After the battle with US special forces, helicopter gunships and Afghan government troops, two Taliban were dead and several more injured.
We had been asleep in a guest room belonging to a man from east London who was a mullah and a fighter when the attack happened.
But the timing of the firefight made the Taliban suspicious and Bilal, one of the senior commanders in this district of Baghlan province, told us politely that we would have to answer some questions. Our phones, bags and cameras were confiscated.
They detained us first in a madrassa — a religious school — a compound-style building flanked on one side by a mosque and on the other by a government school. In the courtyard there were pools of congealed blood where some of the casualties had been brought that morning. We were led into a room where Amanulah, a bespectacled teacher in his 30s, sat with his students, who ranged from 7-year-olds to fuzzy-bearded teenagers with turbans and guns.
Amanulah’s handsome face was dwarfed by his oversized turban and his eyes were red from lack of sleep. He and his older students had spent the night fighting with the rest of the district chief Lal Muhammad’s Taliban. One madrassa teacher had been hurt in the fighting. His son had lost his eye.
Amanulah sat beneath the school emblem, a black curtain embroidered with Koranic verses in golden and white threads and covered with the emblems of the Taliban fighter: a Kalashnikov assault rifle with a shining bayonet, RPG launchers, grenades and knives of different shapes and sizes. Among the embroidered words were: “By the name of God the most gracious the most merciful.”
“I learned English for 12 years in Pakistan,” Amanulah said in correct but extremely slow English. “But here I haven’t used English for a long time.” He had come to the school three years ago because it had a good reputation. “There are very few good schools now in Afghanistan,” he said. “We had many during the Taliban rule but they are closed now or under government control.
“I didn’t want to be a Talib,” he said in a softer voice. “I was just a student. I came here to study. But all my brothers in the school, the teachers and students, were already fighting [with Lal Muhammad’s Taliban] and they asked me if I wanted to join and I said yes.”
CURRICULUM
In the thousand-year-old madrassa system, men like Amanulah are both students and teachers. While he studied the texts needed for him to become a mullah, he taught the younger children the essentials of the Taliban’s particular brand of Islam.
“You join at the age of six or seven, depending on your family. You are taught the basics of belief, religious rituals and grammar. Later you study Persian language and poetry, then you go into basic Islamic law and all along you study and memorize the Koran and Arabic grammar.”
Around 8am the smaller children left the room to prepare breakfast. Two of them picked up a blackened teapot while two others went outside to collect food donations.
They spread the breakfast out on a cloth on the floor: tea, a cold flat loaf of bread, some smaller bits of stale bread and one warm piece of bread that had been cooked in butter. The younger students didn’t touch the hot buttery loaf but politely munched on the old bread.
When breakfast was tidied away, Amanullah picked up his books and went to study with one of his teachers. One of the boys started sweeping the yard while the rest moved into another room of the madrassa.
The second room resembled the type of classroom I have seen all over the developing world. Its walls were mottled with patches of paint and chipped plaster, the floor covered with torn bits of carpet. There was a soiled mattress, a very low desk and a bookshelf lined neatly with copies of the Koran covered in green embroidered fabrics.
YOUNG SOLDIERS
Students came in and out of the classroom, picking up books to kiss them, read, then talk and joke. One 8-year-old boy crouched in front of the desk reading a book about fasting and prayers. Then he picked up a Kalashnikov that was laid against the wall and rested it on the desk. He started fiddling with it, trying to cock it and lift it but the gun was too heavy, so he rested it on the desk, closed an eye and whispered “tatatatatata” at an imaginary enemy on the wall. I asked some of the students why they were here in the madrassa. They answered that they were fighting the holy war.
We spent most of the day in that room. From time to time we were questioned and told that we would be released once the military Komissyon — the Taliban council — had finished its investigation.
Bilal came in the late afternoon to tell us our release was imminent, but two hours later we were told the area was not safe because of drone activity. That evening, they moved us to the jail.
We were given a change of clothes and allowed to keep a book, a pack of cigarettes and some worry beads, then we were blindfolded and handcuffed and put in a car that followed a winding, climbing road. After an hour the car came to a halt and with our eyes still covered and our hands tied we were led up a steep slope.
After some time thick fingers untied my blindfold and in the light of the moon a majestic view unfolded of a wide path framed by two dark mountains that appeared like giant gate posts.
“Walk!” hissed one of the shadows behind us. I heard the metallic click of the safety catch being released and the clank of a bullet being pulled into the chamber. I waited for the shot to come, but it never did.
JAIL
Led by two men in thick military jackets, we climbed the ragged mountain path for nine hours, our hands still tied behind our backs. Shortly before daybreak we reached a barn on top of a mountain. This was where we would be incarcerated for the following days.
The word prison usually implies a thick-walled building with gates, padlocks and guards. But in the Taliban concept of a jail, the gate doesn’t exist. The jailer was the gate, the prison cell, the executioner and sometimes, if you were lucky, your friend.
The jailer in Dhani Ghorri was a short man with bent legs, a chest-long beard and vicious eyes. Taliban commanders from different groups and factions in the area handed him their captives and he would keep them, interrogate them and execute them if the orders were given.
Wherever he was, the cell went with him. It could be a cave or a room in a farmer’s house. In our case it was a barn somewhere between Baghlan and Kunduz. It measured 2m by 4m, with no windows and a very low ceiling. Inside it was dark most of the time. The dirt floor was covered with goat and sheep droppings.
The prisoners and the guards lived in the same room, divided by an invisible line. Both groups slept on flimsy mattresses covered with an almost black layer of shining grime.
For the first night we were blindfolded with checkered Afghan scarves that reeked of grease and which served as our towels and prayer mats. After that night, we were only blindfolded when we were led into the adjacent barn to wash and relieve ourselves. The floor of this barn was covered with droppings of goats and humans.
Our feet were held by a thick cast-iron chain and padlocks.
We ate three times a day: green tea and dark bread for breakfast and dinner. Lunch was the notorious Afghan shorba, bread soaked in meat broth.
Many people had passed through this cell in the past few months, the jailer said. There was a truck driver whose crime was to transport goods for NATO from the northern border of Afghanistan to Kabul. His truck was burned along with several others when the Taliban ambushed the convoy on the road. “We released him after 10 days, but he paid a big fine.” Then there was an Afghan National Army officer who was also released after his tribesmen pledged that he wouldn’t go back to the army.
But not all of the prisoners were let go. “We don’t beat the prisoners unless we get orders to question them,” he said solemnly. “Then we beat them to get them to tell us the truth.
“Before the truck driver we had a spy who stayed here for two months. We beat him every day until he confessed and finally he was executed. I hanged him myself.”
Hanging has become the Taliban’s favored method of execution after Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s spiritual leader, issued orders banning beheading, which had generated bad coverage in the media.
The jailer sometimes came into the cell with gifts. One day he brought us a small plastic bag of candy, another day it would be an old toothbrush or even a bar of soap.
Apart from the jailer, I counted seven guards in all, from frail teenagers to big, tough fighters. They lived in conditions that were not much better than the prisoners. They were not allowed to leave or carry mobile phones and had to spend the night in the cell with the prisoners, often with their feet tied to those of their prisoners. They were fed the same meager food.
Most of them were the lowest ranking Taliban fighters, all poor and illiterate. The only privilege they had was their authority over their captives. They sometimes relished that petty power, moving prisoners away from the light, unnecessarily blindfolding their captives, or just being rough.
The jailer himself was no stranger to prisons. Two years before he had been detained in Pakistan while visiting some Taliban commanders. “They beat me only on in the first day and for three months after that they kept me chained and blindfolded in a dark cell,” he said. “My brother is still there.”
RELEASE
We were in the jail-cum-barn for five days before our credentials were verified by Taliban leaders in Quetta and local commanders.
Word came that we were to be released and we walked the long path down the mountain.
Lal Muhamad and the rest of his command council had gathered in the madrassa at Dhani Ghorri. They apologized to us and returned our equipment.
As we were about to leave, Lal Muhamad produced a thick bundle of US dollar bills and tried to give us a hundred each. “This for your trouble,” he said.
We refused, and began the long journey back to Kabul.
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