Afghanistan's tough guys used to wear beards and wool caps, study the Koran and fight mountain battles. These days an increasing number have waxed chests, cheesy grins and bulging biceps.
"People don't want to fight any more," says Temour Shah, a beefy 23-year-old, pumping weights under an Arnold Schwarzenegger poster at Gold's Gym in central Kabul. "They want to look healthy -- like in the movies."
Bodybuilding is the new craze of postwar Afghanistan, particularly among young urban men. The number of gyms in Kabul has doubled to 46 in the past two years, while a further 30 are scattered across the country.
Every day from 5am men crowd into sweaty halls across the city, grappling with clanking weights machines before cracked mirrors.
Conditions are spartan -- water coolers, neat white towels and showers are unknown luxuries -- but enthusiasm runs high. Barely able to afford theUS$7 monthly membership fee, some enthusiasts work out in their baggy shalwar kameez trousers; others use their work clothes.
"Everyone wants to look strong, but the problem is calories. Most clients just don't have enough food," says Hafizullah Anis, 26, who owns Gold's Gym. He says he helps his poorer clients by offering them free protein supplements he buys at Bagram US military air base.
Returning refugees from Pakistan and Iran have fuelled the body-building craze, but its origins stretch back to the 60s. One of the oldest aficionados, Aziz Arzo, owns a rundown gym in a former dental surgery overlooking the dried bed of the Kabul river.
A short, stocky man in his 50s, he proudly displays his first exercise machine: A homemade contraption of weights, hooks and pulleys. Other weights in the gym are fashioned from concrete moulds and old engine parts.
He says he has 150 "students," of whom the poorest work out free of charge.
"I am one of the originals. They come to me for my experience," he says, beside a pouting portrait of himself on a podium in the 1970s.
Bodybuilding is a natural pursuit in a culture that prizes machismo. The national sport, buzkashi, involves two horseback teams beating a headless calf carcass around a pitch.
The streets are covered with pensive images of the Tajik warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud, an Afghan national hero. But inside the gyms, the governor of California is king.
"I studied Schwarzenegger's career carefully," says Noorulhoda Sherzad, a dentistry student and the current holder of the Mr. Kabul title.
"He achieved everything he wanted. I have dreams, too," he said.
The Taliban tolerated bodybuilding, but only if those working out remained fully clothed and wore beards. "The competitions were ridiculous. You could only show your top," Sherzad says.
In those days, strong, young men could be conscripted into fighting. Today, however, "our gun is our muscle," says Ahmad Ranjber, a gym owner who boasts a 77-year-old among his clients. "And he has a good body, too," he adds.
The body-conscious vogue also reflects slowly increasing freed-oms. Strict social norms prevent young men and women from mixing in public, but many bodybuilders coyly admit they hope to impress.
Mingling with American soldiers has fuelled their desires.
"I am exercising for the big body so the girls will like me," says Feroz Khan, a 20-year-old lorry driver at Bagram base, taking a break from his first workout. He has an American girlfriend called Nikita, he boasts in broken English, although some of his friends express doubts. Romantic choice was part of Afghanistan's new dispensation, he insists.
"I am a love man -- I am not for arranged marriage," he says. "Under the Taliban, it was very dangerous. If I looked at a girl; they would say, `Why you look?' Then they would fight me.
"But now Hamid Karzai is my chief. Since he become president he will allow the love marriage."
Regrettably, however, an unsavory side of modern sport has seeped in.
The prestigious Mr. Afghanistan crown lies unclaimed after controversy engulfed last month's contest.
There was a "small problem" with one of the frontrunners, explains a judge, Fazal Ahmad, of the Afghan Bodybuilding Federation.
"We suspected him of doping."
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not