The Sewing Circles of Herat: My Afghan Years

18. No playing of chess.

19. No flying of kites.

20. No keeping of birds – any bird-keepers to be imprisoned and the birds killed.

21. Men must not shave or trim their beards which should grow long enough to protrude from a fist clasped at the point of the chin.

22. All men to wear Islamic clothes and cap. Shirts with collars banned.

23. Anyone carrying un-Islamic books to be executed.

24. Ban on all pictures in books or houses.

25. All people to have Islamic names.

26. Any street or place bearing a woman’s name or any female reference to be changed.

27. All boy students to wear turbans.

28. Any non-Muslim must wear a yellow cloth stitched onto their clothes to differentiate them.

29. All sportsmen to have legs and arms fully covered.

30. All audiences at sporting events to refrain from cheering or clapping but only to chant Allah-o-Akbar.

‘Basically any form of pleasure was outlawed,’ said Khalil, ‘and if we found people doing any of these things we would beat them with logs soaked in water like a knife cutting through meat until the room ran with their blood or their spines snapped. We did different things, we would put some of them standing on their heads to sleep, hang others upside down with their legs tied together, and stretch the arms out of others and nail them to posts. Sometimes when their spines were broken we would throw bread to them so they would try to crawl. Then I would write the report to our commanding officer so he could see how innovative we had been.

‘Once in Kandahar Jail, I watched the prison superintendent Mullah Burki beat people so harshly that it was impossible to tell afterwards whether or not they had been wearing clothes and when they drifted into unconsciousness we put salt on the wounds to make them scream.’

The state of terror spread by the Taliban was so pervasive that it began to seem as if the whole country was spying on each other. ‘As we drove around at night with our guns, local people would come to us and say there’s someone watching a video in this house or some men playing cards in that house,’ he said. ‘I was shocked. We are a land of feuds and I suppose some people were using us to settle old scores.’

After Kandahar, Khalil was put in charge of secret police cells in the provincial capitals of Ghazni and then Herat, a once beautiful Persian city in western Afghanistan that had suffered terribly under the Soviet occupation and had fallen to the Taliban in September 1995. It was renowned as a highly-cultured place where women would dance at weddings and many girls had been in school until the Taliban closed them all down. Mullah Omar was infuriated when 150 women dared appear on the streets of Herat to protest against the closure of the female public bath-houses. Khalil and his men were told to be particularly cruel to the Heratis who were Persian-speaking and had a large Shia minority, unlike the Pashto-speaking Taliban who were all Sunni Muslims. Speaking in Persian was forbidden and a strict curfew imposed from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m. Anyone out on the streets in those hours, even for emergencies such as illness or giving birth, was arrested. ‘Some Taliban had been killed by the ordinary people in Herat,’ he explained, ‘so we were told to beat them much more harshly.’

Another group that came in for particularly harsh treatment were the Hazaras who make up about 19 percent

(#ulink_31f9c972-f464-5a43-8688-1b9865ed3026) of the population and live mostly in the infertile central Afghanistan highlands of Hazarajat as well as large communities in Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif. Persian-speaking Shias with flat Asiatic features, the word ‘hazar’ in Persian means thousands and they were said to be descended from Genghis Khan and his hordes of Mongol warriors who had swept through the region in 1221–2. Genghis Khan detested cities because they deprived his warriors’ horses of grazing and he razed them wherever possible, wiping out the ancient cities of Balkh, Herat, Bamiyan and Ghazni, leaving only a single watchtower at Bamiyan, and slaughtering so many of the inhabitants of Balkh that a visitor reported arriving and finding only dogs.

The Hazaras had grown to expect a rough time from Pashtun rulers. In 1838 Alexander ‘Bokhara’ Burnes, a young Scot whose book Travels into Bokhara had been a bestseller, was sent as British emissary to the court of Dost Mohammed supposedly on a trade mission but in fact part of a network of British agents in Central Asia gathering intelligence about Russian plans to secure warmwater ports to the south which they had coveted since the time of Peter the Great. In his subsequent account Cabool, he wrote of the Hazaras as ‘oppressed by all the neighbouring nations whom they serve as hewers of wood and drawers of water’, adding that ‘many are sold into slavery and there is little doubt that they barter their children for cloth’. Worse was to come in the 1890s when the British-backed king Abdur Rahman massacred thousands and took thousands more to Kabul as slaves. When the Tajiks took power in Kabul, a minority themselves, they too did not spare the Hazaras. In 1993 Ahmad Shah Massoud’s men swept through the capital’s Hazara suburbs, killing an estimated 1000 civilians, beheading old men, women and children and stuffing the bodies down wells, cutting off hands and throwing them to dogs, and raping the women.

But the Taliban took this discrimination to new extremes. Not only did they see them as heretics – at almost five million people the Hazara make up Afghanistan’s largest Shia community – but they also resented the active role of women in Hazara society and the way they dressed, provocatively as the Taliban saw it, wearing bright full skirts and boots as well as lots of silver bangles and earrings and not covering their faces.

In August 1997, having captured Kabul but failed to take Mazar-i-Sharif, Taliban forces blockaded Hazarajat, cutting off all four access roads in an attempt to starve the one million Hazaras living just below the peaks of the Hindu Kush. No notice was taken of outraged protests from foreign aid organizations such as Oxfam that these people in the provinces of Bamiyan, Ghor, Wardak and Ghazni would die because their crops had failed in the continuing drought and they had already slaughtered all their animals and eaten all the grass.

Then, after finally capturing Mazar-i-Sharif in August 1998 when General Dostum fled to Uzbekistan and several of his commanders switched sides, the Taliban launched what witnesses described as ‘a killing frenzy’ in retaliation for the heavy casualties suffered when they had tried to take the city the previous year. Driving through the streets with white Taliban flags flying from their Datsun jeeps and machine guns mounted on the roofs, they peppered the streets with bullets. One witness described seeing them mow down a group of women on their way to a wedding, a small boy pushing a cart of bread and an old man grinding wheat. After one day of indiscriminate killing, they focused on the Hazaras, carrying out a house-to-house search for anyone of fighting age in the Hazara areas and shooting them on the spot, usually in the face or testicles.

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The new Governor of Mazar-i-Sharif, Mullah Manon Niazi, who had distinguished himself as Governor of Kabul by stepping up the number of public executions, announced: ‘Hazaras are not Muslim, they are Shia. They are kofr (infidel)’. This was taken as official licence both to rape and kill. Shia patients were dragged from hospitals and shot and Mullah Niazi forbade their relatives from removing the bodies from the street for five days until wild dogs had eaten them, as Dostum’s men had done the same to the Taliban the previous year. Thousands more were imprisoned in metal shipping containers twenty to forty feet long that had been used to bring in Cold War arms supplies, and then were either left to asphyxiate or shifted to prisons in the south.

Some of these containers arrived in Herat where they came under the guard of Khalil Hassani and his men. Describing what happened as ‘among the worst of so many bad things’, he recalled: ‘One day when I was in Herat several old Russian trucks were brought from Mazar-i-Sharif on the way to Kandahar. They were carrying metal shipping containers inside which were Hazara prisoners. There were about 450 of them and they were all women and children – I suppose the men had been killed. It was still summer and the trucks were left in the square for two days in the baking heat and the children were crying for food and water but our instructions were to give them nothing and we refused to let them out of the containers for toilet or anything. I can still hear the noise, the desperate banging on the metal and the muffled cries that gradually grew softer. It was more than 40°C outside and must have been like a furnace inside. The old and the babies must have been dead.’

Coincidentally, that afternoon before meeting Khalil, I had wandered around the suburb of Kirani on the outskirts of Quetta, a labyrinth of mud-walled houses and tiny stores, which is mostly home to Hazara refugees. In a small dirt-floored mosque with no roof I came across a huddle of about thirty hungry and frightened Hazara women and children in vividly coloured but very dirty clothes, and a few old men. They told me they had travelled twenty days to come to Pakistan by truck then foot, from a village near Bamiyan, the town famous for the giant Buddhas carved into its mountains, which the Taliban had blown up earlier in the year in defiance of worldwide protest. Having got all the way to Pakistan, they had discovered they could not enter the refugee camps as the borders were officially closed so they could get no aid and would have to keep moving around or risk being picked up by police and dumped back at the border.

‘We left because we had nothing to eat,’ explained Asma Rosaman, a woman in a bright cerise dress with a red-rose patterned shawl, her three sons and three daughters clutching at her wide skirts. Usually refugees at least manage to bring out a quilt to sleep under and a kettle and pot. These had absolutely nothing with them beyond the clothes on their backs and stories of being forced to watch their men-folk burnt alive as the Taliban rampaged through their villages, demolishing their houses, raping women and killing the men.

‘My husband was killed when we escaped,’ said Asma in a voice too tired of tragedy to be emotional. ‘The Taliban followed us on horses. He was carrying our household goods so he was behind and they shot him. He was a wheat farmer but we had not had wheat for a long time because there was no rain. One lady in the village was pregnant and they locked her in her house and set fire to it with her children screaming. They killed children with steel rods and plucked out eyes. I saw them dynamite a cave where 200 people had taken shelter. I closed my childrens’ mouths so that no one would hear them. They killed 3000 people in one month.’

This was probably not an exaggeration. The details took a long while to come out in the world, only when the first refugees started to arrive in Pakistan, but testimony collected by human rights organizations suggests that between four thousand and six thousand people were massacred in Bamiyan after its surrender that August of 1998.

Another woman called Peri Gul with eyes like black olive pits tugged at my arm. ‘There were 300 killed in my village,’ she said. ‘They locked my husband in our house and set fire to it and beat me when I tried to run inside. Afterwards I had to beg bread for my three sons and daughters. Every house was burnt and they sprayed the fields with chemicals and set fire to them so no one had food. Mostly we just scraped moss from rocks. I even thought about selling one of my children but who would buy? Nobody had anything.’ I guessed she was in her mid-20s, ten years younger than me, but she looked old enough to be my mother. Clutching my hand with her calloused dirt-encrusted fingers, she sobbed, ‘We were innocent people just trying to survive. First they starved us then they murdered us. Why didn’t anyone do anything?’

Such stories were so inhuman sometimes I would just want to snap shut my notebook and run away. There were more than three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and it wasn’t as if it was just the occasional individual with a sad story, it was everyone. I felt like a parasite, sucking up all these tales of tragedy to regurgitate in newsprint for people thousands of miles away, and with no tangible advantage for those I interviewed. I had no answer to why the world had done nothing.

Back in the 1980s when I had lived in Pakistan before, I had interviewed lots of refugees, sometimes spending the night in the camps. But then the Afghans had only suffered eleven years of war, their men were defeating the Russians, and there was still hope in their eyes. Now they had been through twenty-three years of war; their men were killing each other and their eyes were blank. As I watched these Hazara mothers unable to feed their babies, I thought of my own well-fed son back home, dressed in a different outfit every day, a wooden train set taking over the living room, parties with cake and balloons, holidays in the sun. I couldn’t imagine looking into those trusting blue eyes knowing I had no food for him and no place for him to sleep. At a store nearby, I bought them a sack of rice, some bread and apples and some blankets, and their gratitude only increased my guilt. It was not enough, it never would be.

In the orchard that evening, we took a break to go and help ourselves to the barbecue, steaming slices of saji, leg of lamb rotating on an enormous skewer, and for a while we talked of other things. I showed them the photograph I carry of my husband who has the dark eyes and olive skin of the Moors who once ruled Portugal. ‘He looks like an Afghan,’ said Khalil approvingly.

By the time the inevitable pot of green tea arrived, there was a bitter chill and the orchard had emptied of diners. But Khalil had more to tell. Between postings for the secret police, he had spent some months as a bodyguard for Mullah Omar, the spiritual leader of the Taliban. He came from the same branch of the Ghilzai tribe and so was trusted.

Holding my teacup in both hands to keep them warm, I asked him to describe Mullah Omar. One of the most enigmatic things about the Taliban was the reclusiveness of their one-eyed leader. Not only had he never travelled outside Afghanistan, Mullah Omar had barely visited his own country. He had only twice gone to Kabul, preferring to rule from his adopted home of Kandahar though he was actually born in Tarin Kot in Uruzgan, the mountainous province north of the city. He had never given interviews to western journalists, and he had refused to meet with western diplomats.

No pictures of him hung in government offices. Newspaper articles about him were always illustrated by the same blurred photograph taken from television footage of him in Kandahar holding up the Sacred Cloak of Prophet Mohammed at a special gathering of Taliban in 1996. At this ceremony, he had himself declared as Amir ul Momineen, Commander of all Islam; it was also the first time the cloak had been taken out for more than sixty years.

All that was known about Mullah Omar was that until 1994 he had been a simple village mullah in Sanghisar, a small community of mud-walled houses an hour’s drive north of Kandahar. He was about forty, bearded, wore a black turban and had only one eye, having lost the other in a Soviet rocket attack during the jihad in the 1980s, supposedly clawing it out of the socket when he realised that he had been blinded. Even the one eye was sometimes disputed. A few days earlier a friend of a friend had come to my hotel, whispering because of all the ISI officers in the lobby, that he had a picture of the real Mullah Omar. I opened the envelope to see a small black and white passport photograph of a man with a turban and two eyes.

Khalil was not very enlightening on his appearance. ‘He looks normal, medium height, a bit fat and has an artificial eye which is green.’ He had more to say on his personality. According to Khalil, Mullah Omar modelled himself on Caliph Umar, a seventh-century leader of Islam who had been declared Amir ul Momineen of the peoples of Arabia and was the second Caliph after the death of the Prophet Mohammed. A simple man who owned just one shirt and one mantle, and who ordered his own son killed for immorality, Caliph Umar used to disguise himself in ragged clothes to mingle incognito amongst the common people. In the same way, Mullah Omar would go out of his compound at night on his battered old motorcycle to find out what his people were saying about him in the bazaars and chai-khanas or tea-houses.

Khalil said that Mullah Omar presented himself as a man of simple tastes but though he berated his cook every day for serving meat when his soldiers in the field had none, he ate it anyway, and he liked listening to war-chants and riding his Arabian horse around his compound. In fact Khalil had quickly come to the conclusion that the great enigmatic mastermind behind the Taliban was just simple-minded. ‘Mullah Omar knows only how to write Omar and to sign his name,’ he said. ‘He’s completely illiterate.’

I had been told the same thing a few days earlier by General Ishaq, administrator of the hospital in Kandahar that used to treat Mullah Omar, and a former general in the Afghan army. ‘His doctor told me he thought that the rocket had left bits of shrapnel in his brain. He said Omar likes sitting at the wheel of one of his cars making engine noises and that he had days of terrible headaches and mood-swings when he would not see anyone and dreams when he thought he was having visions.’

For Khalil, coming into such close contact with the Taliban leadership was what made him lose faith in the whole movement. ‘It is the first time in Afghanistan’s history that the lower classes of the country are governing and by force. There are no educated people in this administration – like Mullah Omar they are all totally backward and illiterate. They have no idea of the history of the country and they call themselves mullahs but have no idea of Islam. Nowhere does it say men must have beards or women cannot be educated, in fact on the contrary the Koran says people must seek education.’

For all the Taliban leader’s avowed simplicity and proclaimed intention of returning Afghanistan to the time of the Prophet, 1400 years earlier, Khalil said Mullah Omar loved the trappings of power. Not poor himself, he had however been shocked by the lavishness of Mullah Omar’s house, set in a vast walled compound with a mosque, guesthouse, its own farm, stables and houses for the uncle who acted as a father-figure and all his relatives. Built in 1997, all paid for by Osama bin Laden, it had specially reinforced walls and roofs, six feet thick and cushioned with car tyres, to withstand even a cruise missile. He had even had a road moved because it went too close to the compound.

The main house where Mullah Omar lived with his three wives and five children was in an inner walled area. In front of the wrought-iron entrance gate was a fountain flowing over a fibreglass sculpture of a fallen log dotted with small Miami Beach-style plastic palm trees. The house itself was a two-storey building, set either side of a central courtyard which contained a water purification system and was painted with murals of the scenic attractions of Afghanistan including the fort at Kalat, the minaret at Jam, the mosque of Herat and oddly one of the swimming pool at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, but not of course of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Whichever wife was in favour would sleep on the same side of the house as Mullah Omar while the other two would sleep in the other section with the children.

Just outside the inner compound was the guesthouse, a bungalow with a large patio with columns painted like tree trunks and walls decorated with gaudy flower murals. Mullah Omar spent the mornings there, sitting on a bed with a tin of money and a walkie-talkie by his side, receiving his commanders, handing out cash and issuing instructions, usually sent out on paper chits.

Khalil said he sometimes saw Osama bin Laden at Mullah Omar’s house, arriving in a black Land Cruiser with tinted windows, usually in a convoy of seven or eight cars at a time. ‘His bodyguards were all very tall people, Sudanese I think, with curly hair and all with wireless sets and earpieces like those American bodyguards. Sometimes I went to Mullah Omar’s house in Uruzgan when they went hunting for birds or deer together or fishing with dynamite.’

The more he saw of them together the more he became convinced that the Taliban were not really in control. ‘We laughed when we heard the Americans asking Mullah Omar to hand over Osama bin Laden,’ he said. ‘The Americans are crazy. Afghanistan is not a state sponsoring terrorism but a terrorist-sponsored state. It is only Osama bin Laden that can hand over Mullah Omar not vice versa.’

During his time in the Taliban, Khalil had attended two Arab-run training camps, one in Jari Dasht, the Yellow Desert, four hours from Helmand, an area with its own airstrip where Arab sheikhs used to go hunting, and one near Herat. ‘We were taught by Pakistani military trainers how to shoot exact targets and how to move along the ground in the front-line,’ he said. They were also told that if they died while fighting under the white flag of the Taliban, they along with seventy-two members of their families would go to paradise. They were also given blank marriage certificates signed by a mullah and encouraged to ‘take wives’ during battle, basically a licence to rape.

Being ordered to the front-line was to provide Khalil’s chance for escape: ‘We were sixty-two friends sent to Bagram, north of Kabul, and our line was attacked by the Northern Alliance and they almost defeated us. Many of my friends were killed and we didn’t know who was fighting whom, there was killing from behind and in front. Our commanders fled in cars leaving us behind so we also escaped, walking all night.

‘I was very afraid of being caught. I got away but then I was stopped by a line of Arabs who demanded to know why we were escaping. For two days we were under their arrest then taken back to the front-line.’