Ebrahim Mahdawi writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace across Afghanistan.
In this testimony, Seventy-year-old Abdul Husain from Deh Afghan remembers a [...]]]>
Graves on Tapa e Karez, the hill of martyrs. Photo credit: Najibullah Musafer/Killid
Ebrahim Mahdawi writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace across Afghanistan.
In this testimony, Seventy-year-old Abdul Husain from Deh Afghan remembers a Russian attack on his village in the Nahoor district. Today, Nahoor, in Ghazni province, is picture postcard pretty: green with plentiful water from streams and rain. There are orchards of apricots, plums, prunes and other fruit. But three decades ago it was the site of a bloodbath.
The worst year was 1981, two years after the Soviet army rolled across the border into Afghanistan. Russian soldiers tried to fight their way into Nahoor through the Qeyagh pass. They bombed Deh Afghan and Sokhta Alawdani, the two villages closest to the border.
“The murdered people were all my relatives – one of my brothers, four cousins and so many others,” says Husain.
There are families who don’t know what happened to loved ones, while in village after village, the many physically challenged survivors are daily reminders of the bombings and killings.
Nahoor with its majority Hazara population was on the frontline of the war between Soviet soldiers and mujaheddin. Power in Kabul rested in the hands of Babrak Karmal, the third communist party president. Nahoor was the first district the Afghan fighters had wrested from the “Russians” as the Soviets were called. The Soviet army bombarded Nahoor from the air and with heavy artillery.
Terror everywhere
According to Husain, who is also known as Malak Abdul, even people in remote and mountainous areas of Nahoor were not safe from Russian “barbarity”. The terror was everywhere. There was no peace for civilians. Those who objected were tortured, and thrown in prison.
Russians entered people’s houses, and stripped it of all belongings. Buildings were demolished. Families fled the fighting and killing. The only people who remained were the mujaheddin.
“I also took my family to a safe area hoping to come back when it was safe,” says Husain.
While his younger brother and his family left, his elder brother and relatives stayed to defend the village. “My brother knew the Russians were coming but he was not aware they had already entered the village. He tried to save himself by moving to Ghara, a village adjacent to ours. But he did not make it,” he says.
Husain and his brother, their families and others from the village, kept walking. But there was no escaping the whine of fighter planes and pounding of shells. “It was terrifying. We did not know how to get away. We decided to go to the Siah Qul area where we thought it would be safer and out of the enemy’s line of firing,” he says.
Gunned down
One kilometre short of Siah Qul, a barren valley in the desert, the Soviet soldiers caught up with the fleeing civilians. “There was one kilometre to get to Siah Qul. Suddenly the desert erupted with the sound of tanks. The Russians had besieged the desert.
“We didn’t know the mountains above Siah Qul were the hideout of mujaheddin,” says Husain.
Russian tanks trained their guns on the winding procession of fleeing civilians. In the bloodbath that followed, only those who ran up the mountainsides survived.
“We were still in the middle of the desert when the Russian tanks started firing toward us from three sides. We ran as fast as we could toward Sia Qul valley. The only hope of escape lay in going into the mountains where the mujaheddin were hiding,” he recalls.
“My brother Jan Ali and some others were running helter skelter to save themselves. The group had scattered. But no one was able to save themselves. Russian tanks got them all in the end,” he says.
Sole survivor
The first one to go down was a relative called Sultan. A shot first got him in the leg. He was screaming, but the Russians had no pity, says Husain. “They sprayed him with bullets,”. Bodies littered the ground.
Husain still cannot fathom how he was the only person who escaped. “The invaders killed all of them. They fired hundreds of shots,” he says.
The Soviet soldiers eventually retreated after 24 hours in nearby Sokhta Alawdani, and men started trickling back into the village. “Women and children stayed away because there was still the possibility of the Russians returning,” he says. “We gathered together all the bodies of the dead.” They decided to bury the martyrs in one place, on a hill called Tapa e Karez. “It wasn’t a graveyard. The hill is called the hill of martyrs,” he says.
The Russians never came back to Nahoor and the village remained in mujaheddin hands until the Soviet army pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989.
]]>
Noor Wali Sayeed Shinwarai writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace.
For this testimony, Shinwarai [...]]]>
Noor Wali Sayeed Shinwarai writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace.
For this testimony, Shinwarai interviewed Farid Ahmad, who was a child when his father was badly injured in a rocket attack, forcing Farid to become the breadwinner for the family.
“When I was born, the country was in the control of Russians. Then the parties (mujaheddin groups) got power and nobody could go out of the house. The war among the parties was going on every day. Unarmed civilians were being killed. Kabul city looked like a graveyard,” said Farid Ahmad.
He was 10 years old when his father was seriously injured. Schools had been closed for a long time because of the war between fighters of Shura-e-Nezar (the group led by Ahmad Shah Massoud) and Uzbek warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum. The war, which started in 1993, was called the “hard war” in Kabul. Rockets fell through the day and night. One fell on a factory building in Qasaba where Farid’s father, Marjan, was at work as a welder.
“My father was not a political person, he was just a welder,” said Farid. “He got such serious wounds that no clinic or doctor in Qasaba would treat him. My father had become blind,” he added.
The family lost their sole breadwinner, and no relative offered to look after them. “The people in our tribe help in hard times but my uncles in Laghman did not help us, nor did our aunts in Jalalabad ask about us,” he said.
The family starved for nine days. Every night they went to bed hungry. There was no money to buy food or candles. “We spent night after night in the dark,” he recalled.
It was not easy to flee Kabul either, because everywhere warlords had set up barriers, which could be crossed only on paying a toll. Anyone caught sneaking across would be beaten or killed.
Hard times
But early on the tenth day there was good news. The war stopped for 24 hours. Rival sides had agreed to a ceasefire. The family loaded their few belongings in an old truck, and left Kabul for Jalalabad. “My brothers and sisters were all younger than me. My father, who had not gotten any treatment, was lying on the floor of the truck. We got to Jalalabad with difficulty,” he recalled.
In Jalalabad, the 10-year-old took his father to the public hospital, and his siblings to the house of an aunt. He went to the city’s Hesar Sahahi refugee camp where many thousands of families were sheltering in tents. In a corner of the camp, Farid made a make-shift shelter out of waste. The family was brought to live there. “The weather was hot in the day. There was no water. We would eat once a day, ” said Farid. “My father slowly recovered, but not his eye sight.”
The camp would be their home until 1996, when the Taliban pushed the mujaheddin out of Kabul.
“Believe me we, didn’t know what Eid was – we could never afford to celebrate.” Farid remembers the one time his younger brothers found a handful of henna, traditionally used for body decorations to mark the celebration of the end of Ramadan, which traditionally involves lavish dispays of food and festivities.
A school was opened in the camp, allowing his brothers and sisters to get an education. Meanwhile, Farid worked as a day labourer, leaving early in the morning, day after day to find work.
Signs of hope
Like so many others, Farid, though still a teenager, had become the breadwinner of the family. He said there were times when he wanted to cry and scream loudly out of frustration but he was careful not to upset his parents. “My father was enduring the pain of blindness. Everything was dark for him. I felt that I, too, should endure the pain and go to work.”
In 1996, the family moved back to Kabul, but life did not get any better. “Untill 2002, when the Taliban fell and Karzai assumed power, nobody in the family knew whether we would have tears for dinner or vegetables,” he said.
Things have gradually improved over the last decade. Farid has found work with a non-governmental organisation. His brothers have reached university. “One can read and write four languages – Dari, Pashto, English and French,” he said, proudly. “I had not seen a smile on my mother’s face for years. Now she smiles, and my father has reconciled to being blind.”
Three years ago Farid, who had saved enough money, got married. “God has lit the candles in our house once again. My daughter is one and a half years old, and my son is one month old.
My father put his hand on his face and named him Sulaiman.”
]]>
Iqbal Jan is from Haska Mina district in Nangarhar province, bordering Pakistan. Under the communist government of Mohammad Najibullah (1987-92) it was a centre of jihadist groups. They were entrenched in its villages to target government forces – a tactic of war that is used now by the Taliban. Caught in the cross-fire, many civilians perished.
Jan’s family was killed in an air attack, he says, after Hezb-e-Islami forces led-by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar took up position behind his house. “A commander of the Hezb-e-Islami was firing at the (government) security posts from behind our house. I begged him not to fire from the village but the commander would not listen. The Russian (Soviet) helicopters levelled my house,” he remembers.
“I remember very well. It was a very cold winter day. At 3 O’Clock the Russian helicopters came and made a doomsday of my house.”
Nearly the entire family was wiped out. Iqbal Jan’s wife, two sons, his brother’s wife, a nephew and niece, a son, daughter and granddaughter of his uncle were all dead. “My uncle, his wife, his son, and I were seriously injured,” he says.
Jan says the commander was seeking to punish him because Jan refused to give him food when he requested it. “We had nothing. I told him so. He was so incensed he screamed, ‘I will kill you because you have become a communist’.”
Burrying the dead
“There were no government officials in our village to help us. Villagers who escaped injury immediately put the wounded on mules and transported them to hospital in Peshawar (across the Khyber Pass in Pakistan). The neighbours buried the dead in the night.”
It was not what Jan envisioned when he and his brother decided to move their famillies back to Afghanistan after years of living as refugees in Pakistan.
A few years before, at the start of the war between government forces and US-armed mujaheddin, the brothers had joined the tens of thousands of Afghan civilians who feld across the border into Teera in Pakistan. “It was a very dark night, and bitterly cold. My wife suddenly called out that the baby swaddled around her bosom was dead. We had nothing to eat, or keep warm — we should have died,” he says. “My lovely son was buried in the graveyard at Teera the next day. Then we moved to Kohat.”
In Kohat city in Pakistan’s Khyber Paktunkhwa province, the brothers worked as coolies (head-load workers) in the vegetable market. When Jan’s uncle visited them a few years later, he begged them to return to Afghanistan, saying the war had ended.
Having survived hunger, loss and hardship as refugees in Pakistan, the brothers returned for a new start in Haska Mina, only to see their families die in the rocket attack on their new home.
Closure
For a while, the remainder of his family – two of his own sons, a nephew and niece who also survived – lived on charity. Neighbours gave them food so they would not starve, a friendly shopkeeper would give them free fabric to make new clothes for Eid.
Fifteen years ago he remarried, and built himself a new house of stones and mud. But over two decades after the attack, he struggles to find closure.
For a devout Muslim like Jan, praying at the graveside on the anniversary of a realtive’s death is an important ritual – one he can’t perform. “I don’t know who is buried where in the unmarked graves,” he says.
“God has given me four daughters and two sons,” he says piously. “But I still dream of my martyred relatives who were buried in the dark by our neighbours.”
]]>