CHAPTER 1
THE FIRST RUN
A good woman is one who loves passionately; has guts, seriousness and passionate convictions; takes responsibility; and shapes society.
—BETTY FRIEDAN
Slowly, one by one, her neighbors began to disappear from the Macroyan community she had come to think of as a safe haven, the place where she had moved after fleeing the attacks and infighting of militants in a Mujahedeen-controlled area of Kandahar a few years earlier.
It was 1996, and for days the streets of Kabul had been building into a chaos that looked all too familiar as the Taliban rolled in to seize control of Afghanistan’s capital. The militant group’s arcane rules had reduced women like Jamila, who, days before, had been working as a schoolteacher, to an oblivion in which she barely recognized herself. She was trapped in her own home, unable to work, forced to watch (along with her children, the youngest of whom was still in diapers) the takeover unfold. The mood of the city had been shifting for months, but the gruesome death of former president Mohammad Najibullah shrouded the city and her remaining neighbors in a fear and oppression from which it would take years to recover.
The posh neighborhood of Macroyan was full of government workers hated by the Taliban. The military officers (Jamila’s husband was a general), high-ranking administration officials, schoolteachers, and rank-and-file bureaucrats represented a link to and loyalty for the old Soviet system, under which Najib had been the last president.
The insurgent group’s first political move was to assassinate Najib.
On September 27, 1996, a small, beat-up truck crept beside the gate surrounding the United Nations (UN) compound where Najib had been hiding since 1992 when the Mujahedeen—a terror group once supported by the United States—pushed him out of office. It was 1 A.M. The truck slowed to a stop as it reached the gated entrance. Two Taliban members jumped out of the front while a third climbed out of the small truck bed in the back. The three militants walked the narrow strip of concrete leading to the front door of the compound.
In a matter of hours thousands of Taliban, who were marching to the heart of the city from southern suburbs, would join them in Kabul.
Najib’s assassination was key to the Taliban solidifying control over the nation’s capital and, by extension, the political and religious direction of the entire country. The group had already taken control of the northern provinces; Kabul was the last domino to tumble. Before the raid Pakistan—a powerful ally that supported Najib’s destruction and the defeat of the Mujahedeen insurgency—had warned the insurgents to keep the assassination away from the UN compound. So, to draw as little attention to themselves as possible, the men had to move quickly.
Three of them entered the compound. The fourth kept the truck’s engine running. The details of what happened next are in question. According to some reports, the Taliban played into Najib’s ego, coercing him out of the building by kneeling before him, kissing his hand, complimenting him, and giving him the impression that his life would be spared. That idea—the thought of being saved by the Taliban—is what kept Najib alive during four years of isolation from his wife and children. In all that time the former leader never left the UN compound and had only his brother, a guard, and a personal assistant for company. In the first scenario Najib willingly followed the Taliban, unwittingly moving out of the guarded compound and toward the neglected presidential palace. He rode the dilapidated truck toward his death with the misguided confidence that the Taliban, some of whom hailed from Najib’s home town, would fly him to India to be reunited with his family. Confident of his safety, the ex-president told his bodyguard and assistant to stay behind.
More than likely, however, Najib’s kidnapping was much worse, as gruesome as the final blows that ended his life. Some report that his capture was brutal and full of the kind of violence intended to instill fear in the hearts of citizens still loyal to the old Soviet order and who might have considered fighting back, including women like Jamila.
After entering the compound the three men likely pushed their way into an upstairs bedroom where Najib and his brother Shah had been cautiously waiting for the insurgents to arrive. They knew the Taliban was coming. The ex-president had earlier thrown away three chances to get out of the country, one of which had come to him just hours before the Taliban arrived when Afghanistan’s interim president—a political rival but also childhood friend—had sent a member of his administration, a general, to the compound with both a warning and a plea. The general knocked on the door of the residence to find Najib playing cards with his brother, bodyguard, and assistant. The general walked into the living quarters and broke up the game. He had a message from the interim president: there was space for Najib, his brother Shah, his bodyguard, and the general who was his personal assistant on a plane booked to leave the country. The Taliban, the general said, was an enemy not just to the interim government but also to the Soviet-backed regime under which Najib had served. But Najib refused to go. The politician’s refusal showed how politically out of touch he had become and how little knowledge he had of the inner workings of the insurgency.
By the time the Taliban had cornered the leader and his brother, Najib’s bodyguard and personal assistant, who had faithfully served the former president throughout his exile, had deserted the compound. They ran from the only home they had known for four years into a territory that had changed significantly. No one was willing to provide a place for the men to hide. Everyone who had served under Najib’s administration was either gone, planning an escape, or too scared to help. Two days later the Taliban found both men and killed them.
Najib and his brother were left unprotected.
Blood splattered across the bedroom walls of the compound as one insurgent hit Najib with the butt of his rifle. The former president was reputed to have once been as cruel as the Taliban. Perhaps, because of his past, Najib should have predicted what would happen to him. In the 1980s, when the future president was head of the Afghan secret police, he was known for abusing and torturing Afghan citizens.
The three men took turns kicking the former president and his brother in the stomach, shoulders, and back. Najib leaned on the men who had beaten him, barely able to walk, as the insurgents dragged the leader down the stairs and to the waiting truck. The former president’s brother was thrown into the truck bed beside Najib. The insurgents drove them toward the now-empty presidential palace.
Behind the thick walls of the presidential complex the insurgents castrated the former president. They tied him, while he was still alive, to the back of their pickup and dragged him along the dirt road that surrounded the palace. When they were done, dust covered Najib’s lifeless body.
As the sun was just beginning to push through the early morning darkness, the Taliban had hung the former leader’s body from the remains of a pylon that stood in front of the palace out of which Najib once ruled all of Afghanistan. His brother’s body hung only a few inches away. Twenty-four hours later the same insurgents who had tortured the former president tied thick ropes around the necks of the president’s former bodyguard and assistant, adding their bodies to the long, metal pole protruding from the muddy tower.
For the next two days members of the Taliban, now well entrenched inside the city, shot bullets into the four corpses as they drove by. Money, which had been tucked between the dead man’s fingers, fell to the ground. His face, caked with dried blood, began to bloat. Men stuffed cigarettes in the dead leader’s nose. Some Kabul residents cheered in the streets, glad that the once cruel leader was gone, according to reports. A few years later some of those same people would long for the former leader’s return. Under the Taliban those cheering crowds would no longer have control over what they wore, how they worshipped, or whether they could even leave their homes. The infrastructure of Kabul would, for the first time, become unstable. Rural areas of Afghanistan, which were already hurting for things like clean water and electricity, would fall even further into decay.
But most people in Kabul weren’t celebrating the fall of Najib. Former government employees were forced to walk by his corpse, fearing that they would be next. Jamila was among them. It was in those days, as the Taliban grew stronger in the nation’s capital, that Jamila and her husband began plotting their escape. If the Taliban could so grotesquely torture and hang a former president, the young teacher thought, what was the insurgency planning to do to average citizens who had been loyal to the administration?
Within weeks of the former president’s death Jamila and her husband would join the ranks of the vanished.
IT WAS MIDNIGHT, and Jamila had spent the entire day deciding what she, her husband, and their children had to take to survive the long trip to Kabul Gate and what they could leave behind. It was important that the children didn’t know they were leaving. No one who was left in her small neighborhood could find out. No trace of where they were headed could be left behind.
Quietly she followed her husband out the front door of their home.
Jamila softly bounced her newborn daughter in her arms, rocking the small, silent baby gently against her chest to ensure she remained quiet. Her husband led the family past the doors of other apartments in the complex—some of which had emptied long ago. Jamila shifted awkwardly underneath her new burqa as she followed her husband down the stairs that led to the complex’s front walkway and through the gate that surrounded her small neighborhood.
She leaned over periodically to shush her youngest boy, the gentle, sensitive one who had always been too attached to her to deal with change. The mere inkling that they could be separated made him emotional. Crying on this night, at this moment, could be dire for them all.
They left with nearly nothing. They had the clothes on their backs, diapers for their daughter, and very little food. Jamila knew that wherever they stopped she would need to fill the bags she had brought with snacks and meals for her children. She was breastfeeding her infant, but the boys—young, rambunctious, active—would need real sustenance. She had no idea where it would come from.
By 4 A.M. they had arrived at Kabul Gate, the last exit out of the city. A small car sat near the curb, engine running, waiting for them to climb in. Her husband had arranged for a driver to meet them there and carry them through the next leg of their journey—the forty-mile drive to Charikar, where they would switch cars again along the corridor that connected southern Afghan provinces to ones that were generally safer and much more rural further north.
At Kabul Gate Jamila opened the back door of the compact car, pulled the seatbelt out of the way, and placed her oldest son on the far end of the passenger seat. Her second oldest filed in behind him, and the youngest boy sat in the middle. She sat behind the driver, and her husband sat beside him in the front. Her daughter lay sleeping on her lap. It wasn’t until she scooted back in the seat and allowed her neck to sink back into the slightly springy cushion of the headrest behind her that she realized how painful the ache in her legs actually was. During the four-hour journey over hard pavement, dirt roads, and rocky soil, she hadn’t stopped to think about how unpleasant the trip was or how difficult it had been to keep her children quiet. Escape was about survival. Thinking about pain—or slowing down because of it—wasn’t an option.
Jamila lost track of time.
As the car slowed down she opened her eyes and looked out the window to her right. Once her baby had stopped crying, the young mother had leaned back to get some sleep. Now she looked up at the stars shining back at her and realized it was still night, or perhaps it was night again—she wasn’t sure. She looked to the front seat and heard her husband directing the driver to pull up to the right of a van parked underneath a bridge. She looked out of the window to her left, past her oldest son’s closed eyes, his head leaning against the glass, and realized that they were in Charikar. She nudged her three boys to wake them and told them to follow their father to the van. Her boys climbed into the back, and she followed, taking care not to wake her daughter. Her husband again sat in the front and this time instructed the driver to take them to a hostel.
The building was large, had very few windows, and was the first place the family could lay their heads for an uninterrupted night’s rest. The rooms in the makeshift inn were small; there was one bathroom per floor. The next morning Jamila was relieved to see the unimpressive cafeteria on the first floor; her children had been surviving on bread, water, and small snacks since they left their home in Kabul. As her husband paid for the family’s breakfast, Jamila added to the tab, placing milk and bread and fruit on the counter. Her husband paid for each item as she stuffed it into one of two plastic bags she had brought with her for the trip. She filled one thermos with water and the other with milk.
As she walked out of the building she noticed in the distance the van they had ridden to the hostel the night before. It was sitting in the far corner of the grounds that surrounded the building. The engine was running, and the driver waved them over. She piled into the vehicle and prepared for the next leg of the journey, the one that would take them to Sheghnan, the area where her husband was raised. She would be surrounded by family, a tribe that loved and understood them, and, she hoped, for the first time in a long time, peace.
SHEGHNAN, AFGHANISTAN, 1998—The mother of four felt the cold morning air hit her cheeks—the only part of her body that wasn’t covered—as she walked out of the mosque and toward her husband, who was surrounded by other men, all slaughtering goats for the Mawlid al-Sharif holiday. It was Jamila’s turn to bring in the meat to be cooked. The festival, celebrating the birth of Muhammad, was unfolding just as it had the year before. Jamila had spent the entire week collecting money for the poor. The goat that Amir was taking care to slaughter as Muslim halal rules dictated and that Jamila would cook to perfection with other wives in the mosque kitchen would be shared with the families who had been invited to the religious ceremony—the poorest of the village’s poor. They would distribute the rest to the husbands they knew were out of work and widows raising several children.
Amir was rarely home. His work as a military officer—in what was left of the country’s fledgling army—kept him away during the week and traveling long distances to spend weekends with his family. They had to make the few days they had together count, trying to pack in multiple activities for themselves, their children, and their community.
They had been living in Sheghnan, a remote area that bordered Tajikistan, for two years now, and there was no reason for them to think that this holiday celebration would be different from any of the others.
Jamila had walked along the community’s dirt roads, passing its low-slung, simple stone homes, to the mosque with her husband that morning. In this rural neighborhood, nestled along the Panj River, the couple walked everywhere. They left their four children—now ages two through ten—at home with her husband’s niece. She passed only a few neighbors on her way, mostly family members. Many of them would soon follow to their place of worship the twenty-nine-year-old mother and the man her parents arranged for her to marry when she was only seventeen.
Since they had fled the high-end Kabul neighborhood of Macroyan, the couple had taken their family through at least three different districts in two provinces but thought they would be safest in Sheghnan, one of the northernmost districts in the country. The community was much more rural and mountainous than Kabul. Its reputable school system allowed Jamila to play up her strengths. The teacher fit well into an area known for pumping out top-notch educators—some of whom would eventually be forced by the Taliban to work in neighboring provinces for free. Unlike residents in Afghanistan’s southernmost provinces who practiced a highly conservative form of Islam, most Sheghnan residents were Ismaili Muslims, a part of the Shia sect, which emphasizes higher education and charity. Women in the village were well educated, and many wore scarves to cover their hair instead of the burqas that covered their faces from public view.
Rules instituted by the Mujahedeen in 1992 changed life for women throughout the country. And, although it took longer for those rules to reach remote areas like Sheghnan, by 1996, when Jamila and her husband moved there, small changes could be seen. Some women, afraid to walk the streets without their husbands, had stopped working before the Taliban made it illegal for women to do so. Other women covered from head to toe in burqas after hearing about females being raped in the streets by members of the Mujahedeen. But Jamila, who wore just a head scarf, and her husband traveled faster than the newly established Taliban edicts did. So for two years life was good in Sheghnan for the schoolteacher and her officer husband.
They had established a routine that worked.
Jamila, determined to keep working after losing her job in Kabul, rose early every morning to cook for her children. She did housework and caught up on last-minute planning for the day’s lessons. She kissed her youngest good-bye and walked to the local school, where she taught history and mathematics to second through fourth graders. She was home every day by early afternoon, which gave her the chance to cook and spend the evenings with her children. Their home was humble: one large room with mattresses in the back, a kitchen that consisted of a small stove and countertop near the front, and an outhouse. The family owned goats and chickens, which they kept just behind the house. They also owned farmland not far from their home, which Jamila tended as regularly as she could.
Inside the mosque, during Mawlid al-Sharif, Jamila moved through the kitchen with the speed of a professional. The women meticulously organized their work. They gracefully maneuvered across the wooden floors, lightly brushing shoulders with one another as they traversed the small room from the corner where they seasoned freshly butchered meat and cut onions and sliced garlic to the other where they slowly stewed it all.
And just as the women slowed down, as they put the last bits of meat into the bubbling broth, Jamila saw a strange man, wearing a black turban, approach Amir behind the mosque. Her husband was preparing to slit the throat of another goat so his wife and the wives of the other men around him could cook more food. Amir stopped as soon as he saw the man, who had a beard and was wearing a long kaftan that indicated he was a strictly conservative Muslim. Amir stood to listen as the man began speaking to him, and then he turned to lead the turbaned stranger away from the mosque.
Out of the small kitchen window Jamila watched them walk further and further out of her line of sight. Before they had gotten too far she ran out the back door to catch up with her husband. He was returning to the house, Amir told her. He would only be a moment. He had just been informed that someone was there waiting for him. It was unusual for him to get such a request. Jamila stuck by him. The couple walked the same dirt path they had taken earlier that morning. The man who had delivered the message walked behind them.
As the group approached the couple’s home, another turbaned man stepped into the walkway. Amir stopped and waited, expecting the stranger to explain himself. As the officer opened his mouth to speak, he felt a pair of hands grab his wrists and pull his arms behind his back. Jamila jumped to the right as the man who had come to the mosque tried harder to restrain her husband, who was now twisting his shoulders and leaning forward in an attempt to free himself.
Jamila saw a machete on the right hip of the man who had been waiting at their house. The long blade rested on his right thigh, the tip of the knife stopped at his right knee, with its black handle held in place by a black belt tied snugly around the man’s waist. One man held Amir as another punched him in the stomach and across the face. As soon as Jamila realized the men were Mujahedeen, she began to scream.
Amir’s knees buckled, his head fell forward. Blood dripped from his nose into the dirt around his feet. Metal handcuffs held his wrists tightly behind him.
Jamila’s screams had brought her children to their front door. They watched as their father was beaten; the baby, now two years old, was too young to understand what was happening. The youngest boy began to wail as the insurgents dragged his father away. The Mujahedeen had found out that Amir had worked for the government, that he had been a Soviet-era general under Najib. The Mujahedeen were also fighting with the Taliban to maintain control of provinces they had ruled long before the Taliban rolled into Kabul and killed the former president. Jamila and Amir had run from one insurgency only to be victimized by another.
The young mother watched as the militants dragged her husband away.
At the top of a hill not far from the Abbas family home, three small figures, slightly blurry in the distance, appeared. One man was handcuffed; two wore black turbans. One stood in front, the other still holding the man’s arms near the shoulder, stood behind him. They forced Amir to his knees. Jamila and her four children stood where the insurgents had left them. They were frozen with shock, fear. Jamila watched as one man drew his machete and slowly raised it into the air. He swung the sword quickly, slicing through Amir’s neck. Then she watched as they dumped her husband’s body in a nearby river.
Eventually Jamila’s screaming subsided. She didn’t try to stop. She wasn’t even aware she had stopped. Her voice could produce nothing more. She watched through blurred vision as the men walked away as if nothing had happened. She raised her right hand and wiped tears, still streaming, from her face. She stared in the distance at nothing.
She would have to run again. But right now she had nowhere to go and no idea what to do.