Under an Afghan Sky (6 page)

“I speak Chinese too. And a little bit of French.”

“You are from China?” he asked.

“I was born there. In Hong Kong. But I am from Canada.”

“Canada.” Zahir paused for a moment. “I never go Canada. Is it good place?”

“Yes,” I said, “it is a great place. You should go there someday. You would like it.”

“If it is good place, why you come to Afghanistan?” he asked me.

“I come to report on the war. I am a journalist.”

“You are journalist. Tell me, why your soldiers are here? Why your soldiers come to our country and kill our people?”

I wasn’t sure exactly how to respond. Canada’s role in Afghanistan was being debated enough at home. The prime minister had just promised to pull our troops out in 2011. And the rising toll of civilian casualties as a result of the fighting between the Taliban and coalition forces was something even the United Nations said had to stop. Canada was in Afghanistan to fulfill its commitment to NATO, but that’s not something I would have expected Zahir to understand.

“We are here to help your people,” I said instead.

“Help?” he scoffed. “You kill our people. You, and America, and Britain, you kill our people.”

“We are here to try to help.”

“You not helping. Taliban is only help for my people. Taliban is good for my people. Taliban help people of Afghanistan.”

The same Taliban, I thought, who recently bombed a school for girls in Kandahar. The same Taliban who used young boys as suicide bombers, strapping explosives to their little bodies and then detonating them by remote control. I remembered the sadness and shock in the voice of a Canadian battle group commander when he told me of arriving on the scene of a bombing, to find a boy’s shoe that had been wired. “The Taliban,” he had said, “will stop at nothing. And there is nothing that is beneath them, even if it means blowing up their own children.”

“You are not really Taliban,” I challenged Zahir.

He looked at me. “No, we are all the same. Taliban is Afghanistan. Afghanistan is Taliban.”

“The Taliban have done bad things to your people. Their bombs have killed people. They have killed children and beaten women.”

Zahir laughed. “You wrong. America kill people. Your soldiers bomb our homes. Why you not go back to America?”

“I am from
Canada,
” I corrected him.

“Canada, America, Britain, you all same. No different. You come, you fight in my country and kill my people.”

“Canada and America are different,” I argued, even though I knew it was useless. I had heard this sentiment before from other Afghans. I had interviewed a mother who had lost her children to a Taliban bombing. She blamed Americans, Canadians, the British, and all the NATO forces. Most Afghans don’t differentiate between Western countries. They see us all as the same, as one homogenous foreign force, yet another invader in a country that has suffered countless invasions since its birth.

“You all same.” Zahir would not be convinced. “Why you no leave Afghanistan?”

“We are leaving,” I told him. “In 2011, Canada will be leaving.”

“You are lying,” he accused.

“No,” I answered. “Canada’s prime minister says he will bring our soldiers back. Canada will be gone from Afghanistan.”

I thought that by trying to make Zahir see that there was a difference between Canada and the United States, I could make him realize his captive wasn’t a sworn enemy of the Taliban the same way an American might be. I realized that I needed him, if any negotiations around my release were to be expedited. He was going home to speak with his father in Pakistan, and his father was probably the one in charge of all the decisions. Perhaps Zahir could influence him, and if I could get him on side, I just might be able to get out of this hole a little quicker.

“Two years still long time,” he said. “Very long time.”

“It’s not that long,” I argued, trying to make him think that Canada was already on its way out. “A year and a half, really.”

Zahir shook his head and changed the subject. “Why you not Muslim?”

Wow, I thought. What the hell? From politics to religion in a single breath! I suppose nothing’s too personal when you’re trapped in a hole with someone, and no subject off limits when you’re a prisoner and completely helpless.

“Why do I have to be Muslim?”

“Muslim good. You must be Muslim. You no go to…” He pointed up at the ceiling.

“Heaven?” I asked.

“Yes.
Jannat.
”

“Why do I have to be Muslim to go to heaven?”

“Koran say! Allah say!” He seemed shocked that I didn’t know this obvious truth.

“I believe in Allah,” I responded, “except I call him God. And I’ll go to heaven if I am a good person.”

“No, you no go heaven. You not Muslim! You Muslim, you go. Not Muslim, you not go.”

“Do you think there is just one heaven?” I asked.

Zahir nodded. He pointed up. “When I go… I have girlfriends.” He smiled a wide smile at me. I noticed his teeth were clean and straight.

“Girlfriends? You think heaven is about getting a girlfriend?”

“Not one girlfriend. Many girlfriends.”

I had heard many interpretations of the houri, which in Arabic translates roughly as “lovely eyed” and generally refers to beautiful heavenly creatures. One interpretation, which is widely discounted by religious scholars, involves seventy-two houri being in heaven to greet a Muslim man who has been martyred.

I couldn’t resist. “Seventy-two girlfriends?” I asked.

“Yes! Seventy-two girlfriends!” he responded happily.

“You don’t think Allah would be upset with you because you have taken me?” I asked.

“We do for Allah.”

“You think Allah wants you to kidnap me and keep me here?”

“We do for Allah. You must study Koran. You know Koran?”

“I know about the Koran. The Koran doesn’t tell you to kidnap people and keep them in holes under the ground.”

“Koran good. You study Koran. You be Muslim. You go heaven.” He pointed up at the ceiling again.

“Why do I have to be Muslim to go to heaven?”

“You no Muslim, you no go heaven.”

I sighed. There was no point in arguing with him. I was reminded a little of a friend I had in my Catholic high school. She was a born-again Christian and was worried for my soul because I didn’t believe in God the same way she did. She wanted me to study the Bible with her at lunchtime so that I could better understand why Catholicism wouldn’t lead me into heaven—and this was before and after Catechism classes with the nuns! I never understood it. I will never understand why we can’t just accept that not everyone believes in God or in Allah the same way we do, or believes at all, and why some people desperately feel their mission in life is to evangelize and convert. To me, it showed a great deal of disrespect. Religious fundamentalism puts us at war with ourselves and is at the root of many of the world’s problems and conflicts.

“I will study the Koran when I get back to Canada,” I said to Zahir. “I want to see for myself if you are right.”

He nodded. This seemed to satisfy him for the time being.

I looked at the alarm clock. It was barely nine o’clock—three more hours until Khalid was to come back, though I’m not sure I believed that he would. I thought that maybe they would move me somewhere else, maybe to a bigger hole, maybe to a house
somewhere nearby. I wasn’t sure I could spend another night here like this. The ground was hard, and the air was damp and full of dust. I wondered what was going on outside, whether my kidnappers had called anyone with my cell phone, whether my parents and my sister had been told. And I wondered how Shokoor was doing. Would my kidnappers try to hunt him down? The thought filled me with dread.

Shokoor was the CBC’s fixer in Afghanistan and had worked with many journalists in some very crazy and dangerous circumstances. We all liked him, and trusted him with our lives. The term “fixer” really wasn’t adequate or fair to describe what Shokoor did for us, or how much we depended on his help. He would set up interviews and then translate them. He shot videotape. He arranged transportation, which he liked doing—before working for Canadian television, he was an attendant on Afghanistan’s national airline, Ariana. His English was excellent, and he could earn more money, in American dollars, by working with us than with Ariana, so eventually he became our permanent employee in Kabul.

Whenever we needed something, Shokoor was there. He was our eyes and ears outside the confines of the military base, our guide whenever we stepped off. On my first assignment to Afghanistan the summer before, he introduced me to nan-i-Afghani, the long flat sheets of Afghan bread, and had taken me shopping in Kabul for my first kameez. He knew I liked to eat and he knew I liked to shop. He had picked me up from the airport and taken me straight to the shopping district in the heart of the city—Chicken Street. It was the main shopping street, lined with little stores where shopkeepers sold carpets, scarves, purses, and jewellery—mostly to foreigners. I’d bought scarves and a beautiful carpet there the year before, and I wanted to go back for a few more of the lovely patterned silk scarves as gifts for friends in Canada.

Shokoor was always worried about the safety of the journalists he worked with. Every time I left the relative safety of the NATO forces base to go into Kandahar City, he would caution me to put my scarf over my head and to not stay in one place for any length of time. He had been looking forward to my coming to Kabul for a few days, and we were going to split the work of shooting videotape, since the cameraman working with us had decided to stay in Kandahar. Shokoor had gone to the refugee camp a few days before on a “reccie”—a reconnaissance mission—to assess the security situation and to pre-interview some of the people there. Reports out of Kabul indicated the security situation in the city was relatively stable that summer. It was less secure in Kandahar and the south because of the increase in fighting.

Before coming to Afghanistan, I had read the security assessment by AKE, or Andrew Kain Enterprises, a security company hired by the CBC to train journalists who would be travelling to danger zones. I had spent a week outside of Atlanta, Georgia, the year before, learning about combat first aid, and being put through various scenarios, like what to do if the car you’re riding in is pulled over by armed militants. It was extremely useful training and helped prepare us for the possibility that something, anything, might happen in a war zone. One of the things we were taught: always have a location checked out before a shoot.

“It is safe,” Shokoor told me on the phone from Kabul when I was still in Kandahar. “It is a good story, Mellissa.”

We were not going to spend a lot of time at the camp, and he had already chosen a few families, as well as the camp spokesperson, for me to interview. He knew I liked doing stories about women and children, and what the war was doing to the everyday Afghan in his country. We’d done a story on a girls’ soccer team the summer
before, and another story about how the government was taking care of all the children who had been orphaned by the war.

Shokoor was so happy that Canadians could see what life was really like for Afghans. Like me, he believed it was important to tell the stories of those most affected, the homeless, the refugees, the children. Shokoor was young, in his late twenties. He was tall and soft-spoken. Only once had I seen him get angry, when he raised his voice at a guard who refused to let me into a government office even though we had an appointment. He lived mostly in Kabul with his family but would come down to Kandahar if we had stories to do in town and off the base there. That’s where I first met his wife, Zarlashta, the year before, and their new baby. Now he had a second son, and I was supposed to meet him on this trip and go to his home for supper while I was in Kabul. Since I had already been invited to the Canadian embassy for Thanksgiving Monday, we had planned to have dinner with his family on the Sunday night, after our shoot.

I knew that wherever Shokoor was now, he had to be devastated by what happened. I hoped that in my absence someone would be able to reassure him that none of this was his fault. I just knew he would be blaming himself because he felt so responsible every time we went out with him. I hated the thought of Shokoor calling my foreign editor, Jack Nagler, in Toronto to tell him what had happened. I wished I could get on the phone and call him myself. “Jack, I’m okay. This wasn’t Shokoor’s fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. We had a good story at the camp. It’s an important story.”

Dearest M,

Had our first meeting at the Canadian embassy. The ambassador is away and won’t be back for a week, but they’re assembling a team as quickly as possible. We found out Shokoor and his brother are still in custody and are both considered suspects. The Afghan police believe they sold you to the Taliban, but you and I both know that’s preposterous. Why would he do that when he makes a lot of money from the CBC and has done so much work for them over the years? They say there are “discrepancies” in his story. They were among the fourteen or fifteen people who were arrested in the hours after you were taken. But as things go in Afghanistan, Shokoor was allowed to keep his mobile phone in jail and I’ve spoken to him three or four times. He was crying. He blames himself for what happened.

We had to go to the Afghan interior ministry to meet the national police chief and then had a second session with another police “general.” They wanted to make sure your calls were direct and not taped, or relayed through a different location. I don’t understand how it works, but apparently the kidnappers hold two phones together and make the call that way. Seems like pretty farcical police work to me. This “general” told us they had arrested a number of people from the refugee camp and were looking for a guy named “Malik,” who they said was very anxious to get you to visit his tent. He also told us they found the car that was used, and discovered the kidnappers’ weapons at the bottom of a water barrel inside a house. There have been a lot of kidnappings, mostly rich Afghans, and
we have serious concerns that the police are deeply involved. The Americans suspect the chief of police.