1997
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INTERNATIONAL REPORTING |
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Index | 2/5 | 2/14 | 10/1 | 10/7 | 10/14 | 10/15 | 10/27 | 11/3 | 11/30 | 12/31
Fighters in Afghan Mountains Live for Next Battle
From all that the fighters said during a night resting at the inn, the
outlook is for more long, dusty days tramping across
inhospitable hills or bouncing in open trucks down rocky roads,
with little awaiting them but the next skirmish. For many of
them, fighting is the only life they have ever known. But during hours spent sharing the fighters' evening meal of
boiled rice and their dormitory on a bare mud floor at the back of
the inn, their nonchalance was striking. Among the fighters, there seemed to be little sense of a life
beyond their ragtag existence in the Afghan hinterland. There
were no complaints, even from men with no laces for the battered
street shoes that serve as combat boots, no openly expressed
fears of death in a war that has killed hundreds of thousands like
them, not even much that could be called hope. There was only a general sense that a life spent roaming this
ancient land in pursuit of battle was about all that any Afghan
man could expect. "We are fighters -- that is what we do," said a man who gave his
name as Shamsuddin, 45, a commander in the guerrilla force of
Ahmad Shah Massoud. He spoke during a break from an evening spent listening to
bulletins on the Afghan fighting squawking from a short-wave
radio tuned to Radio Tehran. The Iranian broadcasts are much
favored among the Persian-speaking men of the ethnic Tajik
minority in Afghanistan who are the bulk of Massoud's force. From the grins that the commander's remark prompted among
fellow fighters grouped about him in the glow of a kerosene
lamp, it seemed that they, too, considered questions about their
personal feelings to be effete or irrelevant. They did not even seem much interested in the complex politics
of the war, which has provided them with a kaleidoscope of
enemies, some of whom have been allies, then enemies, then
allies again. The rule seemed to be that they fight whomever the
commander chooses. At the moment, the enemy is the Islamic movement known as the
Taliban, which captured Kabul, the Afghan capital, from the
Massoud forces last month, then set about imposing a strict
system that includes bans on women working, on girls going to
school and even on the playing of soccer. The Massoud forces have taken the lead in counterattacking the
Taliban north of Kabul, striking in recent days at targets as close
as five miles from the capital's northern outskirts. The Massoud forces are newly aligned with two other ethnic
armies, the Uzbek-dominated force of Gen. Abdul Rashid
Dostum and the Shiite Muslim force of Hazaras under Abdul
Karim Khalily, which have pledged to resist the Taliban, who are
mainly from the ethnic Pathan majority in Afghanistan.
But in this valley, as in many other regions of northeastern
Afghanistan, there is plenty of evidence, in ruined villages and
blasted bridges, of the fighting that pitted the Massoud forces
against the fighters of Dostum and Khalily until only a month
ago, before the Taliban united former enemies against them by
taking Kabul. For the Massoud men at Doab, Radio Tehran has provided the
fighting rationale of the moment: that the Taliban have been
armed and financed by Pakistan and the United States, and are
therefore no better than the Russians who sent an occupying
force to Afghanistan for a decade in the 1980s, or for that matter
the British who invaded Afghanistan twice in the 19th century. "The Taliban are puppets of Pakistan," the Massoud fighters said
in a chorus that rang through the evening. "We will drive them
out of Kabul." But in the end, it seemed that it was the fighting, not the enemy,
that mattered most. The evening was punctuated by bloodthirsty
gestures that needed no translation, ranging from leveled
Kalashnikov rifles and the staccato noises of automatic fire to
hands strangling an imaginary foe. It is a mood like this that has troubled the handful of Afghan
psychologists who have not joined the middle-class exodus
abroad. They have been saying for years that even if the fighting
stops, Afghanistan will have to contend for decades with the
tortured psychology of men who have known nothing but war. The good-humored camaraderie of the Massoud fighters, some of
whom gave up their own blankets to two Western reporters to
ward off the night chill, seemed all the more remarkable for the
hardships of the terrain they have been assigned to hold, and to
recapture every time it has been lost. Only three days ago, when the Massoud fighters were further up
the valley, the village of Doab shifted its allegiances to the
Taliban, posting a white Taliban flag on a pole atop a part of the
main street that was bombed to a shell by Soviet aircraft a decade
ago. The next day, as the Massoud forces approached, the village
shifted back. Doab -- the name means "two rivers" in Dari, the Persian dialect
spoken by Afghanistan's Tajik people -- is in the heart of the
Bamian region of the Hindu Kush, about 60 miles west of the
Salang Highway that connects Kabul to northern Afghanistan
through the mountains. To reach here from the highway requires a 12-hour journey along
a narrow, unpaved road made almost impassable by huge,
knife-edged boulders, waist-high floods and bridges across
plunging rivers that the fighting has reduced to little more than
tangled masses of iron and wood. To drive the road is to pass through a patchwork of territories,
some only a mile or two along the riverbank, that are controlled
by the different military factions belonging to the new
anti-Taliban alliance. At the checkpoints, trucks carrying cargos of rice and wheat --
and sometimes flatbeds full of Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara families
fleeing Taliban rule in Kabul -- are charged tolls by teen-age
fighters waving rifles. Each halt has a commander who seems to report to nobody but
himself, eager to show off his small band of fighters and his
armory of battered Soviet weapons to passing foreigners. Often there is enough bombast for a comic opera. "There is no
way out for the Taliban fighters," Sherdat Fedayi, 50, a
commander in the Dostum forces, said at a checkpoint a few
miles east of Doab. "They will soon be surrounded by us to the
north, the south, the east and the west." As his men gathered around him, Fedayi pointed south toward
Kabul and added, "The only escape for them is to the cemetery." |
