanian kings, and must have been echoed a hundred times in vanished Balkh.
The city, it seems, never recovered. A Taoist monk who passed by in the night two years after the Mongol sack heard only dogs barking in the streets. Even a century later the Berber traveller Ibn Battuta entered a maze of azure-painted ruins.
I had found a driver prepared to take me west. Mobin looked like a ruffianly Talib, but he drove a Land-Cruiser, spoke halting English and was quickly resourceful. We went to the Mazar headquarters of the national police to find out the dangers of our route. The compound teemed with recently arrived government militia. In their sooty uniforms they looked drab and expendable. Some of them had probably belonged to disbanded warlord squads, and might as easily return. We were interviewed by a massive, slovenly officer with hooded eyes. He told us we should take two militia as bodyguards.
But they looked a liability. They might cause trouble with Dostum’s soldiers, who controlled Shebergan along the way, and I decided to leave without them. In the fortified offices of the UN Assistance Mission, a sleek Pashtun told me that the road beyond Shebergan to Maimana, two hundred miles away, was impassable. Better to take a track across the desert, he said, and a satellite phone.
But when I asked about the road beyond that, he thought for a second, then drew his hand across his throat.
We started before dawn, the stars still shining. The streets of Mazar were empty, the bazaars cluttered with covered carts, and dogs scavenging between. Our road went easily over the dark plain. A year before it had been impassable as Dostum’s men fought with the rival militia of Mohammed Ata. Now we passed without challenge through the walled emptiness of Takht-i-Pul, where the Taliban had slaughtered hundreds in 1998. No lights showed. A
burnt-out tank was abandoned in a field. Towards dawn Mobin stopped the Land-Cruiser and spread his prayer-mat over the tarmac, alert to mines. Then he prayed, facing west in the headlights, the motor ticking over. His prostrations were almost feverish. Perhaps, I thought uncomfortably, he was thinking of the way ahead.
It was morning as Dostum’s militia lifted a barrier and we entered the fir-lined streets of Shebergan, passing the white confection of his palace. Shebergan was Dostum’s stronghold, and his portraits–the face of a genial uncle–were pasted everywhere. On the main street we picked up an old man who knew the track to the west, and soon afterwards our tarmac petered out. We veered on to a trail which ran between sandy ridges, sometimes opening on to flats of ashen earth and scrub. Mobin said sombrely: ‘This is the Dasht-e-Laili.’
I could make out nothing. But somewhere here, close together, the prisoners of Mazar-e-Sharif’s double sack–Taliban in 1997, Hazara in 1998–were laid brutally to rest. Then it became Dostum’s killing field. In December 2001, after the Taliban surrender at Kunduz, most of the crammed container lorries did not go to Qala-i-Jangi but laboured on to Shebergan, and to here. Their doors opened on a mass grave. Half their human cargo, it is said, had already suffocated; those who survived were executed. Some 2,500 may have died. The United Nations called for supervision of the site, for fear of evidence vanishing, but would not investigate without military protection. None was granted.
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