The Sewing Circles of Herat: My Afghan Years

‘We went to join Harakat of Maulvi Mohammed Nabbi Mohammedi because at the beginning that was the most powerful group militarily. To start with we just had a few guns from the gun-shops at Darra [a Pakistani tribal town famous for copying guns] but we captured more and slowly spread. We were the first mujaheddin to do conventional fighting – trench warfare – because the terrain here is not suitable for guerrilla methods. In 1982 we left Harakat and joined Khalis to get better arms.

‘The Front was started by Abdul Razzak and he sent sub-commanders to various districts whom he had recruited directly and pays all their expenses. Now we have two thousand people in three areas – Argandab, Malajat and Zabul.’

I asked about the command structure and Bor Jan explained; ‘We communicate by letter because we don’t have radios and even if we did maybe they wouldn’t be safe. Usually we carry out joint operations where each sub-commander brings five or ten men and then the spoils are divided. Disputes are resolved through local systems of elders or religious scholars but if that fails they go to a special Islamic court where a man called Maulvi Pasani decides.’

All of them were very bitter about Pakistan and the Peshawar leaders. ‘For every one rupee aid given to the resistance, we get one paisa. We only have two clinics for our wounded in Quetta which is two days away while there are hundreds in Peshawar.’

Although Bor Jan claimed to be helped by the civilians inside the town, he said his men often went hungry. ‘Once during heavy Soviet bombing we had no food for twenty-five days and we lived on grapes. Now we keep leftover bread in bags and store it for hard times.’ He pulled out a sack to show us and I felt a piece of the bread. It was rock hard. ‘Last winter we lived on this for one hundred and eighty-two days,’ he said.

We stayed at Bor Jan’s post for about a week. I was not allowed to venture outside the post as it was made clear that it would look extremely bad for the Mullahs Front if it got out to anyone, particularly other mujaheddin, that they were harbouring a Western woman. They seemed far more worried about this than about being attacked by the Russians. I grew to hate my turban, which was hot and heavy in the boiling desert sun, my hair damp and sweaty underneath, but I was never allowed to remove it. ‘Remember, you are a Kandahari boy,’ they said to me, something I discovered had hazards of its own in a region where men are known for their liking of young male flesh.

One afternoon another motorbike roared up and we were joined by Ehsanullah Ehsan Khan, another Popolzai, whom everyone called Khan Aga or Uncle Khan. Frowning at me, he said he was the son of Saleh Mohammed Khan who initiated the 1954 insurgency against the liberation of women and burnt the movie hall and girls’ school. ‘The Communists took him to the Governor’s house and dropped a stone on his head,’ he added.

There was not much to do. Once we went on a crazy night-time raid on a government defence post in the centre of the city which involved us leaving the motorbikes in a flour-mill, tiptoeing past a Communist post so close that we could hear the radio inside, then hiding in the woodcutters’ bazaar until a signal was given at which everyone fired their weapons then fled back through the empty streets and along the ridges between irrigation canals.

Mostly we did nothing. I became accustomed to sitting in Bor Jan’s garden writing my diary with bullets whizzing one side and rockets the other, and chatting to his men. When they were not cleaning their guns, clipping their nose-hairs or tending their beloved flowers, those that were literate would read the Koran. There was none of the hashish smoking I had encountered on previous trips though plenty of chewing – and spitting – of tobacco. I was provided with a Kalashnikov-wielding bodyguard, a solemn-faced nineteen-year-old called Abdul Wasei to stand in front of the door while I washed off my coating of dust in the bucket-shower, which after a week without washing, felt like a five-star bath. They even made me a bed, which was wonderful until I realised that I was sleeping on boxes of ammunition.

Abdul Wasei, a nineteen-year-old former raisin cleaner who was my bodyguard.

Ratmullah had found a little sparrow, which he tied by string to a multi-barrel rocket-launcher and it would jump around squawking. Some of the fighters amused themselves by firing their Kalashnikovs near it and betting how high it would jump.

Ratmullah.

One day Bor Jan told us we were going to attack the airport. The plan was to depart at dawn but we left in the late morning, about twenty of us, all on motorbikes. I sat behind Ratmullah, trying to balance without touching his body so as not to offend him and consequently almost falling off. It felt good finally to be outside the post until in a field of green corn we passed an abandoned tractor, the driver’s body hanging awkwardly over the side. His brains had been blown out.

We hid the bikes in a branch-covered hole in a mulberry wood and, passing under a Koran held up by Ratmullah, we ran through the trees and down into one of the trenches that the mujaheddin had dug around the city. In the distance were some hills, beyond which was the airport. Some of the men took up position behind the trench in a tower used to dry grapes and began firing rockets at the airport, hoping to blow up a plane or an oil-tanker, though it seemed to me much too far away.

A shout went up and I just caught the fleeting panic on Ratmullah’s usually serene face before he pulled me to the ground under his huge weight. Two Russian tanks had appeared on the crest of the hill and were rolling down towards us. There was a dull thud as one of them fired and the grape tower behind us went up in smoke. As hot dust and rubble rained down on us Abdul Wasei dragged me into a shelter dug into the side of the trench. We could hear the cries and whimpers of the wounded but there was nothing we could do. If we emerged from the trench, we would be shot.

For two days we stayed there trapped while the tanks resolutely refused to go away. The cries behind us stopped and the silence was almost worse. We had nothing to eat or drink and my tongue felt thick in my mouth. There was a pool of muddy water in the trench and the others scooped it up with their hands and drank. Dead mosquitoes were floating on top but in the end I gulped down the dusty-tasting water, wryly remembering the British diplomat in Islamabad who had advised me ‘whatever you do, take your own cup to Afghanistan to avoid catching anything’. Ratmullah suddenly jabbered excitedly in Pashto, holding something up in his chubby hands. It was a mud-crab. I watched in horror as he bit into it, making noises of delight. Soon everyone was looking for mud-crabs and chewing them happily.

Eating mud crabs in the trenches.

Finally on the second day the tanks retreated back up the hill, presumably deciding we must all be dead. We ran crouching along the trench then out and back into the mulberry woods where our bikes were still where we had left them. When we got back to the post and were sitting drinking green tea, I put on my radio. After the usual crackle and static, I found BBC World Service and the unmistakable gravelly voice of Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World. It was one of those moments you know you will never forget. Exhilarated at still being alive, I asked Abdul Wasei if he was ever scared. He shook his head. ‘That would bring dishonour on my family. A coward running away will not be buried in Muslim rites. Instead he becomes a ghost so will never reach Paradise.’

That night as it was our last dinner before leaving, we had rice with little bits of meat and bone, eaten scooped up in our hands. The next day, on the way back to Pakistan, I realised that the sparrow had disappeared.

The more times I went into Afghanistan to cover the war the more I realised that there were many realities and the best I could hope for was a few fragments, never the big picture. But always within a few days of returning ‘outside’ to the comfort of Peshawar and the luxury of plentiful food and clean clothes, there would come an aching hollowness and I would spend all my time trying to get back inside. War was an addiction and I was badly hooked.

‘No foreign editor is worth dying for,’ said someone older and wiser who saw what was happening to me but I laughed, downed shots of the smuggled vodka we referred to as ‘Gorbachev’ and went swimming at midnight in the Pearl Continental pool to the outrage of the hotel management. The ragtag mujaheddin of the mountains with their plastic sandals and Lee Enfield rifles were defeating the powerful Red Army with all their tanks and helicopter gunships and these were glory days.

That was before Jalalabad.

Jalalabad was different. By then it was March 1989 and the Russians had finished withdrawing their troops from Afghanistan. After years of guerrilla warfare the pressure was on the mujaheddin to show that they could capture and control a town. ‘It’s time to fish or cut bait,’ said an American diplomat with a southern twang at the weekly ‘Sitrep’ and we knew it was battle on. Kabul was the ultimate prize, but snug in its nest of tall mountains, the city presented too difficult a target. So the royal winter capital of Jalalabad was chosen as it was only fifty-eight miles from the Pakistan border and thus logistically easy. There were no secrets in Peshawar though plenty of misinformation and rumour. Everyone knew that the Pakistani military advisors were working on a plan. We all wanted to be the first one there.

One evening when I was in Islamabad the phone-call came. ‘It’s starting.’ Quickly I dressed in my mujaheddin gear of shalwar kamiz, rubbed permanganate powder mixed with earth into my skin to darken it, tucked my hair into a flat wool pakol cap, and wrapped a woollen shawl around my shoulders. By then, as a fully paid-up member of the War Junkies Club I also had a mud-spattered US army jacket. I grabbed my small rucksack and jumped into my little Suzuki car weaving my way though the camels and arms trucks up the Grand Trunk Road to Peshawar to meet with the group of guerrillas I was planning to travel with. They had bad news. The border had been closed by ISI and no journalists were to be allowed across.

The commander was a friend and willing to take the risk so we left immediately, crammed in the back of a jeep, up the Khyber Pass, a twenty-five-mile journey through narrow gaps in craggy mountains decorated with pennants of the Khyber Rifles and other frontier forces familiar from British history. The mountains were barren and not spectacularly high but it was always a thrilling drive, recalling the various British misadventures starting in 1839 when British troops marched up here on the way to the First Afghan War which ended in disaster in 1842, and back again in 1878 for the Second when they were again forced to withdraw. Each time hundreds of men had been killed just getting through this pass, controlled then as now by the murderous Afridi tribe famous for smuggling and complete untrustworthiness. Many of these men were buried near the Masjid mosque at the top of the pass. Nearby, at the Torkham border post, ISI were out in large numbers. An officer jumped in the back and shone his torch on our faces. I had my head down, my shawl covering me as much as possible.

‘You’re not a mujahid!’ he spat, hauling me out, ‘you’re a Britisher!’ As my mujaheddin friends zigzagged across the border towards battle, I was unceremoniously taken back to Peshawar in the back of a police van. I was furious, crazed and desperate to get to Jalalabad. It was little comfort to find that none of the journalists were getting in. Famous war correspondents were pacing about hotel lobbies, shouting at their fixers and interpreters and waving wads of dollars. ISI had told the mujaheddin that they would be fined $2000 if a journalist was found with them so most were refusing even to try.

That night I visited all my friends and contacts, pleading to be taken across the border. Speed was of the essence and the usual ways of going by foot or donkey along smugglers’ paths over the mountains would take too long. Then my friend Azim came up with an idea. He had a fleet of ambulances that were going back and forth to ferry the wounded and I could hide under the floor. He lifted up one of the floor cushions and I curled in the space while he piled blankets and medicines on top of me. It was perfect.

We left before daybreak, last in a convoy of three ambulances. It took us about two hours back up the Khyber Pass to reach Torkham. I held my breath as I heard the doors being opened but we were waved straight across with only a cursory glance into the back of the ambulance. The blankets under which I lay were saturated with disinfectant so by the time we got into Afghanistan and I could emerge into daylight I was high on the fumes.

The men driving the ambulances were delighted by the success of the plan, laughing at how we had fooled the Pakistanis. The air always seemed lighter and cleaner the moment one crossed the border and the scent of the pines and spruces of the Spinghar Mountains began to clear my head.

In the first ambulance was a boy called Naem with the stubbly beginnings of a beard who picked a pink flower, which he shyly offered to me. ‘It must be orange blossom season in Jalalabad,’ he said as we sat on the ground looking down across the vast plain. ‘My mother told me that before the war every year at this time poets from all over the country would gather here to read poems dedicated to the beauty of the orange blossoms.’

He told me that he was working as a medic rather than a fighter because his father and elder brothers had been made shaheed in the war and so he was looking after his mother and sisters, but he really wanted to fight. It didn’t seem odd to me. It was too far away to smell the oranges but in the distance I could just make out the green trees of Afghanistan’s garden city and remembered the famous oil painting of Dr William Brydon arriving slumped over his exhausted horse at the gates of the garrison, the only survivor of 16,000 British fleeing from Kabul back in 1842 including women and children.

(#ulink_a7e1bc04-be7d-528e-ab1d-2a32f58ad55a) He had been allowed to live by the Afghan forces in accordance with the orders of their commander Akbar Khan, son of the former ruler Dost Mohammed whom the British had unseated, to ‘annihilate the whole army except one man who would reach Jalalabad to tell the tale’. The doctor’s report recounted in chilling detail how his fellow officers and their families and orderlies had been mown down by gunmen on mountaintops as they fled the ninety miles through narrow snowy passes. So many were killed that when the British Army of Retribution marched back this way a year later they wrote of their gun carriages crunching over the bones and skeletons. These plains had seen so much death, and sitting on that hilltop, listening to the far-off sounds of war, the hum of planes and pops and crashes of tank-fire and rockets followed by puffs of grey smoke on the horizon, I felt the familiar rush of adrenalin.

We stopped for a while at an earth-walled mujaheddin post in Ghaziabad, about twenty miles outside Jalalabad, for a glass of green tea drunk with boiled sweets in place of sugar. There were hundreds of men with Kalashnikovs milling around, eyes rimmed with black kohl for battle, many chewing naswar, opium-laced tobacco, which they then spat out noisily. The news from the front was not good. In the first few hours the previous day, the mujaheddin had captured several government outposts, southeast of the city, including Samarkhel which was headquarters of the feared Eleventh Division, and it had been easier than expected. ‘They just fled,’ said one commander who had taken part. But as the fighting had progressed to the perimeter of Jalalabad airport, the regime had sent in reinforcements from Kabul. The Afghan airforce that the Americans had confidently pronounced useless now the Russian pilots had left was flying skilfully, and it was looking bad.

Ahead we could see columns of smoke rising and hear the dull rumble of bombing. Sher Ali, the medic in my ambulance picked up a clutch of bullets from the floor. ‘See,’ he grinned. ‘That was last time.’ He pointed to a string of holes along the rear door. He wasn’t smiling for long. As we neared a small stone bridge over the Kabul River which flows through the centre of Jalalabad, the whine of aircraft suddenly grew louder and the sky darkened as a bomber-jet hummed low like an enormous grey moth over our heads. Our ambulance screeched to a halt off the road and we all jumped out and scrambled down the stony slope. For a moment everything seemed to stop. My heart was thudding so hard I could not hear anything outside, just a voice in my mind praying for survival. Then there was a loud explosion and scraps of dust and rubble flew all around us and the plane was gone. There was an eerie moment of complete silence then a stray dog started whining and cluster bombs were dropping sending up mushrooms of smoke and seeming to bounce towards us. Then I saw. Almost in slow motion on the road in front the first ambulance had been hit and exploded into orange flame. No one could have survived. Still tucked behind my ear was the pink flower that Naem had given me only an hour or so earlier.

I was horrified but not as much as I should have been. All I could think of was getting to the front. When the other ambulances decided to turn back, I was incredulous. ‘It’s too dangerous,’ said Sher Ali, ‘we have to look after you. Mr Azim would be very angry.’

‘But you’re ambulances!’ I protested, ‘you’re supposed to go to dangerous places and pick up the wounded.’

There was no persuading them. We headed back toward Pakistan at high speed. In the end after furious arguments they let me off back at the mujaheddin post where I begged everyone coming through to take me to the front. Eventually a group of fighters arrived from Peshawar under the command of Rahim Wardak, whom I knew, so they agreed I could go with them.

At Samarkhel we stopped and walked around the captured government post, half-eaten meals testimony to the speed with which the forces of the regime had fled. There were dead bodies in a cornfield lying on their backs like broken puppets. A red food-ration book was lying by the side of one and I picked it up.

We were getting nearer to the noise of battle and close to the airport we came upon an exodus of people on donkeys and foot. There were hundreds, thousands of them. Mostly women with children, a few belongings bundled up in scarves. Many were bleeding and wounded or dragging half-dead people on carts behind them. It was clear what was happening. The 200,000 civilians of the former Moghul city that had once been a place of palaces and gardens were being caught between the mujaheddin rockets coming into the city and the Afghan airforce bombing of the roads. It was what commanders like my friend Abdul Haq, who had been against the battle, had predicted would happen. In those few days 10,000 people were killed, the biggest single death toll of the whole war.

I was scribbling non-stop in my little notebook. I had a great story. But the refugees, seeing a western woman, presumed I was a doctor. I was surrounded by people, then dragged to one side of the road. A weeping woman was crouched over her young daughter laid out by a clump of witch’s hair. Her eyes were open, a pale limpid green but there was a film over them and a waxiness to her face. I guessed she must have been about seven. The woman lifted up a cloth. The girl’s insides were hanging out of a hole in her stomach.

‘What happened?’ I asked, pen poised, not looking too closely.

‘She was hit by a rocket while fetching water. Please, you take her in your jeep to Peshawar. If she dies it is too much for my mind. Her father had been killed and her brothers have not come since the fighting began two days ago. Now it is just us. Please by the grace of Allah help us.’

I made notes then started to walk away. I had to get to where the action was. I wasn’t getting the point that it was all around us.

The woman pulled at my sleeve. There was a heady perfume in the air, not from the orange blossom which was still only in bud, but from crimson and yellow narcissi growing nearby and often sold in the bazaar in Peshawar. The flowers were meant to signify hope and the coming of spring.

‘Her name is Lela,’ she said, ‘please you can help us.’

‘I’m sorry. I am not a doctor,’ I said as I got back in the Pajero with the mujaheddin who had been signalling impatiently. We drove off leaving the woman staring disbelieving after us, her arms in the air in a gesture of supplication. It was a picture that would stay frozen in my mind and later sometimes come to me in the unlikeliest places, ice-skating under the Christmas tree of the Rockefeller Center and seeing a young girl with head back and green eyes shining as her mother twirled her round and round.

It turned out there wasn’t really a front, just a mess in which everyone was trying to survive and turning on each other, and for which later everyone would blame everyone else, the commanders saying they had never wanted to fight and were not equipped or trained for such a frontal assault. The previous year General Zia had promised Jalalabad as a Christmas present to Congressman Charlie Wilson, a frequent visitor to Peshawar and fervent supporter of the war against the Communist Russians. But Zia was dead now after an explosion brought down his plane, so you couldn’t blame him.

The Soviet ambassador in Kabul, Yuli Vorontsov, told me a few months later that ‘the amount of ammunition spent in Jalalabad was four times that spent in the battle of Stalingrad because unlike the German and Soviet armies the Afghans are getting it for free and so are not economical’.

In the midst of it all as we were crouching down trying not to get hit by bullets that may well have been from our side, I felt the man next to me stiffen. I followed his gaze and saw an ISI colonel we all recognised from Peshawar. Rahim Wardak, the commander, was furious and strode towards him, said something and walked back. The ISI man looked stunned so I asked Rahim what he had said. ‘I asked him “How do you who have never won a war, dare try and order us who have never lost one?”’ he replied. Later, much later, I read that Osama bin Laden was also there in that battle and was so shocked by the needless slaughter of both civilians and mujaheddin that he became convinced that it was part of a US conspiracy implemented through the Pakistanis to discredit and end the jihad.

Whatever your point of view you couldn’t be part of Jalalabad and not be affected.