Christina Lamb - The Sewing Circles of Herat - My Afghan Years

‘Mullah Omar told me we don’t want chairs, you tribal leaders can have those, we just want food for our men,’ said Wali Jan. ‘For the four days it took them to capture Kandahar our nan shops gave all the bread they produced to them. We also gave them watermelons. Then they said they wanted to take Herat which was good for us as we import through Iran and wanted that road cleared so we gave them money and they captured Herat and again Mullah Omar told me don’t worry, we don’t want chairs. They also said we don’t want taxes, just zakat , the Islamic tax, just 2.5%. But they cheated us for they took the chairs and then they started taxes, demanding more and more money.’

Patrolling the streets of Kandahar in his black Taliban turban, Mullah Khalil Hassani also felt cheated. Throughout 1998 the leadership began issuing more and more radical edicts and his duties changed. Instead of searching for criminals or subversives, the night patrols were tasked with finding people watching videos, listening to music, playing cards or chess, or keeping birds, something that had always been popular in Kandahar where people would train so-called Judas pigeons to lure birds from other people’s flocks and capture them. Men sporting beards that did not meet the regulation length of being long enough to squeeze a fist around it and still have some beard protruding at the bottom, were to be arrested and beaten, as were any women who dared venture outside the house in squeaky shoes, white shoes, or shoes that clicked. Even owning a kite became a criminal offence.

One of Wali Jan’s market stalls was burnt down for selling Malaysian soap because printed on the green and yellow packets was a silhouette of a woman; another for stocking washing powder with a photograph of a housewife and children. ‘It was a nightmare – the police were always confiscating food because they had pictures of people on them,’ he recalled. ‘We had to close down the photo booths and video shops, and could no longer sell music, only the Taliban Top Ten.’ According to him, the Taliban’s favourite singer was a man called Siraji, who intoned monotonous war chants inciting people into battle with lyrics such as:

This is our house, the home of lions and tigers We will beat everyone who attacks us We are the defenders of our great country.

‘They banned everything,’ he continued. ‘The only entertainment was public executions. The only safe activity was sleeping. Once I asked Mullah Omar what people were supposed to do for enjoyment and he said, “walk in gardens and look at flowers”. But the funny thing is after he took over there were five years of drought and everything died so there weren’t even flowers.’

‘Was there a list of forbidden things?’ I asked Khalil. ‘Not exactly a list,’ he replied. ‘Most of the things we knew and notices would come round with new ones as well as orders, such as to keep our turbans straight.’ He thought for a while then asked for a sheet of paper from my notebook and wrote down the following, adding to them throughout our conversation as he remembered more. I later had it translated.

1. All men to attend prayers in mosques five times daily.

2. No woman allowed outside the home unless accompanied by a mahram (close male relative such as a father, brother or husband).

3. Women not allowed to buy from male shopkeepers.

4. Women must be covered by burqa.

5. Any woman showing her ankles must be whipped.

6. Women must not talk or shake hands with men.

7. Ban on laughing in public. No stranger should hear a woman’s voice.

8. Ban on wearing shoes with heels or that make any noise as no stranger should hear a woman’s footsteps.

9. Ban on cosmetics. Any woman with painted nails should have her fingers cut off.

10. No woman allowed to play sports or enter a sports club.

11. Ban on clothes in ‘sexually attracting colours’, (basically anything other than light blue or mustard).

12. Ban on flared trousers, even under a burqa.

13. Ban on women washing clothes in rivers or any public place.

14. Ban on women appearing on the balconies of their houses. All windows were supposed to be painted so women could not be seen from outside their homes.

15. No one allowed to listen to music.

16. No television or video allowed.

17. No playing of cards.

18. No playing of chess.

19. No flying of kites.

20. No keeping of birds – any bird-keepers to be imprisoned and the birds killed.

21. Men must not shave or trim their beards which should grow long enough to protrude from a fist clasped at the point of the chin.

22. All men to wear Islamic clothes and cap. Shirts with collars banned.

23. Anyone carrying un-Islamic books to be executed.

24. Ban on all pictures in books or houses.

25. All people to have Islamic names.

26. Any street or place bearing a woman’s name or any female reference to be changed.

27. All boy students to wear turbans.

28. Any non-Muslim must wear a yellow cloth stitched onto their clothes to differentiate them.

29. All sportsmen to have legs and arms fully covered.

30. All audiences at sporting events to refrain from cheering or clapping but only to chant Allah-o-Akbar.

‘Basically any form of pleasure was outlawed,’ said Khalil, ‘and if we found people doing any of these things we would beat them with logs soaked in water like a knife cutting through meat until the room ran with their blood or their spines snapped. We did different things, we would put some of them standing on their heads to sleep, hang others upside down with their legs tied together, and stretch the arms out of others and nail them to posts. Sometimes when their spines were broken we would throw bread to them so they would try to crawl. Then I would write the report to our commanding officer so he could see how innovative we had been.

‘Once in Kandahar Jail, I watched the prison superintendent Mullah Burki beat people so harshly that it was impossible to tell afterwards whether or not they had been wearing clothes and when they drifted into unconsciousness we put salt on the wounds to make them scream.’

The state of terror spread by the Taliban was so pervasive that it began to seem as if the whole country was spying on each other. ‘As we drove around at night with our guns, local people would come to us and say there’s someone watching a video in this house or some men playing cards in that house,’ he said. ‘I was shocked. We are a land of feuds and I suppose some people were using us to settle old scores.’

After Kandahar, Khalil was put in charge of secret police cells in the provincial capitals of Ghazni and then Herat, a once beautiful Persian city in western Afghanistan that had suffered terribly under the Soviet occupation and had fallen to the Taliban in September 1995. It was renowned as a highly-cultured place where women would dance at weddings and many girls had been in school until the Taliban closed them all down. Mullah Omar was infuriated when 150 women dared appear on the streets of Herat to protest against the closure of the female public bath-houses. Khalil and his men were told to be particularly cruel to the Heratis who were Persian-speaking and had a large Shia minority, unlike the Pashto-speaking Taliban who were all Sunni Muslims. Speaking in Persian was forbidden and a strict curfew imposed from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m. Anyone out on the streets in those hours, even for emergencies such as illness or giving birth, was arrested. ‘Some Taliban had been killed by the ordinary people in Herat,’ he explained, ‘so we were told to beat them much more harshly.’

Another group that came in for particularly harsh treatment were the Hazaras who make up about 19 percent 3 of the population and live mostly in the infertile central Afghanistan highlands of Hazarajat as well as large communities in Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif. Persian-speaking Shias with flat Asiatic features, the word ‘hazar’ in Persian means thousands and they were said to be descended from Genghis Khan and his hordes of Mongol warriors who had swept through the region in 1221–2. Genghis Khan detested cities because they deprived his warriors’ horses of grazing and he razed them wherever possible, wiping out the ancient cities of Balkh, Herat, Bamiyan and Ghazni, leaving only a single watchtower at Bamiyan, and slaughtering so many of the inhabitants of Balkh that a visitor reported arriving and finding only dogs.