Is This Your First War? (8 page)

I spent the day before the Northern Alliance convoy was scheduled to leave in a neighbourhood of Dushanbe inhabited by Afghan refugees. They had made homes here that were more permanent and comfortable than the ones their countrymen found in the refugee camps outside Peshawar. A market catered specifically to their unique appetites. But all were anxious to leave.

“As soon as the Taliban are defeated, we'll go back to Afghanistan. It's our motherland. We have to go back. If they were defeated today, we'd leave today,” a man named Sharif told me. He had once been an engineer in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif, but fled when the Taliban took the city. Now he sold tea and shoes in a market stall.

“They wash themselves with juice instead of water before they pray,” he said of the Taliban, meaning they claim to act in the name of Islam but are not true Muslims. “America must help us defeat the Taliban. But we don't want them to stay. We don't want any other country to rule us. We want to govern ourselves.”

From a nearby stall another Afghan named Mohammad Hakim beckoned me to follow him. We wove our way through the market, past a smoking fire pit where a young boy was cooking a large pot of
plov
, a Central Asian rice pilaf. Gusts of wind blew walnuts off the branches of overhanging trees. They clattered off the tin roofs of market stalls and onto the ground where children scrambled to pick them up. We entered a darkened hallway and emerged in a room where several Afghan men sat around a table supporting sweets, pistachio nuts, and a pot of tea.

The men stood up as we entered. Mohammad introduced me to each man in turn, and each rocked forward slightly, right hand on his heart. It was an infectious gesture.

Salam alaikum.

Wa alaikum salam.

Peace be with you.

And also with you.

Maruf, a friend of Mohammad, poured tea into my cup and then dumped it on the ground, refilling and emptying the cup several times before leaving it on the table.

“I left my house there. I left my land there. I left a piece of my heart there,” he said. Others nodded and murmured. “We can only be free in our own country.”

Maruf blamed the Taliban for his lot as a refugee but bore them no grudge. Once they are defeated, he said, they must be welcomed to become part of a new Afghanistan. “The enemy is someone with a gun. If they reject their guns, they are no longer enemies.”

I asked Maruf why he was so intent on returning to Afghanistan. It had been destroyed by war. People were starving. Rebuilding it would take years. Meanwhile, I said, here in Tajikistan, you have carved out a good life for yourself. Why go home?

“Afghanistan is a beautiful country,” Maruf said. “It is worth loving.”

The next morning I rose at dawn so as not to miss the convoy's departure. I had never before stolen so much as a chocolate bar, but after staring at it for five minutes, I rolled up the blanket on my hotel bed and stuffed it into my backpack. I then headed for the market and bought bags of nuts, dried fruit, and water. Thirty ancient Russian military jeeps were parked nearby. They would take us to the border.

“Are you coming with us?”

A smiling middle-aged man called out to me. He had a stubbly white beard and bright, almost mischievous eyes. His ethnicity and accent were hard to place, but he sounded educated. All around us people were grunting and swearing, hoisting bags onto the roofs of jeeps, and yelling into cell phones. He appeared to take no notice.

“I am Doctor Awwad,” he said. “This,” he continued, gesturing with a flourish at a much younger and slightly flustered South Asian man who was trying to disassemble a tripod, “is Arvind. He's my cameraman.”

Awwad's first name was Waiel, though I never called him that, even weeks later, after we had been shot at together, slept under the same blanket and worn each others' unwashed clothes. I don't think I ever even addressed him without the honourific “Doctor.” It wasn't that he was stuffy or full of himself. He simply had a professorial air about him that made it difficult not to show him respect. He and Arvind worked for the Middle East Broadcasting Corporation. They were based India. Awwad, who was Syrian, lived there with his Persian wife. He was a medical doctor by training but said he could make more money as a journalist. I think he also preferred reporting to medicine.

Loud, belching, mechanical coughs sounded as the jeeps in the convoy sputtered to life. “We'll see you there,” Awwad said and turned to jog away. Arvind followed, lugging his camera equipment. I climbed into the back seat of a jeep that had been reserved for me. There was a Tajik man beside me. I don't know what he did or why he was going to Afghanistan. He spoke no English. Shortly after we left Dushanbe, he was asleep on my shoulder.

Waiel Awwad.

The journey south took all day. We were held up by checkpoints. Jeeps got stuck in the sand and had to be dug out. At times the dust and sand blowing across treeless mountains obscured the sky so that it was impossible to tell whether the sun still shone. Periodically we'd pass through a cluster of mud brick houses. Brightly dressed women waved while their sons ran to open windows with bags of nuts to sell. But these scenes disappeared the closer we got to the border. Soon, there were only tumbleweeds, sand, and dust so pervasive it was difficult to discern thorn bushes from barbed wire.

We were held up at the last checkpoint, just north of the Amu Darya River, as darkness fell. The river marked the border, and the front lines lay not far beyond that. Deep, rumbling explosions rolled over us, rattling my chest and catching the breath in my throat. They came with muted flashes of light that briefly glowed just above the horizon and were followed by the staccato clatter of small arms. Tracer bullets and rockets lit up the sky. I had never before heard weapons fired in anger. It was exhilarating and terrifying all at the same time. I turned on a flashlight to write in my notebook.

“No light! No light!”

One of the men shepherding the convoy yelled down the row of cars. I turned off the flashlight and waited. The man beside me was again asleep on my shoulder.

Finally, close to midnight, we drove to the very edge of the river and unloaded. A rough barge had been pulled to the Tajik shore. It looked like a floating dock you might find at a weekend cottage. A metal cable anchored to both banks of the river allowed it to be pulled across by a tractor engine on shore. I carried my pack and my five-litre bottles of water onto the barge and looked for something to hold on to as it swung into the current. There was nothing. The water below me was black. Halfway across the river I looked back at Tajikistan. The Tajik border guards wore old Russian uniforms — tight-fitting shirts and peaked hats. I looked south again as the Afghan riverbank came into view. It was a sight I will never forget. The sky still crackled and glowed with the fire of war. As we inched toward land, men became visible, little more than silhouettes. They carried assault rifles over their shoulders and wore turbans and loose-fitting clothes that billowed in the wind and swirling sand. The barge lurched to a stop. I shouldered my pack and stepped onto the ground.

War

T
he
teenaged soldier standing behind a desk in the hut that served as a border post on the Afghan side of the river squinted at my passport. It was almost pitch black inside. I fished a flashlight out of my pocket and shone the beam at the stamp from the Afghan embassy in Dushanbe. The border guard stared at it studiously. It wasn't clear that he could read. He looked at me and beamed.

“
Baleh
,” he said. Okay.

A few minutes later Arvind, Dr. Awwad, and I were squeezed into a Russian jeep heading east over dried and deeply rutted mud. There was no real road. Dr. Awwad spoke decent Farsi because of his Persian wife and could converse with our driver. He was taking us to Khodja Bahuddin, the village where Ahmed Shah Massoud had been assassinated by al-Qaeda agents a few weeks before. The Northern Alliance would give us a place to sleep there. Our progress was little faster than walking speed, given the condition of the ground below us and of the decades-old vehicle we drove in. But slowly the sounds of war became increasingly muffled and then almost imperceptible. We pulled into the village and then to a walled compound with a sheet metal gate guarded by a soldier slouched in a white plastic chair. He roused himself to open the gate as we climbed out of the jeep and then settled in to sleep again.

Inside were a few canvas tents with the logo of the Red Crescent Society stencilled on them and several mud-walled and concrete buildings. Although it was well after midnight and the sky showed no hint of dawn, light shone from one of them. I approached and called out softly. The woman who came to the door looked Southeast Asian but spoke with a flat American accent. Her face was clean. Her hair looked washed and brushed. I realized she must have been a television reporter.

“Yes?” she said.

I looked past her to what appeared to be an empty room, save a few cameras and bags piled near the walls. A kerosene lamp provided the light.

“Hi. We've been in a jeep or digging through sand for most of the last twenty-four hours. We just arrived. We're really tired. Can we sleep inside on the floor until morning?”

“No. I'm sorry. NBC has the building.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“NBC has this building. They told me I could sleep here, but they can't let anyone else in.” She tried to smile. She couldn't.

I was furious. “NBC doesn't have this building. It belongs to the Northern Alliance. They're letting you stay here. They're letting us stay here, too. Who the hell are you to stop them?”

I was getting really worked up. Every Afghan I had met, from the exiles in Peshawar the previous year, to those in Dushanbe the week before, had shown me humbling hospitality. And now this American woman was playing gatekeeper. I was on the verge of losing my temper completely. But then Dr. Awwad was behind my right shoulder.

“It's okay,” he said, holding an upraised palm toward me and speaking in low and even tones. “It will be morning soon anyway.”

I felt my outrage draining away. I was exhausted.

The building had a concrete base with a flat ledge that extended beyond its walls and above the sand below. From my bag I pulled the blanket from the Dushanbe hotel, and another thin woollen one I had bought in Pakistan the year before. Dr. Awwad, Arvind, and I lay beneath them. The temperature outside was a little above zero. The concrete beneath us was cold to touch. I felt myself shaking. I rummaged in my bag and pulled out a toque. I awoke a couple of hours later with the sun cresting the horizon and NBC crew members stepping over us on their way to the latrine.

It took me a few moments to realize where I was. The previous day I had woken up in a bed, in a hotel, in another country. Now there was a bearded man on one side of me and sand on the other. The compound had been built on a slight plateau, meaning that when I sat up, I could see dozens of mud-walled homes spilling away from the hillside, and just above them the sun, looking like a burning red disc as it shone through the heavy dust that hung in the air. The building where al-Qaeda agents had murdered Massoud was nearby. Blasted smoke stained its walls. The Northern Alliance had an operating base here and would feed and shelter us for twenty dollars a day. Locals who spoke English, or who pretended to do so, knew there were journalists here and had come looking for work. Anyone with a car did the same. I ate the breakfast provided by the Northern Alliance — flatbread and tea — and split the cost of a driver with Arvind and Dr. Awwad. I also hired a young man who assured me his English was strong to work as my translator. We decided to head straight for the front lines.

The front was only ten or fifteen kilometres away, but it took us a couple of hours to get there. The trip was one I would take dozens of times over the next few weeks. There wasn't a proper road anywhere, but the mud walls of buildings in the village were spaced far enough apart to allow a jeep to pass between them. We would drive south out of the compound, through the market on the edge of town where the money-traders worked and where it was possible to buy potatoes and onions and, occasionally, a live chicken. Then west over rutted dirt toward the front. Our exact route would change depending on exactly where we were going, but inevitably we would reach the Kocha River and would have to leave the jeep behind. There we would hire horses to cross the river and continue over ground that provided more cover in the form of trees and gullies as we neared Taliban lines.

The author near Taliban lines, October 2001.

In the weeks to come, I would recognize that between Khodja Bahuddin and no man's land, there were always places along the way at which point going farther would mean a sharp increase in danger. It was relatively safe, for example, to stop at the Northern Alliance strongpoint of Ai-Khanoum, the hilltop ruins of a city Alexander the Great founded more than 2,000 years ago. Amid pottery shards and a beautifully preserved pediment from a Corinthian column, it was possible to see for miles in every direction and count the puffs of smoke that rose in the distance from the impact of shells or bombs. The Taliban never seemed able to come close to hitting it with artillery and would have had to scale a cliff to get there in person. But beyond Ai-Khanoum there were stretches of open ground, places where you would have to leave the shelter of a hill to move forward, or a forest that became too sparse to hide your movement. The problem was that in isolation, each decision seemed small and inconsequential.
We'll drive quickly to that next hill; it won't take more than five minutes. I barely hear any shooting; let's move up a bit. Nobody can see us here.
Then, an hour or two later, you'd find yourself in the midst of a firefight and wonder how you got there.

On this morning, however, I understood none of this. As we coaxed our horses into the cool waters of the Kocha River, the sounds of explosions and sputtering machine guns wafted over us. But I was so captivated by the beauty of the valley, so pleased to be on a horse, so excited to be nearing a battle, that it never occurred to me to worry. It is only possible to be that naïve and that ignorant about war once. Soon I would barely recognize the thrill I felt that morning. And, of course, it seems foolish to admit to those emotions now. But I suspect that any journalist who has covered conflict and denies feeling a similar rush of heightened emotions upon first approaching the sound of gunfire is being less than truthful, or else has forgotten.

A Northern Alliance fighter at Ai-Khanoum, a hilltop fortress founded by Alexander the Great.

We reached a small hill and scrambled to the top, where six men and boys huddled in a small dugout with a heavy machine gun and several AK-47 assault rifles. It wasn't until I heard shells whistling over our heads and saw smoke rising from explosions both in front of us and behind us that I realized how exposed we were. I asked one of the teenagers what he was fighting for.

“He says Taliban very, very bad,” my translator relayed to me. “If he sees one, he will kill him.”

I scratched in my notebook. Not a bad quote, I thought. Vivid stuff.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Taliban very, very bad,” came the response by way of my translator. “He will kill them.”

A couple more exchanges like this and it dawned on me that my translator's English consisted of little more than a few dozen phrases he had memorized. The deceit had earned him a hundred bucks.

Fortunately, thanks to Dr. Awwad's Farsi, we were able to communicate with the fighters on the hill. They were all young. The commander of the little hilltop garrison, Shah Wali, was twenty. Those under him were teenagers. They smiled a lot. One had lost a leg to a landmine. The shin and knee of another, Mohammad Hussein, were crisscrossed with raised white welts of scar tissue. He pointed to the village below us, where he had been hit during a Taliban attack the previous year. He lost consciousness and woke up in a hospital. When he could walk again, he came back to the front. A third, Kharmoh Mohammad, had also been shot.

They told us that the Taliban were foreigners and terrorists, not real Afghans. They wanted peace. I dutifully wrote it all down in my notebook. Then they said they were homesick. Mohammad had been fighting for two years, since he was sixteen, and had not seen his family all that time. For Wali, it had been three years. Both were illiterate and asked me to write a letter to their mothers. “Tell her I'm okay.” I took a photo to include in the letter. They posed with their arms wrapped around each other and their chests thrust out. The turban Mohammad wrapped above his beardless face looked oversized, as if he were dressing up. It was getting late. We picked our way back down the hill. I looked up. Mohammad and Wali were still waving from the crest of the hill. They seemed small. I waved back.

Northern Alliance fighters Shah Wali and Kharmoh Mohammad hold a hilltop dugout facing the Taliban.

One of the pleasures of reporting from northern Afghanistan at that time was freedom of movement. I was staying in a mud compound that lacked the security and comforts of the fortified military bases where journalists who arrived later in the war would typically stay. But then I imagine many of them experienced Afghanistan from a much greater distance. I didn't see a Western soldier the entire time I was in Afghanistan that trip. Few were there during the early months of the war. Most on the ground were secretive American special forces. Occasionally, talking to Afghan soldiers in a dugout opposite Taliban lines, one would tell me that an American had been there the night before, scouting Taliban positions. Soon after the bombs would come.

I never needed to hire an armed guard, either. When I wasn't conducting interviews, even a translator or guide wasn't necessary. I'd simply leave the compound and keep walking. It helped that I typically wore my shalwar kamiz with an Afghan blanket slung over my shoulders. The outfit wouldn't have fooled anyone who looked too closely, but it meant that the orphans and other children who ran in packs through the town ignored me.

An elderly man near the Northern Alliance strongpoint of Ai-Khanoum.