The Favored Daughter (29 page)

He carried with him the hopes of many Afghans. And we were pleased to hear via BBC radio that he was well received. His message was simple and clear. The Taliban, and the Al Qaida fighters they were sheltering, were a growing threat—not only to Afghanistan but to the world.

In a personalized message to then US President George Bush, Massoud warned: “If you don't help us, these terrorists will damage the US and Europe very soon.”

But the West's political leaders did not heed his warnings in time.

There was very much an air of sad resignation among my friends in those days. It really felt like the Taliban was here to stay forever. For 14 years we fought the Soviets and now we had to fight this new and strange form of Islam. And if the United Nations did recognize them as the government that meant the Rabbani government that ruled in Badakhshan would become the illegal government. On a personal level I would have almost certainly lost my job.

At the same time that General Massoud was in Europe, a lot of foreign delegations came to Badakhshan to meet Rabbani. He had since returned from Pakistan and was based out of Faizabad. It was clear the United Nations was now actively trying to broker peace and some kind of agreement between the Taliban and the government.

It was September 9, 2001, a sunny autumn day. I had just got in the UN car and was on my way to a displaced persons (IDP) camp. I was supposed to be monitoring the children's play activities. When I got there everyone was crying. The lives of these IDPs was truly awful—they lived in tents with no sanitation but they never lost their spirit and would always smile and joke. But now they were all in floods of tears. A young man told me why. Ahmed Shah Massoud had reportedly been killed. My head spun and my knees buckled underneath me. It was just like the sensation I had when my mother died when I thought I was falling out of the sky. The hero of our nation could not be dead, he couldn't be.

Later on that night we got more details of the story on the BBC. The situation was still very confused as to whether he was dead or just badly injured, and certainly on the ground there were wild rumors. But over the course of the coming weeks and months the picture became clearer. Two Arab extremists posing as television journalists detonated a bomb that was hidden inside their camera as they interviewed the famously cautious Massoud. One died in the explosion, and the other was gunned down by Massoud's men as he tried to escape. Massoud was badly injured in the blast and died while being flown by helicopter to a hospital. Police in France and Belgium later made a string of arrests and convicted a number of Al Qaida–linked North African men for providing the killers with forged documents and cover stories. It seems Osama Bin Laden had correctly judged that following his network's now infamous terrorist attacks on the United States two days later, Washington would naturally turn to Massoud's Northern Alliance to capture or kill him. Indeed, they did. But the Northern Alliance would have to go into that battle without their great commander.

I can only liken it to the day in America when President Kennedy died. Americans of that generation always say they remember exactly where they were when they heard the news. It was the same for us Afghans when Massoud died. Even Shaharzad, who was just a tiny girl of three, remembers that day.

For many, Massoud was the hero of the mujahideen, the man who had led the battle against the Soviets. He was a skillful tactician and a brutally efficient soldier. His victories earned him the title “Lion of the Panjshir.” But for many of the younger generation, like me, who had been damaged by that war, his real heroism began when he started to fight against the Taliban. He was so often the lone voice speaking out and warning against the extremism they carried with them. He warned the world about the terrorists and he paid for that with his life.

To this day I struggle to understand how the West ignored his message that Islamic terrorism was a threat to the world. He told them that if we don't stop it now, stop it today in Afghanistan, tomorrow it will come to their borders. He tried to explain that he was a Muslim—a strong Muslim—but the Islam the Taliban propagated was not one he agreed with nor one that represented the culture or history of the Afghan nation. He had five children, four daughters and a son. All of his daughters were educated and he often spoke about that. He tried to educate people that Islamic values do not prevent a woman from being educated or working. He knew the Taliban was creating a negative image of Islam around the world and he tried to counter this.

He was such an inspiration to me. He taught me that freedom is not a gift from God. It is something men must earn.

When he died I felt Afghanistan had lost all hope.

Just 48 hours later Massoud's warnings about Islamic terrorism came horrifically true. The twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York were attacked, along with the Pentagon in Virginia, while a fourth airliner crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, killing 40 passengers and crew along with four hijackers, taking the total number of Al Qaida victims that day to 2,977 people. Innocent people.

The world had woken up to the warnings too late to save these poor people.

And many more innocent lives, mostly in Afghanistan and Iraq, would be lost in the so-called war on terror that now followed.

 

SEVENTEEN

THE DARKNESS LIFTS

On September 11, 2001, I was sitting at my desk when a colleague ran in clutching a radio. We listened in shock at the news that the twin towers had been attacked.

I had tears running down my face as I thought about all those people trapped inside that building. We had no skyscrapers in Afghanistan and I had never seen a building so high it touched the sky, so I could only imagine the terror of being unable to get out of a burning building.

For the first time I felt a strong connection between what was happening in Afghanistan and what was happening on the other side of the world. For me the whole story was like one big jigsaw puzzle. It was a puzzle that had been coming together for years. Now someone somewhere had placed the final piece on the board. And the world was shaking with shock.

Bitterly I thought that at least world leaders would now finally recognize that Ahmed Shah Massoud's warnings had been right when he said terrorism would come to their borders.

What I didn't expect was such a quick response from the world. Many Afghans would disagree with me on this, but I personally believe very strongly that the United States was right to send troops into Afghanistan to topple the Taliban.

At work, a barrage of emails started to come in, warning international UN staff to leave Afghanistan and all local staff to stay in their main office and not travel within the country. My boss was from another province and went to be with his family, so I was left to manage the office alone.

It was a very difficult time because we had been setting up a back-toschool campaign in which thousands of boys and girls who were past school age but who had missed an education because of the war or the Taliban were invited back to finish their studies.

UNICEF, in cooperation with other organizations, provided the children with temporary school tents, stationery, and books. It was exhausting but hugely rewarding to know that I was helping to ensure that these young people an education.

We had also been planning a big polio immunization campaign all over the province. For two months, alone, we managed to implement the immunization campaign for children and we managed to keep the schools open. I was still the only Afghan female UNICEF staff member inside Afghanistan, and now I was also the only one managing the office.

In America the investigation into who carried out the 9/11 attacks quickly identified the hijackers, and then traced their activities back to Al Qaida sources. Washington demanded that the Taliban government hand over Osama Bin Laden. The Taliban refused.

On October 7, 2001, less than a month after the attack on the World Trade Center, the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom. American and British warplanes and cruise missiles struck Taliban and Al Qaida targets across Afghanistan. At the same time Massoud's Northern Alliance soldiers began to push south toward Kabul with the aid of their new-found air superiority, but sadly without their key general.

The West was hoping for a quick, clean removal of the Taliban and the death or capture of Osama Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Al-Zawahiri.

It was a simple plan: US and British airpower would devastate Taliban forces, while new types of bombs would blow apart whole mountainsides to kill Al Qaida fighters in the caves where they hid. On the ground the Northern Alliance and other key forces, again predominantly from the north, would mop up what the bombs had missed.

Some of these men took to their task with a chilling enthusiasm. We occasionally heard news of the atrocities against Taliban forces, such as hundreds of Taliban prisoners being burned alive. Whoever an enemy is, such gross inhuman abuse in war is always wrong. In some of the villages that had been oppressed by the Taliban, people grew brave and began pelting them with stones and telling them to leave.

I knew that not all the Taliban had been bad. Some of the low-level people in their ranks were just people trying to survive. And hadn't I even been helped by some of them? Like the old man who didn't even know me but had helped me to get Hamid out of prison one time. I was sad these individual men were getting killed, but I was thrilled the Taliban's theocratic regime was being destroyed and this dark period of Afghan history was coming to an end.

I didn't mind that it was the United States and a host of other foreign nations leading the fighting. Many Afghans dislike the help of non-Muslims because they are infidels (or non-believers). But I didn't see it that way. I had never really considered the Taliban proper Afghans anyway. They were always controlled and led by other nations. I remember when I had lived in Kabul seeing the entire of neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khan taken over by the Taliban's “guests”: the Arabs, the Chechens, and the Pakistanis. Hearing their accents and seeing their wives dressed in black niqabs (the Arab style face and head covering), I'd had the sensation that Kabul was no longer under Afghan control but had become an Arab proxy city, like Riyadh in Saudi Arabia or Doha in Qatar.

And some of the Taliban's worst atrocities had foreign connections. When the Taliban attacked an area north of Kabul called the Shomali plains, they did so with such ferocity that the land is still known as the burning plains. During one battle they killed thousands of men, and then they deliberately burned all the trees and crops before bulldozing the remains into the ground. This totally annihilated the population's chances of future survival. Destroying crops and other scorched-earth tactics are things I associate more with Arab countries, rather than Afghanistan. And it is most definitely not something the Taliban would have been clever enough to have thought of themselves.

After that they went from house to house forcing all the young girls and women outside. The last time people saw these women they were being herded into trucks and cars. The local suspicion was that they were taken to countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar and forced to work in brothels. And of course many of the foreign fighters took these women as forced wives. No one can prove these local suspicions are true, but too many of these things happened for me not to believe them.

So when non-Afghan forces were involved in the Taliban's defeat I was grateful for their help. I was just so very pleased they were no longer going to be running my beloved country. One by one the provinces fell from Taliban control. In Tora Bora, which had been believed to be Bin Laden's hideout, the fighting raged for weeks. Then suddenly it was over. The Taliban were gone.

The men who had tortured my husband and destroyed my chance of a happy marriage were losing their power, just as my poor husband Hamid was losing his own final battle with his health.

BEING THE ONLY FEMALE STAFF MEMBER at the UN in the country made me the subject of much curiosity. Journalists constantly visited my office wanting my advice on stories they could write—something that was hard to find time for because of all my work responsibilities.

My workload meant that I was out until late most evenings, and this made for problems at home. Hamid was sick and he needed me. I wanted to be with him, but I also wanted to be doing this essential work for my country. Usually, Hamid was supportive and didn't mind when I worked long hours, but by now he knew he didn't have long left and he resented the time I gave to my job over him. I was completely torn emotionally, which only added to the stress.

Some days I was literally running from one meeting to the next, with no time to eat. I was still wearing my burqa, even during the meetings with foreign officials and aid workers. Then one day, the provincial governor suggested I take it off. He said it was okay. These people needed to see my face to communicate with me. After that, I stopped wearing it at work.