Nir Rosen - Aftermath

We drove through a Shiite village called Kara Barei on our way to the area between Gabari and Sher Kala village. “I’m a martyr, I’m a star,” sang the Taliban chants on the tape. “I’ve reached my goal, I’m a martyr . . . I will testify on behalf of my mother on Judgment Day. When I was small my mother put me on her lap and spoke sweetly to me . . .” We finally arrived at the mosque where Dr. Khalil was waiting for us. Upon entering I inadvertently stepped on a pair of Prada sunglasses. Dr. Khalil walked in at that moment and picked them up to examine them somberly. He was a burly man with light skin and a dark brown beard. He had thick hands and was stern. He wore a cap on his head. After everybody prayed together, Dr. Khalil told everybody to leave the room except for Kamal, Yusuf, and me. We sat on the floor. He put his sunglasses on. “Deir obekhi , ” I said, apologizing for entering his territory without permission. He did not react but accused Kamal and me of being spies for the Afghan army. He asked how I got a visa to Afghanistan and why, and how I got visas to other countries. I told him I was there to write about the mujahideen and tell their story. If I liked them so much, he said, why didn’t I join them? He asked about my contact. I said he was a former mujahid from Jamiat-i Islami. He scoffed dismissively, telling me they were not mujahideen. Suddenly he got up and said he would make phone calls to Pakistan and elsewhere to investigate us, so we had to spend the night in the mosque—he would come back for us in the morning. He got up and left in a hurry as I tried to protest.

I sat glumly on the floor in the guest room. A few minutes later Shafiq stuck his head in and said, “Yallah , ” Arabic for “come on.” I stood up with alacrity, relieved to get out of there though confused about why. But the Talibs sitting with us insisted we drink the tea they had just made. I hurriedly gulped down the scalding tea. We stepped out into the darkness and heard helicopters in the distance. Soon we could spot their silhouettes; everybody ducked behind the car and motorcycle, so I did too, wondering if the men I was with had heard of night-vision goggles. After the sky was silent again, Yusuf apologized for having to leave me and go see his family. Shafiq told me we had to return to this mosque in the morning, and I was once again crestfallen. He drove the Corolla slowly, painstakingly winding through invisible paths. The moonlight was blocked by dust. I could see nothing out the window and wondered what was guiding Shafiq. The mobile phone network was shut down again, and I had no way of updating my contacts in Kabul.

At Shafiq’s house I met his seventeen-year-old brother, who was studying at a nearby state school and knew some English. I was surprised that a Taliban commander would let his brother attend a government school. Shafiq’s brother told me he wanted to study engineering and didn’t want to fight. He had been with Mullah Abdillah all day, he said, and Abdillah had spent much of the day calling Taliban commanders to try to release me from Dr. Khalil. He had even called Mansur Dadullah in Kandahar.

Shafiq carried a television into the guest room and turned on the generator. He was able to read the English titles on the guide and found Al Jazeera, the Arabic satellite news channel. We watched coverage of attacks on the road from Kabul to Jalalabad and the ones we had driven by in Wardak. Boys were shown taking pieces of the trucks away. Shafiq got bored with Al Jazeera and put on Ariana, an Afghan channel, to watch an Indian soap opera dubbed in Dari. Women were shown in revealing Western attire. I was amazed that he would watch something so anathema to the Taliban. It was okay, he said. “It’s a drama about a family.” Later he put on a British Muslim channel called Islam and moved on to an Iranian American pop-music satellite channel. A portly singer with stubble and long hair imitated ’80s rock in Farsi. The next video showed an Iranian pop singer dressed up in leather like Davy Crockett and wearing brand-name tank tops. It was terrible stuff, but Shafiq told me he had no problem with these things. Qadim and Shafiq’s brother chatted. Shafiq read him something, and it became clear that Qadim was illiterate.

I finally managed to fall asleep, but at 11 p.m. there was shouting outside, and Kamal told me to wake up. “The Taliban are here for us,” he said, and my heart started racing again. Three young men carrying AK-47s with scarves and blankets draped around their heads and shoulders walked in. My knees felt weak as I stood up to greet them. “They’re a different group,” Shafiq’s brother said. They were not here for us at all. They hadn’t even heard of us but were merely a night patrol passing by. One of them sat on the floor with his barrel pointing at Shafiq. I eyed him nervously as he played with the trigger absentmindedly until Shafiq’s brother told him that his safety was off and it was dangerous. They left and came back again, this time leaving with Shafiq.

In the morning, I woke up to the sound of military planes overhead. I stepped out of the qala and saw a convoy of American armored vehicles a mile away. I fought the strong urge to walk to them and be rescued, knowing they might shoot me themselves and that it would doom everybody who had helped me. I waited impatiently for the phone network to go back up. One of my contacts in Kabul told me that he had spoken to senior Taliban people everywhere and had told Dr. Khalil not to harm us, but Dr. Khalil insisted we were spies. My contact thought he was just trying to assert his independence and hoped to exchange us for a large ransom. Mullah Nasir, a one-armed Kandahari who served as Taliban governor for Ghazni, was also helping us. Zaibullah Mujahed, the Taliban spokesman, had promised to call Dr. Khalil as well. I tried to persuade Shafiq to drive us to Ghazni’s capital, but he said that if he didn’t return us to Dr. Khalil, then Khalil would arrest him.

Shafiq’s nephew had been arrested the night before after a Taliban patrol spotted him walking with a girl. Shafiq left us to go release him. In the meantime I spoke to a contact in Kabul, who told me that we had gotten caught in a rivalry between Mullah Abdillah and Shafiq, on one side, and Dr. Khalil, on the other. Mullah Abdillah and his men had killed nearly a dozen Pakistanis and Arabs for trying to burn down a girls’ school, but the foreigners were commanded by Dr. Khalil, so bad blood lingered. My contact told me he had been told by senior Taliban that we would be released in the afternoon but that once we were on the road we should take the batteries out of our phones. Shafiq had to deal with more headaches when other Talibs called to complain that they had heard music coming from his house when they called him the night before. Exasperated, Shafiq protested that it was only Al Jazeera.

Mullah Baradar, the Taliban minister of defense and Mullah Omar’s deputy, called Dr. Khalil and demanded our release because he had given us permission to travel in Taliban territory. Another contact added pressure on Dr. Khalil by calling his former commander, who had arranged for his release in the prisoner exchange. Early in the afternoon Dr. Khalil finally showed up. He examined my passport and visas, and carefully went through my bags. He was most fascinated by my Gillette gel deodorant, opening it and smelling it. He took my toothbrush out of its container and carefully thumbed through the bristles, bringing it close to his eye to examine it. He leafed through my notebooks and was intrigued by my many medicines for diarrhea and dehydration. He asked me to show him the pictures I had taken. “Zaibullah Mujahed said I should hit you, but I will not,” he told me. Dr. Khalil’s attitude was markedly different, and he made me feel at ease. “What can I do for you?” he asked. I asked him a few questions. He was fighting for a government of Islamic law, he said, but Mullah Omar did not have to be the leader again. God willing, it would take up to twenty or thirty years until they got rid of the foreigners. If the foreigners left, he would still fight the Afghan army, and he refused to negotiate with President Karzai. Women could go to school and work, he conceded. Dr. Khalil had studied in the Hakim Sahib Sanai Islamic School in the Pakistani town of Jub and then studied internal medicine in Afghanistan. In 1992 he joined the Taliban, and he was a commander in the far northern Taluqan district.