A Fertile Valley Left Barren by the Taliban
fairplay
RAVAGED REGION
A Fertile Valley Left Barren by the Taliban
By AMY WALDMAN
ISTALIF, Afghanistan, Jan. 3 -- Once, young boys sold wild tulips and
sweet fruit at the entrance to this ancient village on a hillside.
Today, only a few haggard men scavenge for wood.
Once craftsmen hawked indigenous blue pottery and hand-sewn prayer rugs
along the narrow main street here. Today their stalls, built to last
centuries, sit silent, empty and ruined, their roofs burned into the ether.
Once the Throne, as Istalif's high point is known, was a favorite picnic
spot, yielding a view of terraced houses descending to villages nestled
amid vineyards and fields -- Afghanistan's breadbasket, the Shamali
Plain. Today, a deserted Throne oversees a quilt of destruction, Istalif
writ many times over: burned, empty villages surrounded by dried fields
and orchards -- Afghanistan's scar, the Shamali Plain.
The people of Shamali proudly resisted the Taliban and paid an
extraordinary price. Nearly every house was burned, the vines hacked
down to stumps, and much of the generations-old water system destroyed.
Some of the methodical savagery had an ethnic cast. Most of the Shamali
people were Tajiks, who showed little inclination to be subjugated by
the Pashtun Taliban. A few Pashtuns were allowed to stay, but others
were forced out.
The people were scattered like flung seed. Many Tajiks headed north, to
the Panjshir Valley, where along its glassy-clear river their tents
huddle together as if for warmth. Pashtuns were taken to Kabul, to the
former Soviet Embassy compound, where children wander dark halls filled
with smoke and rubble.
The Taliban took the Shamali Plain in 1996 and lost it the next year.
They laid waste to what they could as they retreated, but the greatest
destruction came in their push north two years later. The "cleansing"
was often indiscriminate, the message in the eradication of homes and
livelihoods clear.
If the Taliban lost the war, in Shamali they won the battle. They turned
the fertile plain, which stretches north from Kabul to the mouth of the
Panjshir Valley, into a desert barren of everything except mines, which
were laid by both sides. They severed centuries-old connections to the
land among families that had been poor, but proudly self-sufficient.
They made them into migrants in their own land, dependent on handouts
from aid agencies.
"There we had everything: land, wheat, water, wood," said Nafisa from
Khalazaee, who lives at the compound with her nine children. "Here
everything we receive is given by others. If they stop, we will be hungry."
Shamali is the vista that greets diplomats and others who land at Bagram
air base and drive to Kabul, and it is a fitting welcome mat. All the
strands of Afghanistan's recent agony, all of the challenges of its
future, are interwoven here.
Those challenges are becoming starkly clear as people begin to return,
whether to build anew, or to feed off the scraps of their old lives.
Today, Khalil Ahmad, 27, hacked away at dried grapevines, hoping to sell
the firewood in Kabul. If the stars aligned, he said wishfully -- the
water system was fixed, there was money for rebuilding, mines were
removed -- he might be tending the vines instead of stripping them.
"The root is still there," he said, convinced, like many villagers, of
the hardiness of their dried, mutilated vines. "The root can grow again
in the spring."
For every village, the story of destruction was different. Qara Bagh,
site of a famous bazaar, was close to the front line, and home to many
mujahedeen, and so suffered a particularly ruthless hand. Villagers say
hundreds were killed.
"They wanted to have total control of us," Aqashirin, 48, said, speaking
next to his tent in Panjshir. "They wanted us to be afraid of them, to
give up. We did not give up. We accepted this place, this camp. We
accepted our houses being burnt. But we did not accept to live under
their control."
The village was mostly Tajik, with a few thousand Pashtuns. Many of them
fought against the Taliban, and had their homes burned, too. But other
Pashtuns showed the Taliban which houses to burn, said Said Rahman, a
commander from the village.
In Shakar Dara, a mostly Pashtun village supportive of the Taliban, the
Tajiks were surrounded and told to leave their homes. At least 30
Tajiks, like Shahwali, 60, were taken to prison, in his case for two
years. Their homes were burned. The rest of the village was left untouched.
The reason was Anwar Danghar, a famous mujahedeen commander who had
switched sides and helped hold Shamali for the Taliban. Villagers say he
also invited Arabs and other foreigners to use an ancient fort just
outside the village as a training camp.
Starting in 1998, the foreigners came to learn how to use explosives,
blowing up tires with rocks on top that would fly high above the fort's
walls. Today, the trenches and tunnels they constructed are the major
remnants of their presence.
The mostly Tajik people of Mir Bacha Kut said no twice when the Taliban
asked them to leave. Out came the guns and the cables used for beatings.
Residents left their homes and watched them burned one by one.
The young men were taken to jail. Surghol, 23, spent two and a half
years there "just because I was from Shamali."
"Anyone from Shamali was their enemy," he said.
That was certainly true for Khalazaee, an entirely Pashtun village that
had no homegrown commander to save it. It was near the front line, and
so it, too, was shown no mercy. Around 100 boys and young men were taken
to Pul-i-Charki prison. The village itself was obliterated, its remnants
heavily mined.
"It was not a question of language," Zardghol, 65, said. "It was a
question of geography."
He remembers that it was around noon when the Taliban came to Khalazaee
and ordered everyone out, and that they did not even allow villagers
time to prepare lunch. Residents were loaded onto minibuses and trucks,
and told they would return in two or three days. Instead they were taken
first to Jalalabad, then to Kabul, to the former Soviet Embassy.
The embassy compound consists of 24 gray, concrete, badly damaged and
decayed buildings redeemed by humanity -- children with school books and
on swings; adults lining up for water and wood. The other day a wedding
party marched through, a stream of color amid the women in blue burkas
and girls in bright headscarves with pink spots of color and glitter on
their cheeks.
There is more freedom these days now that the Taliban, who had
checkpoints around the compound, are gone. But the conditions are the same.
There is no electricity, no water, and poor ventilation. The hallways
and rooms are black and icy. The smoke from cooking fires stings the
eyes and sears the throat. The stairs on which children frolic have no
rails, and plunge steeply down to the rubble below.
"This is not a life we have here," an elderly, one-eyed man named
Imamodeen said. "We are happier to be dead than have such a life here."
In an infernal urban setting, rural people have attempted to remake
home. At the end of one hall, Nafisa baked bread in a mud oven that the
refugees built. The large room where she lives has been partitioned by
mud walls. Sixteen people sleep in one half of the room, 13 in the other.
The people of the embassy say they want to go home. "I miss our grapes,"
said Nafisa's daughter, Rafela, 25. "I miss our gardens. I miss our
houses. I miss everything."
But they say it is not possible. They have no money to rebuild. In many
of their villages, there is no water, to drink or irrigate, because the
Taliban deliberately sabotaged the carezes, a series of underground
canals, using grenades, mines, even dead goats. The carezes were places
to hide, and they sustained life in a place the Taliban wanted cleansed
of it.
Then there are the mines. Shah Alamhan, 70, nearly lost a hand and foot
to a mine three months ago when he tried to return to Khalazaee to see
if his house still had windows and doors.
The refugees complain bitterly that they have stopped receiving the food
aid they have come to rely on. They accuse the Russians of trying to
force them out of the compound.
But aid officials say it is they, not the Russians, who want the
families -- 2,400 by their count -- to go. They want to give the
refugees aid in their villages, so the villages can be rebuilt.
"They'd rather be waiting for free handouts than working on their
beautiful fields," said Fayyaz Shah, the head of the Kabul sub-office
for the World Food Program. "The aid here is keeping them from going
back." If they return, he said, aid agencies will pay them to rebuild.
The urgency of making Shamali habitable again extends beyond the plain.
In and around the barracks of Kabul thousands of Shamali soldiers are
garrisoned. They would return to the land if they could. For now, they
cannot, so they stay with their guns.
In their idle time, they think about their enemies. The thoughts are not
kind.
The word has been passed down by commanders through the ranks that the
Taliban are to be forgiven, even those who scorched Shamali. The message
has been heard, and heeded, but not taken to heart.
"If the government forgives, we forgive," Said Rahman said. "But if
someone comes and destroys a stone of your house, do you forget it? Of
course you do not forget it. As long as we can we will take revenge."
The same sentiment echoed in Mir Bacha Kut, where Sher Muhammad had come
to scavenge his own home, looking for pieces of beam he could take to
Kabul to burn as firewood.
"If we find them," he said of those who burned his home, "we will take
revenge."
The only hope is that even fighters are weary of war, and that
rebuilding, when it happens, will demand their full attention.
Near Istalif, Tajiks whose homes had been burned came back last week to
a small Pashtun village, Shirawa, that had been left untouched, again
thanks to a local commander. Some planned to claim the empty houses that
Pashtuns who fled had left behind; others, to rest in Shirawa before
beginning the long walk home.
A few Pashtuns remained in the village, and said they did not fear
retribution. The Tajiks said they had no plan to exact any.
"Should we kill them?" a returnee named Azimullah asked, saying he had
more pressing matters, like building a home. "They can all come back, no
problem."
With the help of the United Nations refugee agency, some 400 Tajik
families returned to the Istalif area in the last week, bearing tents to
pitch near demolished homes.
They had dismantled one tent village in Panjshir, only to create another
in Istalif. But for Abdulbasir, 45, it was one step closer to reclaiming
his life.
"Besides, what else should we do?" he asked, with the resolute logic of
a people as resilient as the roots of their grapevines.