KANDAHAR. Fazal Mohammed lives in the Zhari district, along the road from Laskargah to Kandahar, with his wife and five children. The house is humble, the walls of the rooms are made of mud and straw as well as the stairs leading to the structures where Fazal keeps the fruits of his harvest.When a rocket hit the barn where he kept his cattle, killing all the cows he had, Fazal, who had no money to buy them back, no savings to support his family, began growing opium poppies. Cheaper, safer. Since the Taliban control the city, he has returned to rest. There are no more attacks along the way, and he can travel to Kandahar even when the sun goes down, his children play in the ground without fear of being killed by a rocket and then he no longer has to pay the soldiers at the checkpoints. The monthly rate that farmers and shepherds owed to soldiers in the regular army, up until last August, was 400 Afghans a month, plus a quarter of the harvest for each harvest.
None of Fazal’s children are in school now, nor were they in school before. The first, here, in the villages of southern Afghanistan, is a concept hanging from the categories of the news, which are not those of history. Here, history has come full circle, returning to the Taliban their spiritual capital, the symbolic city where Mullah Omar gave life to the group in 1994, a capital they never left, constantly in contact with the exiled leaders of the shura. of Quetta, Pakistan.The effects of the Fazal war have them on the house wall destroyed by the RPG and keep them in the memory. They have the appearance of US soldiers who break into the village, move women and children to one side of the road and men to the other, with their wrists tied, soldiers blocking villages all night, looking for information, hiding places , suspected collaborators, and then they leave, loading a handful of men onto the military vehicles. Fazal was never taken away but, he says, he remembers the crying of children and the humiliation of women, exposed to the gaze of strangers. This is why today, when he sees the Taliban flag on the street, he is not only raised, he is happy.
His is not complicity, he is not (only) support for the group. It is above all the desire for security that animates him. Even the road leading to Kandahar, the National Highway 1, bears the signs of war, on the asphalt there are still the chasms caused by the explosions of the devices that the Taliban placed to hit the vehicles of the coalition and the Afghan regular army. A road designed to unite five provinces, Kabul, Wardak, Ghazni, Zabul and Kandahar and cost the Americans 300 million dollars, which has transformed over time into what the Afghans call “the road of death”. Today, hundreds of Afghan citizens fly the flags of the Islamic Emirate on the remains of the attacks that marked it and killed it as well as the soldiers.
At the entrance to the city, surrounded by watchtowers and a ring of concrete barriers surmounted by barbed wire, is the Sarposa prison. Until August the 1000 inmates were almost all Taliban, today the prison houses almost only drug users. The Sarposa prison follows and explains the history of the movement, in 2008, two Taliban suicide bombers blew themselves up in front of the gate, killing 15 guards. 1200 prisoners escaped, almost all Taliban fighters and commanders.
Photo by Alessio Romenzi
After the attack, the complex was fortified and illuminated, protected by three checkpoints and gates, to prevent another mass escape. In vain. Three years later, in 2011, 500 men fled through a 300-meter tunnel that connected the wing of political prisoners, the Taliban, to the main road, the Kabul-Kandahar “road of death”. An operation planned for months and impossible without the complicity of the prison security forces. After the colossal escape, Zabiullah Mujahid, who was already the movement’s spokesperson at the time, said: “We had the support of qualified professionals to dig the tunnel, above all we had the support of our people.” The “friends,” he explained, referring to the knowledgeable and conniving Afghan army soldiers, had provided not only cover for months but also copies of the keys to the cells from which the Taliban detainees had come out five at a time to avoid the noise. At the end of the tunnel, Mujahid said, there was a group of suicide bombers ready to blow themselves up if something went wrong.
After the 2011 attack, the prison was almost empty, the escapees took up arms and began fighting against NATO forces again. Last August, when the Taliban recaptured their spiritual capital, Sarposa prison was the first building to be captured. They replaced the Afghan flag with that of the group and freed the prisoners, that is, their fighters. In the August offensive that led them to lead the country, they followed the same method everywhere: first besieging the districts, villages and cities, and once inside, first freeing the members of the group, expert people who would have strengthened the ranks of subsequent fights. A classic jihadist operational strategy: targeting prisons to free leaders from detention but also fueling propaganda against opponents, regenerating the armed force, and communicating to detained Taliban, often high-value members, that the Taliban fighters did not have them. left alone.
Operations, therefore, at low cost and maximum reward. This is why the history of the group, its longevity and its strength, is also written on the history of prisons. From the assaults on the Sarposa prison alone, in Kandahar, in the 5 years between 2008 and 2015, 2000 fighters were freed, among them the leading figures who have held firm consensus and planned the battle. Today at the entrance to Sarposa there is a sign that reads: “We do not accept addiction to drugs, in here you will be treated and one day you will be able to be useful to society again”.
Inside there are 600 inmates for drug addiction, and a few dozen common criminals. The political prisoners of the time, the Taliban, are no longer there, because they are in charge of the city. The Molavi Mansour, wrapped in his gray patu, his head covered by a white turban, runs the prison, while walking in the clearing the prisoners kiss his hands and he does not stop them, he has the rough and aggressive look of those who move between the cells because he is familiar with it. Not that of the boss, but that of the inmate.
Mansour was detained in the Bagram US base prison for five years. According to Human Rights Watch, prisoners in Bagram were chained, intentionally kept awake for long periods of time, repeatedly bathed in freezing cold water in the winter, kicked and punched to get them to speak. Up to two hundred children were held in Bagram cells for years. This is why when Molavi Mansour says “I know what it means to be a prisoner” his words leave the trail of the desire for revenge in the air.
Photo by Alessio Romenzi
The land around Kandahar, the kilometers leading to the mud and straw houses, are proof that geography makes history here. Unconquerable villages, and for this reason unconquered, by the Pax Americana, where the fighters fled, returning to rural life, waiting for the right time to settle the accounts and win the war, while around the project of the construction of the Afghan institutions that were transformed into a greedy elite, in a bottomless pit of money at the mercy of warlords, their robberies, and the earnings of international contractors.
“The country resisted, the enemies fled the country, and we finally got our independence”, Ahmed Saed is the head of the Culture and Information department set up by the Taliban in Kandahar, he has a Taliban flag attached to the wall with four pieces of tape , a globe on the desk and the books, ordered, on the shelves, a notepad on which he writes the required authorizations by hand. Everything returns the image of modesty and honesty that the group wants to convey, the one on which it has built the consensus, like that of Fazel Mohammed, the pastor who became an opium grower “today our people live in safety, this is the most important, remember those who for years have invoked rights, raiding our homes at night, and killing our people. Those who say they have brought money that our people have not benefited from ».
There are no women on the streets of Kandahar, the chronicle says. They weren’t even there before, the story goes. And Saed confirms it: this is the application of Islamic law, this is how we governed, this is how we will continue to do so, in the name of Allah and supported by the people.Look at the globe on the desk, handwrite the paper that allows foreigners to work and ask questions. And he grants one, the last.What is democracy, Saed?He smiles, then says, “Guantanamo.”
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