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
An Afghan Village, Destroyed at the Hands of Men Who Vowed Peace
So when a battered Kabul taxi arrived here Thursday morning,
smoke still rising and the smell of torched ruins heavy in the air,
villagers clamored to tell outsiders how Sar Cheshma had died. Hastening down narrow lanes between fire-blackened houses,
the handful of people remaining in the village abandoned for a
moment their rush to board trucks waiting to carry them away as
refugees. The villagers' story has been a familiar one in the 18 years that
Afghanistan has been at war. The twist this time was that the men
who destroyed Sar Cheshma were the turbaned warriors of the
Taliban, the ultra-conservative Muslims who have imposed a
medieval social order across much of Afghanistan. Two years ago, the Taliban sprang from religious schools with a
promise to suppress the carnage that has killed an estimated 1.5
million Afghans and driven millions of others from their homes. The villagers of Sar Cheshma say 30 Taliban fighters swept in at
dawn on Tuesday, then spent several hours pouring canisters of
gasoline into the 120 courtyard houses and setting them on fire. Sar Cheshma lies barely five miles from the northern outskirts of
Kabul, the capital, where the Taliban forces are fighting a
village-by-village battle with the forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud,
a less conservative Muslim leader whose troops used Sar
Cheshma briefly on Monday as a base to fire on the Taliban. A young mother and her three sons were killed by a Taliban
rocket fired when the Massoud forces were in the village. There were no further deaths in the torching that nearly
obliterated the village. But in one mud-walled courtyard after
another, where hundreds of people lived, little remains but
buckled bed frames, melted kitchen utensils and charred piles of
grain. "Are we not humans?" sobbed a 45-year-old woman named
Narwaz, rushing forward with others to greet visitors who had
slipped past Taliban checkpoints posted to keep outsiders away. Beside her, a villager named Khairuddin, 55, waved a bloodied
burqa, the head-to-toe shroud that the Taliban force all women to
wear outside their homes. The garment was all that remained of
his daughter, the woman killed with her sons in the Taliban
rocket attack. In a home up one of the village's dusty pathways, another man,
Najmuddin, 30, broke away from sifting through his blackened
grain supply, hoping to find enough uncharred bits to carry
away. Suddenly, the grain forgotten, his face contorted, he rushed to
fetch a metal bowl piled high with ashes that had been balanced
on a section of broken wall. It was all that remained of a copy of
the Koran that he said had been in his family for generations."Tyrants! Tyrants!" he shouted, referring to the Taliban. "This is
the book of God. Kill us if you must, but don't burn our holy
book!" Their attention attracted by his cries, several neighbors rushed
forward, one with a large metal plate sitting among the utensils
that Najmuddin had saved from the fire. Reverentially,
Najmuddin placed the bowl with the ashes onto the plate and
carried it away. "We honor these ashes," he said, weeping. "The Koran is the
book of God." The shock of what happened here appeared to be all the greater
among the villagers because the perpetrators were the Taliban. When they emerged as a fighting force in 1994, the Taliban
presented themselves as the harbingers of a new Afghanistan,
modeled on the teachings of the Koran and inspired by a burning
zeal to reunify the country. From their original base in the southern city of Kandahar, they
swept east and west, suppressing local militias that had reduced
much of the country to anarchy. The Muslim clerics who led the
Taliban promised that their forces would set new standards of
decency in the fighting. Taliban units appear to have avoided raping and pillaging in the
manner of most of the other Afghan forces that have fought in the
civil war. But they have become widely hated for the draconian
social order laid down by the Taliban leaders, which bans women
from working outside the home and girls from going to school,
requires men to grow beards and forbids children to fly kites or
play soccer. Since Kabul fell to the Taliban four weeks ago, there has been a
series of uprisings against them in towns and villages north of the
capital. Now the Taliban have gone a step further, using tactics
indistinguishable from those of other forces that have contributed
to the country's destruction. Today, two days after the attack on Sar Cheshma, Taliban jets
bombed Kalakan, a village under the control of the Massoud
forces about 10 miles further north. According to an account by a
reporter for the BBC who visited the village, the bombing killed
20 civilians.
In the case of Sar Cheshma, the Taliban attack was the latest in a
series of disasters. The residents have repeatedly found
themselves in the middle of the fighting because of the village's
strategic position, hard up against the Ghoza mountain range,
which runs like a shield across the northwestern flank of Kabul. In the decade that Soviet forces were here, Sar Cheshma became
a stronghold for the Muslim guerrillas who ultimately drove out
the Soviet troops. Soviet bombers pounded the village more than once, leaving
jagged ruins where mudwalled homes once stood and forcing
many villagers to flee to Pakistan and Iran as refugees. Some
returned after the Russians left, but barely a third of the village's
300 homes were occupied this week. In the atmosphere of panic that gripped Sar Cheshma Thursday,
many villagers said the Taliban were worse than the Russians. "We killed more than 40 Russian soldiers in this village, but they
never burned our houses," said Nizamuddin, 35, who like most
others here had supported his family by raising livestock and
working a small plot of land. Again and again the villagers voiced special loathing for the
Taliban because of the religious movement's claim to be the true
upholders of the Koran. "Didn't they do a wonderful job here, these Muslims?" said
Nizamuddin, leading the visitors on a house-by-house tour.
"Wasn't this burning of our village a true act of faith? We should
applaud them -- they are surely the best Muslims in the world." If razing the village showed how none of the armies fighting for
control of Afghanistan shows much mercy for civilians, it also
demonstrated that the war has gone beyond a competition
between faiths and ideologies and become little more than an
ethnic struggle. One reason the Taliban have been driven back so quickly from
the northward advances they made after overrunning Kabul is
that many villages dotting the dusty plain between Kabul and the
Hindu Kush mountains 60 miles to the north are inhabited by
ethnic Tajiks, the second-largest population group in
Afghanistan. All but a tiny minority of Taliban fighters are from the Pathan
ethnic group, which is the largest in Afghanistan, accounting for
about half the country's 16 million people. As a Tajik village, Sar Cheshma was a natural attraction for
Massoud's forces, and a natural target for Taliban suspicion. The
villagers say Taliban fighters arrived last weekend, summoned
them and ordered them to surrender all of their weapons. This
done, the Taliban departed with a warning that any attempt by
Massoud forces to enter the village should be reported
immediately to a nearby Taliban post. "We gave them our Kalashnikovs, and they said they would
protect us," said the villager named Khairuddin. On Monday, the villagers said, they awoke to find that a group of
Massoud fighters under the command of a Muslim cleric from the
village, Mullah Taj Mohammed, had slipped into Sar Cheshma
overnight. The Massoud fighters ordered the villagers to stay in their homes,
making any warning to the Taliban impossible, the villagers said.
A brief battle followed, they said, in which Khairuddin's family
members were killed, then the Massoud fighters slipped away to
the mountains, leaving the villagers to face the Taliban's wrath at
first light on Tuesday. For most of the villagers, the immediate future appears to lie in
joining hundreds of thousands of refugees in Kabul, many of
them so destitute that they wander the streets begging. But one Sar Cheshma resident said she was finished with fleeing.
Sajida, 40, a widow, clutched her son, Abdullah, 12, and said
she would stay amid the ruins of her home. Six years ago, her husband, an officer in the Communist army
that disintegrated in 1992, was killed by a guerrilla rocket in
Kabul. "I left Kabul to escape from the fighting," she said, "but
the fighting has followed me wherever I have gone. Now, if I
must, I will stay and die here." |
