Three

Back on the Silk Road

Scott Anderson, editor-in-chief of the Ottawa Citizen, glowered at me across the empty pint glasses littering the rough wooden tabletop at Woody’s Pub on Elgin Street. Half a dozen reporters and editors were there one night after putting the paper to bed a day or two after I returned from New York. Anderson had not yet reached forty years of age and normally had a reserved, if gruff, personality. He usually gave me a hard time, but I was pretty sure he liked me. I wore a shirt and tie. I wrote well, and quickly. And I was ambitious. I had spent much of that year agitating to go to Macedonia, where a conflict had flared up between the Macedonian armed forces and ethnic Albanian rebels. It took some gall to push for foreign assignments in between shifts on the cop desk, but whenever I did the corners of Anderson’s normally scowling mouth would budge upwards. Tonight Anderson was unusually animated and seemed, half in jest, to be affecting the persona of a 1920s newspaper baron.

“What am I going to do with you, Petrou?” he said, rocking backwards in his chair.

I took a long swallow of my beer and stared back at him. We were both drunk.

“Send me to Afghanistan, Scott.”

I don’t know whether Anderson had planned his response or was simply caught up in the moment, as if I had dared him and he couldn’t back down.

“Fine,” he said. “You’re going.”

Hung over and bleary-eyed the next morning, I decided not to ask Anderson if he was serious the night before. I started calling the Washington embassies of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan’s tiny Northern Alliance-controlled enclave in the northeast of the country to arrange for travel documents. Other journalists were banking on getting into Afghanistan through Pakistan, but I reasoned that the Taliban controlled the border and that I might end up stuck in Peshawar if I did the same.

Over the next few days, as word spread through the Citizen newsroom and across the Southam newspaper chain that Anderson was sending an intern to cover the war everyone expected would erupt at any moment, some more senior writers got their backs up, as did the editors of other newspapers in the chain.

Anderson called me into his office at the front of the newsroom. There were a few framed front pages hanging on the wall and a novelty rubber ink stamp that read “Bad Idea” on his desk. I sat down in front of him.

“I’ve put my reputation on the line for you, Petrou. Don’t fuck it up.”

I was terrified of fucking it up right from the beginning. But I was also confident and didn’t think his decision to send me was that strange. I had just been to the Tribal Areas of Pakistan and had spent much of the past year reading about Afghanistan and Central Asia — albeit mostly histories about events that had taken place more than a hundred years earlier. And at least I had seen Afghanistan, which, in September 2001, was more than could be claimed by most reporters in the world.

A day or two later Scott stopped by my desk. “We couldn’t get you life insurance, so don’t get killed.” It was the kind of joke an editor could make then, before journalists in Afghanistan started dying. In December 2009, Michelle Lang, a young reporter working for Scott at the Canwest newspaper chain, was killed along with four Canadian soldiers by a Taliban bomb in Kandahar. I don’t need to have talked about it with Scott to know her death tore him up inside.

In retrospect, though, the amateurism surrounding my dispatch to a war was remarkable. The office manager insisted on limiting the amount of money I could take with me to a couple of thousand dollars, suggesting I could pick up more from bank machines when I got there. I didn’t have a laptop. I barely got a satellite phone in time. And of course the Citizen could have taken out life insurance for me. But it was expensive, so they chose not to. I didn’t care. I still don’t. A few years later, when we were engaged to be married, my girlfriend, Janyce McGregor, rolled her eyes when I wanted to invite Scott to the wedding. I insisted. The only thing a young reporter really wants is a chance. He gave me one.

I packed in a hurry. I stuffed the shalwar kamiz that a tailor had made for me the previous year in northern Pakistan into my backpack, along with an Afghan blanket and a rolled woolen pawkul hat that was popular with Afghan refugees. I brought long underwear, a handful of energy bars, candles, and a toque. I maxed out a cash advance on my Visa card so that I carried a total of about $5,000 U.S. in my pockets or folded into a money belt around my waist. I carried two hard-backed notebooks to write in and a Lonely Planet guide to Central Asia, the April 2000 edition, complete with a chapter on Afghanistan. (“Best Time to Go: don’t go.”) As an afterthought, I threw in a copy of Peter Hopkirk’s book, The Great Game, a history of how the nineteenth-century imperial rivalry between Britain and Russia played out across Central Asia. Because I was rushed, and also because I was convinced that any checked luggage wouldn’t make it to my final destination, I didn’t take much more than this: no stove; no sleeping bag; no knife; no map.

I stood in the doorway of Janyce’s apartment in an old house near Elgin Street on my last morning in Canada, the backpack tied shut and leaning against the wall. Janyce faced me half a foot away, her shoulder-length blonde hair wet from the shower. Our toes touched. There was a cab waiting outside. Janyce was already late for work. We had only been together a couple of months. It was an unusual way to begin a relationship.

“Will you be careful?”

“Yes.”

I dragged my backpack down the steep and narrow staircase and threw it into the waiting taxi. The previous night she had slipped a photograph of herself smiling in a black turtleneck sweater and with a message scrawled on its back inside one of my books: “Come home to me soon.” I wouldn’t see it until I got to Afghanistan.

I had a brief episode of air rage when the woman at the Air Canada check-in counter refused to let me take my backpack on the plane as carry-on luggage, and I almost missed my airport rendezvous with the guy who was meeting me in Toronto with a satellite phone. But soon I was winging across the Atlantic on an overnight flight. I used my ten-hour layover in Moscow to take a cab into the city and spent about one quarter of my money on a laptop. I needed to switch terminals for my second overnight flight to Tashkent, Uzbekistan. In the grungy departure lounge, a priest wearing a coarse brown robe knotted at the waist asked me in English where I was going and promised, unbidden, to pray for me.

One afternoon the previous fall, Adam and I had sat on a balcony in a teahouse overlooking the bazaar in the old trading city of Kashgar, in northwestern China. A few minutes earlier a wide-eyed eight-year-old bathroom attendant in a mosque across the street had saved me from a beating or worse when, with much frantic hand-waving, he stopped me from pissing in what I had assumed was the cleanest, most pristine urinal in Central Asia. As I backed away from the white-tiled trough, half a dozen men filed into the room and sat down to wash their feet and hands in it before prayers.

Adam and I reclined on rope beds, drinking scalding tea from small, handleless, bowl-shaped ceramic cups that we refilled from a large metal pot, and plotted our next move on maps spread out before us. As was the case during the heyday of caravan commerce along the Silk Road trading route, Kashgar remained the place where roads from the Indian subcontinent and what are now the ex-Soviet republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan converged. Our visas were for Pakistan, to the south. But the romantic allure of the old Silk Road cities to the west of us, just over the Tian Shan Mountains, pulled at me with a force that seemed almost gravitational. We ultimately stuck to our planned route and turned south, but missing out on Uzbekistan had gnawed at me ever since.

Now, less than a year later, my eyes sticky and my mouth tasting foul, I stepped into the hazy early morning sun outside Tashkent’s airport. I flagged down a cab, threw my backpack into the trunk, and asked the driver to take me to the city centre. The Taliban still controlled everything in Afghanistan south of the Uzbek border. To get to Afghanistan, I’d have to first travel through Tajikistan in the east. I planned on spending a day in Tashkent before moving on. My hopes of finding any evidence of Uzbekistan’s fabled history in Tashkent faded the closer we got to downtown. It seemed clear that the historical era most influencing Tashkent’s present was not the majesty of Silk Road empires but the seventy years of Soviet rule. It hung over the city, inescapable, like a bad smell. It was there in the dreary apartment blocks, the planned sprawl, and, most ominously, in the Stalin-like personality cult directed at Uzbekistan’s president, Islam Karimov, whose face looked down from billboards everywhere in the city.

Karimov, whose country’s strategic location next to Afghanistan would soon make him an ally of the United States, was confronting his own low-level Islamist insurgency from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, whose fighters also fought with the Taliban. Karimov’s methods of dealing with them included the widespread jailing and torture of anyone he feared posed a threat to his rule, including large number of moderate practising Muslims. His secret service agents have boiled prisoners to death.

The American Department of Defense was willing to overlook these atrocities for years, even if the State Department preferred not to. The United States funded the Uzbek military and trained its soldiers. In return, America was able to use an Uzbek airbase as its staging ground for war efforts in Afghanistan, and the CIA received cooperation from the prisoner-boiling Uzbek security services. American money and aid came with few other strings. Little pressure was applied to force Karimov to democratize his country or scale back human rights abuses. His assistance in the war on terror was considered too valuable.

Then, in May 2005, Uzbek security forces shot dead as many as 1,500 demonstrators in the town of Andijan, gunning down survivors who tried to flee into Kyrgyzstan. The demonstrators had gathered to hear speeches from businessmen who had been freed from jail, and to protest rising prices. Some even invited Karimov to hear their complaints. The Uzbek president nonetheless described the victims as radical Muslim terrorists. China, seeing obvious parallels with its own restive Uighur population, agreed. So did Russia, seizing an opportunity to drive a wedge between the United States and one of its Central Asian allies. The United States, however, could not ignore such a sordid slaughter of unarmed civilians. It condemned the massacre and accepted some survivors of the attack as refugees. Karimov ordered U.S. soldiers out of Uzbekistan that July.

Uzbekistan is now firmly part of Russia’s sphere of influence, as it was for decades under Soviet rule. Islam Karimov’s oppression, meanwhile, has increased. Not coincidentally, so has the radicalization of growing numbers of Uzbek Muslims. Hundreds have fought in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. According to Ahmed Rashid, there were maybe five or six hundred Uzbek militants in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas after the September 11 attacks. By 2008, there were several thousand under the command of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. New recruits continue to arrive, including from outside Central Asia. In 2010, four German Muslims were convicted of plotting to bomb airports and nightclubs in Germany. The four belonged to the Islamic Jihad Union, a splinter group of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. At least two of the convicted men, German converts to Islam, had trained with Uzbek militants in Pakistan.

“Excuse me.”

The woman sitting behind the desk at my hotel in Tashkent was about fifty years old, ethnically Russian, one of thousands whose families were encouraged to move to Uzbekistan during Soviet times and who then found themselves stranded there when the Soviet empire collapsed. Her hair looked as if it had been seared into a puffy helmet with chemicals and a blowtorch. She was smoking and a little overweight, but hard and thick rather than plump, and she wore a starchy uniform that must have been uncomfortable. She had already allowed me to pay for a room, a process that seemed to have required an enormous amount of effort on her part and drained whatever goodwill she might once have possessed.

“Excuse me.”

It took her a very long time to raise her head.

“Look, I’m sorry to bother you. I’ve been on planes and in airports for two days. I know it’s really early in the morning, but I’m starving. Is your restaurant open?”

She looked at me with what I wanted to believe was motherly pity but recognized as contempt.

“Nyet.”

I tried to smile and stepped back from the counter toward the stairs heading upstairs to my room. I took a few steps, looked around, and noticed there were no hallways branching off to what might have been place to eat. This wasn’t the kind of place with a rooftop patio.

“Do you have a restaurant?” I asked.

She inhaled and blew smoke.

“Nyet.”

I have a friend, Justinian Jampol, who used a chunk of money he inherited in his early twenties to purchase Soviet artifacts that were scattered around Eastern Europe after the Cold War ended and grew his collection into a world-class museum. I should have sent him a bar of soap from this hotel. It was pink and hard, about the size of a book of matches, and it refused to lather or break down even after prolonged exposure to hot water. But the room had a bed. I fell into it and was immediately unconscious.

A few hours later, with the sun now high and strong, I left the hotel and started walking toward Tashkent State University. I was only going to be in the city for a day, but I figured I’d file a story while there, and I needed a translator. Along the way I passed an Uzbek man wearing a traditional pillbox hat who was preparing street food in his market stall. He was kneading a ball of dough and then stretching it into strands between his fingers, folding them over and stretching them again. Ever longer and ever thinner. I recognized what he was making and smiled.

“Brother,” I said to him in broken Russian. “Lagman?”

He nodded. I ordered a bowl. For some reason the familiar dish made me deliriously happy. I called Janyce on the satellite phone and left a rambling message on her answering machine.

The day went downhill after that. I did manage to find a student who spoke good English and was happy to work for the day as a translator. But trying to probe below the surface to find out what people really thought proved to be near impossible. Uzbekistan was a police state and politics was a potentially dangerous topic of discussion. “They’re afraid to say anything critical,” my translator told me after our sixth or seventh interview with someone who said only that she wanted peace and trusted her president. I went back to my hotel and dictated a cliché-ridden story to the desk back in Ottawa. I thought I could save the Citizen some money by using the hotel phone rather than my satellite one, but the hotel manager charged me $100. I wasn’t yet in Afghanistan, and already I was worrying about running out of cash. I lay on my bed and waited for the cab driver to come back and take me to the border in the morning.

He arrived at dawn as I stood outside the hotel’s front doors. The light was grey. A man was pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with shovels along the sidewalk. He looked far too old and thin to lift it. He padded by quickly in his flip-flop sandals.

“Okay?” the driver asked.

I threw my bag into the trunk. “Okay. Let’s go.”

We left the city before any traffic appeared on the roads. Soon Tashkent disappeared behind us. The sun rose above the horizon. On either side of the highway stretched ocean-flat cotton fields, another leftover of Stalin’s forced collectivization. When we reached the border with Tajikistan, an embarrassed-looking teenaged soldier with an AK-47 demanded a five-dollar bribe.

“What are you doing in Khujand?”

The man who approached me in the small airport in Tajikistan’s northernmost major city was thin with high cheekbones and a thick toothbrush moustache. He wore a fake leather jacket and held a smouldering stub of a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, which he neither brought to his lips nor discarded. I was pacing back and forth in front of my backpack, which I had tossed on the floor, periodically stopping to stare at the departure schedule. No flights were leaving for Dushanbe until late that evening.

At the time, I was obsessed with filing stories back to Ottawa as frequently as possible. I had convinced myself that if a day went by in which I didn’t send the newspaper a story, Scott might decide the gamble of sending me to Central Asia had failed and I’d be called back home to account for ruining his reputation. Waiting for eight hours in a smoky airport meant a wasted day and a newspaper edition without my byline in it.

“What are you doing here?” the man asked again.

“It’s a long story,” I said. “I’m trying to leave. Afghanistan. Well, Dushanbe first.”

“Wait here.”

I knew the man was a cab driver, or at least knew people with access to cars. And sure enough he returned with news that a friend of his, Bachrom, was willing to drive me to Dushanbe. I looked at the very basic map in my Lonely Planet and calculated that Dushanbe was two or three hundred kilometres away. The cartographer had drawn some rough mountains between Khujand and Dushanbe, but I didn’t pay them much notice. Four, maybe five hours, I thought. I’ll be there by mid-afternoon. Lots of time to work. We negotiated a price.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

A few hours later, crammed into the back seat of a tiny hatchback, I stuck my head out the window and stared up at the jagged peaks of the Fan Mountains that towered above us in all directions. They’d make your stomach turn if you looked too long. On our right, a few feet of broken rock extended beyond the edge of the paved road, and then a drop into nothingness. We rounded a corner and faced a truck coming from the opposite direction. It seemed to occupy the entire road and showed little sign of stopping or slowing down. Bachrom downshifted and guided the car closer to the edge of the road. The truck driver blared his horn. I closed my eyes.

“Mikhail, a little beer?”

Ali, a round-faced man with thin, straight hair and a friendly manner, was squeezed beside me in the backseat. He held up a bottle and smiled. His eyes were clear. After several hours on the road, this was the first bottle he had opened. As soon as we started climbing switchbacks into the Fan Mountains, it became clear that the trip to Dushanbe would be an all-day affair. Fortunately, Bachrom, Ali, and Azirov, another passenger, were good company. Ali in particular befriended me immediately. He had been trained as a medical doctor during Soviet times, but Tajikistan’s civil war and its corrupt and dictatorial government meant that he sometimes earned less than five dollars a month. He decided it wouldn’t be right for a foreigner to visit Tajikistan without drinking fermented mare’s milk and insisted that Bachrom detour to find some.

“Is it alcoholic?” I asked.

“A little bit of alcohol,” said Ali. He smiled and rubbed his stomach. Bachrom hissed a whistling stream of air between his teeth and cursed. There were soldiers on the road ahead. They flagged us down. Bachrom wordlessly handed the soldier a small bribe and was waved on. “You will see that money solves everything in this country,” said Ali.

By now it was getting late in the afternoon. Shepherds were bringing their flocks into the valleys. Some sold honey by the side of the road. Others set up camp and boiled tea over open fires. An old man on a horse picked his way down a mountain path and rode across the road ahead of us. He wore robes and an ancient long-barrelled rifle strapped to his back. A massive shaggy grey dog trotted beside him, lifting its muzzle often to look at his master on the horse. The man stared straight ahead and didn’t quicken his pace to clear the road as Bachrom stopped to wait for him to pass. He reached the other side of road and climbed back into the hills.

We stopped for dinner at a bare-bones teahouse on the side of a hill. Ali bought yoghurt, mutton, tea, and bread, which we ate with our fingers from communal bowls while sitting on rope beds covered with carpets. Around us were shepherds who could afford to pay for food. Their dogs circled beyond the reach of a thrown stone. Farther down the mountain were visible the fires of shepherds without the means to pay someone else to cook for them. Ali insisted on paying for everything.

“We want you to know that you have friends here, Misha,” he said, using an affectionate Russian diminutive of Michael. “We are your friends.”

Ali tried to smile, but his eyes were flat, and he was soon lamenting the state of his country. “We have no democracy here, no freedom. The police are always taking, taking, taking.”

I tried to guide the conversation toward the attacks in New York and the war in Afghanistan that had just begun in earnest with the start of the American bombing campaign against Taliban targets. Nobody thought the war would affect them. “The Americans will come. The Americans will go,” said Bachrom. “We’ll still have our problems.”

Ali (left) and Bachrom on the road between Khujand and Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

We got back into the car as night fell. Bachrom picked up speed, braking and easing his car to the right as we approached every blind turn and then accelerating when the road opened up briefly ahead. We rounded one corner, and Bachrom slammed on the brakes. A column of expensive cars was ahead of us, driving in the same direction.

“Military command,” Ali said, while Bachrom cut his speed and coasted. “They are bad, dangerous people.”

Conversation didn’t resume until after the convoy had disappeared. We rounded another corner, and our headlights picked up a roadside hut and two soldiers pacing outside, their young, smooth faces shadowed by the stiff green peaked caps above them. One waved at us to stop. Bachrom rolled down the window a couple of inches and passed out a tightly folded bill. I looked over at Ali. His face was buried in his hands.

By the summer of 2001, weeks before the September 11 attacks, the Taliban had taken over almost all of Afghanistan, driving the Northern Alliance into an ever-shrinking pocket in the north, and in the traditional resistance fighter redoubt of the Panjshir Valley. Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir, was fighting another seemingly hopeless war. He was a master of guerilla tactics, but the odds against him were as long as they had ever been when facing the Soviets. The Taliban still had the firm backing of Pakistan’s largest and most powerful spy agency, and their depleted ranks were continuously refilled with recruits from Pakistan’s madrassahs. Their most notorious guest, Osama bin Laden, provided them with cash, international connections, and the guns, muscle, and ideological zeal of the foreign, mostly Arab, jihadists in al-Qaeda.

Massoud’s allies were much more fickle. He received some support from Russia, Iran, and India. His agents cooperated closely with the CIA. But while America recognized that the United States and Massoud shared a common enemy in Osama bin Laden, there was little interest in confronting the Taliban under the presidencies of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. America wanted to narrow the scope of its terrorist problem. And one man was much easier to deal with than a movement that controlled millions of people and most of a country.

Massoud tried to change this. He sent envoys to America to meet with State Department officials to try to convince them that the Taliban should be considered part of a larger Islamist network funded by bin Laden and other wealthy Gulf sheiks. Simply getting rid of bin Laden wouldn’t solve the problem. As recently as August 2001, Massoud dispatched his longtime friend and foreign minister, an ophthalmologist named Abdullah Abdullah, to Washington, where the Northern Alliance’s resident lobbyist managed to book a few appointments at the State Department and on Capitol Hill. Abdullah went with Qayum Karzai, brother of Hamid Karzai, who was then a leader among anti-Taliban Pashtuns from Afghanistan’s south. They got nowhere. As Steve Coll documents in Ghost Wars, a history of the CIA in Afghanistan prior to the September 11 attacks, “the members they met with could barely manage politeness.” Even arguments based on the oppression of women under the Taliban found little traction. Instead, the two Afghan envoys heard counter-arguments about “moderate” and “non-moderate” Taliban. They left after a week, completely dejected.

It wouldn’t take long before bin Laden demonstrated how closely al-Qaeda co-operated with its Taliban hosts. On September 9, 2001, two Arab television journalists with Belgian passports arrived in the village of Khodja Bahuddin, where Massoud kept a base in northern Afghanistan. Hidden inside their camera was a bomb that they had carried with them from Pakistan, to Kabul, and finally to Massoud’s compound. When it exploded in Massoud’s face, he was fatally wounded and died soon afterwards. Twenty-five thousand people attended his funeral a week later, which was held, fittingly, in the Panjshir Valley.

“The murder plot had been meticulously planned by al-Qaeda,” writes Rashid in Descent into Chaos. “If the attack had taken place a few weeks earlier, as planned, and the Northern Alliance had been destroyed by the Taliban offensive, the Americans would have had no allies on the ground after 9/11 took place. For the first time in more than a decade, the trajectory of Afghanistan’s sad, desperate history was to cross paths with a major international event, and Massoud was not alive to take advantage of it.”

The Northern Alliance was devastated by the loss of Massoud, but the Taliban offensive did not destroy them. Massoud was officially succeeded by General Mohammad Fahim. And now, finally, the Americans were joining their long war against the Taliban. When I visited Afghanistan’s lacklustre embassy in Dushanbe, however, it was Massoud’s face that peered from posters lining the walls. It was easy to understand why so many foreigners swooned. Massoud was very handsome. But he had refused to play the role of a globetrotting revolutionary extolling his cause on speaking tours and from university podiums. He had commanded the loyalty of so many Afghans because he didn’t leave their side even during Afghanistan’s darkest hours. Now the soldiers who had fought for him squatted on the curb outside the embassy while I picked up my visa inside. Their uniforms looked as though men unused to needlework had sewn badges and patches on generic green tunics. We looked each other over as I left the embassy. It wasn’t the last time I would underestimate their skill as fighters.

I had been told a convoy would be leaving in a couple of days. There wasn’t much to do in the meantime but wait and wander. Dushanbe was a bleak city. Most people couldn’t afford to drive, and those who could drove SUVs. They were either drug runners or staff at the various NGOs and United Nations agencies clustered in a posh and gated area of a town. The international aid types drove white SUVs. The drug runners had more diverse tastes. That’s how you could tell them apart. I also called the Citizen’s office manager and insisted that the newspaper wire me more money. They agreed to a few more thousand dollars, which pushed my total back over five grand.

I spent the day before the Northern Alliance convoy was scheduled to leave in a neighbourhood of Dushanbe inhabited by Afghan refugees. They had made homes here that were more permanent and comfortable than the ones their countrymen found in the refugee camps outside Peshawar. A market catered specifically to their unique appetites. But all were anxious to leave.

“As soon as the Taliban are defeated, we’ll go back to Afghanistan. It’s our motherland. We have to go back. If they were defeated today, we’d leave today,” a man named Sharif told me. He had once been an engineer in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif, but fled when the Taliban took the city. Now he sold tea and shoes in a market stall.

“They wash themselves with juice instead of water before they pray,” he said of the Taliban, meaning they claim to act in the name of Islam but are not true Muslims. “America must help us defeat the Taliban. But we don’t want them to stay. We don’t want any other country to rule us. We want to govern ourselves.”

From a nearby stall another Afghan named Mohammad Hakim beckoned me to follow him. We wove our way through the market, past a smoking fire pit where a young boy was cooking a large pot of plov, a Central Asian rice pilaf. Gusts of wind blew walnuts off the branches of overhanging trees. They clattered off the tin roofs of market stalls and onto the ground where children scrambled to pick them up. We entered a darkened hallway and emerged in a room where several Afghan men sat around a table supporting sweets, pistachio nuts, and a pot of tea.

The men stood up as we entered. Mohammad introduced me to each man in turn, and each rocked forward slightly, right hand on his heart. It was an infectious gesture.

Salam alaikum.

Wa alaikum salam.

Peace be with you.

And also with you.

Maruf, a friend of Mohammad, poured tea into my cup and then dumped it on the ground, refilling and emptying the cup several times before leaving it on the table.

“I left my house there. I left my land there. I left a piece of my heart there,” he said. Others nodded and murmured. “We can only be free in our own country.”

Maruf blamed the Taliban for his lot as a refugee but bore them no grudge. Once they are defeated, he said, they must be welcomed to become part of a new Afghanistan. “The enemy is someone with a gun. If they reject their guns, they are no longer enemies.”

I asked Maruf why he was so intent on returning to Afghanistan. It had been destroyed by war. People were starving. Rebuilding it would take years. Meanwhile, I said, here in Tajikistan, you have carved out a good life for yourself. Why go home?

“Afghanistan is a beautiful country,” Maruf said. “It is worth loving.”

The next morning I rose at dawn so as not to miss the convoy’s departure. I had never before stolen so much as a chocolate bar, but after staring at it for five minutes, I rolled up the blanket on my hotel bed and stuffed it into my backpack. I then headed for the market and bought bags of nuts, dried fruit, and water. Thirty ancient Russian military jeeps were parked nearby. They would take us to the border.

“Are you coming with us?”

A smiling middle-aged man called out to me. He had a stubbly white beard and bright, almost mischievous eyes. His ethnicity and accent were hard to place, but he sounded educated. All around us people were grunting and swearing, hoisting bags onto the roofs of jeeps, and yelling into cell phones. He appeared to take no notice.

“I am Doctor Awwad,” he said. “This,” he continued, gesturing with a flourish at a much younger and slightly flustered South Asian man who was trying to disassemble a tripod, “is Arvind. He’s my cameraman.”

Awwad’s first name was Waiel, though I never called him that, even weeks later, after we had been shot at together, slept under the same blanket and worn each others’ unwashed clothes. I don’t think I ever even addressed him without the honourific “Doctor.” It wasn’t that he was stuffy or full of himself. He simply had a professorial air about him that made it difficult not to show him respect. He and Arvind worked for the Middle East Broadcasting Corporation. They were based India. Awwad, who was Syrian, lived there with his Persian wife. He was a medical doctor by training but said he could make more money as a journalist. I think he also preferred reporting to medicine.

Loud, belching, mechanical coughs sounded as the jeeps in the convoy sputtered to life. “We’ll see you there,” Awwad said and turned to jog away. Arvind followed, lugging his camera equipment. I climbed into the back seat of a jeep that had been reserved for me. There was a Tajik man beside me. I don’t know what he did or why he was going to Afghanistan. He spoke no English. Shortly after we left Dushanbe, he was asleep on my shoulder.

Waiel Awwad.

The journey south took all day. We were held up by checkpoints. Jeeps got stuck in the sand and had to be dug out. At times the dust and sand blowing across treeless mountains obscured the sky so that it was impossible to tell whether the sun still shone. Periodically we’d pass through a cluster of mud brick houses. Brightly dressed women waved while their sons ran to open windows with bags of nuts to sell. But these scenes disappeared the closer we got to the border. Soon, there were only tumbleweeds, sand, and dust so pervasive it was difficult to discern thorn bushes from barbed wire.

We were held up at the last checkpoint, just north of the Amu Darya River, as darkness fell. The river marked the border, and the front lines lay not far beyond that. Deep, rumbling explosions rolled over us, rattling my chest and catching the breath in my throat. They came with muted flashes of light that briefly glowed just above the horizon and were followed by the staccato clatter of small arms. Tracer bullets and rockets lit up the sky. I had never before heard weapons fired in anger. It was exhilarating and terrifying all at the same time. I turned on a flashlight to write in my notebook.

“No light! No light!”

One of the men shepherding the convoy yelled down the row of cars. I turned off the flashlight and waited. The man beside me was again asleep on my shoulder.

Finally, close to midnight, we drove to the very edge of the river and unloaded. A rough barge had been pulled to the Tajik shore. It looked like a floating dock you might find at a weekend cottage. A metal cable anchored to both banks of the river allowed it to be pulled across by a tractor engine on shore. I carried my pack and my five-litre bottles of water onto the barge and looked for something to hold on to as it swung into the current. There was nothing. The water below me was black. Halfway across the river I looked back at Tajikistan. The Tajik border guards wore old Russian uniforms — tight-fitting shirts and peaked hats. I looked south again as the Afghan riverbank came into view. It was a sight I will never forget. The sky still crackled and glowed with the fire of war. As we inched toward land, men became visible, little more than silhouettes. They carried assault rifles over their shoulders and wore turbans and loose-fitting clothes that billowed in the wind and swirling sand. The barge lurched to a stop. I shouldered my pack and stepped onto the ground.