Undersea Prison (3 page)

Hunger eventually forced Durrani to leave his mother’s body in their dark, miserable hut and walk the streets of the city, ragged and unwashed, scavenging for something to eat. He remembered sorting through rotten food in gutters, competing for it with filthy dogs and cats, and sleeping in abandoned dwellings. Then one day - perhaps weeks later, he had no idea how long - he was literally picked up off the street and carried into a house by a man who turned out to be a schoolteacher. After nursing Durrani back to health the teacher placed him in an orphanage where he joined a dozen or so other children.

Durrani said his name was Po-po, his mother’s nickname for him, but when asked for his family name he said, quite accurately, that he did not know. He might have told them what little he did know about his family but for reasons he could not fully understand at the time he was afraid to. His mother had never explained the complexities of race discrimination to him but he was aware that he and she had been different from the Pashtun majority and not in any positive way. Weeks later, after much badgering by the orphanage staff and the other kids, he finally muttered the only name he knew that linked him with his family. To his surprise the reaction had been most favourable, which gave him the confidence to stick with it.

One day a little girl with features similar to his mother’s arrived at the orphanage. Durrani immediately went to befriend her but he was pulled aside and told by the other children to leave her alone because she was of a low caste. It was Durrani’s first lesson in how Hazaras were considered inferior to the Pashtuns. The Hazara children were often taunted by the others, treated like animals and made to act as if they were slaves. The schoolmasters did not appear to see anything wrong in it and only intervened when they saw the Hazara being severely beaten.

Durrani soon realised how imperative it was that he should never mention his mother’s Hazara ethnicity. He became so fearful of the ramifications that his denial turned into a phobia.When walking the streets he would avoid eye contact with any Hazara he passed for fear that they might recognise him. A memorable exception was the day he saw coming towards him a young woman who looked exactly as he remembered his mother. He could not take his eyes off her until she was feet away, at which point he dropped his gaze and turned his back to her in case she really
was
his parent. He was afraid she might talk to him.

When the woman had passed Durrani he ran up the street as fast as he could and didn’t stop until he found somewhere to hide. He did not feel shameful about his reaction. On the contrary, he was relieved at avoiding a close call. But he could not shake loose the memory of the girl’s face and he gradually became confused about his mother’s death, doubting whether she had actually died at all.The frightening implications of that were that if she was still living he could be exposed.

Since the day Durrani had walked out of his hut, leaving his mother’s corpse inside, he had never returned to the area where they had lived. But a few days after seeing the Hazara woman in the street he was filled with the urge to learn if his mother really was still alive. The need to know was not based on any sudden longing to be with her again. His fear of being labelled a Hazara was now greater than any affection he had ever had for his mother.To avoid being seen he waited until the sun had dropped behind the mountains before making his way to the top of the hill that overlooked the area. He crept inside the old British fort and climbed the ramparts of the weathered but still imposing walls to search for the hut from afar. He could not find it where he thought it should have been. But after walking from one end of the fortifications to the other and back several times, identifying some vaguely familiar reference points, he came to the conclusion that the dwelling no longer existed.

Durrani remained on the battlements for many hours, gazing down at the huts and houses, the people coming and going and the handful of children playing where he used to, watching in case his mother should turn up. He left when it was completely dark and all he could see was the glow of kerosene lamps inside the houses, never to return to the place again. From time to time throughout his life, whenever he caught a glimpse of the old fort as he passed through the city, his thoughts went back to those days. The most vivid memory was that of his mother lying in the hut with blood trickling from her mouth.

So fearful was Durrani of being exposed as a Hazara that to maintain his security at the orphanage he decided to keep to himself, rarely talking to the other children. When asked about his family he shrugged and said he knew nothing other than that they were Pashtun.

Durrani was nineteen and working in a barber shop as a floor sweeper when the Russians marched into Kabul by invitation to support the beleaguered Communist government. He might have stayed in the city if it had not been for another orphan, Rog, a Pashtun boy Durrani’s age. Rog was the only person in Durrani’s life whom he had allowed to get close enough to call a friend. When Rog one day declared that they should leave Kabul and join the mujahideen to fight against the Russian invaders Durrani experienced his first taste of the lure of adventure. It was an enticement that would subsequently tempt him many times. The following night he and Rog left the city together.

After several days of mostly walking, with the occasional ride on a truck, they arrived at a village in the hills outside Kandahar where Rog had a relative.Within a week they had joined a band of mujahideen.

Thus Durrani began a nomadic guerrilla existence that would span practically all of his next two and a half decades and end with his capture and incarceration in the most impregnable prison on the planet.

The pair were initially employed by the mujahideen as general dogsbodies: carrying ammunition, fetching supplies, cooking and washing. But after Rog was killed in a Russian helicopter attack along with a dozen others in the group, Durrani was handed a rifle and from that day became one of the fighters. A year later, while being treated for a wound and recovering at a training ground in the Hindu Kush mountains, he met a fellow soldier who had recently lost an eye, a quiet, tall, muscular man with an intense and unusually charismatic personality. His name was Omar and the next time Durrani saw him, a decade later, the man had become a mullah and also the leader of a powerful new force that would eventually become known to the rest of the world as the Taliban.

After ten years of fighting the Russians were eventually chased from Afghanistan and Durrani found himself pondering his future and how he was going to make a living. It felt strange to be considering a normal life after so many years as a warrior but it did not take him long to come to the realisation that he had no useful peacetime skills other than the ability to drive a vehicle. And so that was precisely what he did. He got a job as a taxi driver in Kabul, hoping eventually to own his own vehicle and go into business for himself. But the peace he expected to descend on Afghanistan with the end of the war against the Russians did not materialise: the battle for control of the country continued. It was not long before he was lured back into the ranks where he joined the rebellion against the Communist government that was still in power.

Durrani’s involvement in the struggle was not motivated by any political loyalty. It seemed to him that the endless battles were for the personal gains of others and that Afghans were merely the tools of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the Americans. There was little remuneration other than what could be got from looting. But when he was called to join the fight he went because it seemed better than what he was doing at the time. He was a nomadic warrior purely for the sake of it.

Once again Durrani took part in the capture of Kabul, a new government was installed, and he went back to driving a taxi. During the brief period of calm a pretty young Tajik girl who worked in the taxi company’s office came into his life. Durrani set his sights on marrying her. He planned to work hard enough to buy a car, set up his own taxi company and prove his worth to her. But Durrani was to have his heart broken only a few months later when the son of the taxi company’s owner announced his intentions to marry the girl, who had accepted his offer. For her he was, financially, a far wiser choice than Durrani.

The failure of the new Afghan leadership to bring order led to the country breaking up into zones, each one led by its own warlord. The two most powerful generals were Massoud and Hekmatyer who both vied for ultimate control at the whim of the same old power-brokers: Pakistan and the US. Crime became pandemic and the general unrest led directly to the emergence of a new clan formed by a sect of Pashtun Islamic-fundamentalist students known as the Taliban. Their banner call was to rid the country of corruption, crime and greedy warlords and they quickly became very popular.

A combination of peer pressure, heartbreak, loss of confidence in the future and the subconscious need to find a purpose to his life saw Durrani leaving Kabul to join in this latest effort to bring order to Afghanistan. He also could not ignore an important characteristic of the Taliban. They were essentially a Pashtun organisation that, in the early days at least, were keen to return the old Afghan monarchy back to power. In such uncertain times it was wise to stick with one’s own kind and so Durrani enlisted with the Taliban.

A couple of months later he took part in the battle for Kandahar and after a successful campaign found himself marching on Kabul once again. On his thirty-sixth birthday, a date he had chosen arbitrarily as he did not know his real date of birth, the Taliban took the capital and from there embarked on a crusade to liberate the rest of the country. Durrani approved of the harsh politics of his new leaders, having decided they were necessary to bring order to his war-torn country. Neither was he deterred by the level of brutality used by the Taliban in order to enforce its rule. However, the massacre of Yakaolang left him with scars that never fully healed. Yakaolang was a predominantly Hazara town that had shown the potential for resistance to the new rulers. The truth was that the people had not yet taken up arms against the Taliban but were used as an example to any who might be considering it.

Durrani, now sporting a long black beard, arrived at the town one afternoon along with several hundred Taliban and met up with a force of similar numbers made up of foreign fighters from Pakistan and various Arab countries. Their orders were simple enough: to systematically select every male over the age of twelve and execute him. During the next few days a festival of looting and slaughter took place. More than three hundred men and boys were shot or mutilated along with dozens of women and children who simply got in the way.

On the final day of the massacre the gang Durrani was part of burst into a house and on finding a young Hazara boy of the right age started to drag him outside to execute him. But the boy’s older sister tried to stop them, directing her pleas at Durrani. He was standing in the doorway, unable to take his eyes off her - her likeness to his mother was astounding. While pleading for mercy she walked towards him, her hands grabbing the front of her clothes as if she was trying to rip them from her body. She stopped in front of him and became suddenly calm, lowering her voice and talking to him as if she knew him, or so it seemed to him.

‘Please spare him,’ she said. ‘He is just a boy. You know that. You must have sympathy.’

In the Pashtu language it sounded to Durrani as if she could see that he was one of them, one of her kind, a Hazara.

The other Taliban were watching the display as they held the struggling boy, looking between Durrani and the girl, something Durrani suddenly became aware of.

‘Please,’ she cried, stepping even closer to Durrani. ‘You are not the same as the others. I can see that. Spare my brother. I beg you.’

She could see compassion in his eyes but had failed to recognise the overriding fear behind them. Durrani squeezed the trigger of his AK47 and shot the girl once through the chest. She fell back to the floor but managed to support herself on her hands defiantly, refusing to fall all the way back. Her brother wailed on seeing the bloodstain grow down the front of her dress. She never took her eyes off Durrani even as they filled with tears. She looked more like his mother than ever as death came to claim her, a trickle of blood on her lips. She raised a hand towards him as if she wanted him to take hold of it. Durrani wanted her to stop and the only way he could do it was to fire again. The second bullet killed her instantly.

Durrani’s colleagues approved of the execution and pushed past him, taking the girl’s brother outside. A few seconds later more shots rang out.

Durrani remained staring at the girl’s body for a long time, a confusion of emotions swirling inside his head. He felt neither approval nor satisfaction. What he did feel was something that up until that moment in his life had been alien to him. It was guilt.

He left the house, walking past the limp body of the girl’s brother hanging lifeless over the front-garden gate, and continued down the main street and out of the town. It was not so much because he was disgusted by what was going on but because he was lost inside himself, consumed by his experience in the house, wondering what was happening to him.

The memory of the girl remained with him for the rest of his life - until his very last breath, in fact.

The Taliban plan to control the whole of Afghanistan did not succeed. The fighting continued for years against the Northern Alliance until the attack on the World Trade Center when it was the Americans’ turn to invade the country.The Afghan weapons and strategies that had worked so well against the Russians were no match for US might and the Taliban were swept aside.

Durrani took to the hills and eventually escaped into Pakistan where he stayed for several years. He remained in the employ of the Taliban, for his own security as well as to earn his keep. Occasionally he was sent back over the border on sorties, gathering intelligence on US troop movements, sometimes getting into fights with American or Pakistan border patrols. Some of his comrades-in-arms joined the fight in Iraq but Durrani did not want to move that far from his country. Most of his compatriots believed that, as with the fight against the Russians, and against the British many decades before that, a protracted guerrilla campaign against the Americans would eventually see the Afghans victorious. But the Americans had also learned from those past campaigns and the Taliban found it far more difficult to operate in the same way they had under the Russian occupation.