AT THE FRONT
Stories of Hope and Desperation
I sighed as I boarded the Tajik Air flight from Moscow to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, stepping over a worn oriental rug used as a doormat for passengers. Whitewashed by time, the old Russian-made plane worried me.
Then, as it began its takeoff, it didn't seem to be climbing very much. I told myself that this was because of all the giant-sized bundles the Tajik passengers had piled on board in Moscow. Instinctively, I closed my eyes. Sure enough, there was an ear-shattering roar inches from my head. I assumed that I would soon feel what I was hearing. But I didn't. Slowly I opened my eyes and saw that, just above me, a large hunk of the plane's inner metal shell had fallen down, so that I could hear the engines' wild roar and the wind rushing by. Only a thin metal skin with ancient-looking wires running along it separated me from the sky.
What else, I wondered, lies ahead?
I couldn't get out of Dushanbe fast enough. My time there was spent waiting at a Tajikistan government public information office, and at the embassy of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in exile, the government kicked out of Kabul five years earlier by the Taliban. I spent money left and right on forms and visas. Although they were asking for the world's support for their fight against the Taliban, the rebel Afghans were not handing out visas freely to everyone. They rejected an Israeli reporter outright, saying Israelis aren't welcome to their Afghanistan. Later, inside Afghanistan, they were less than helpful towards Syrian-born correspondent from Middle East Broadcasting (MBC), one of the major Arab television satellite stations. Their hatred of Osama bin Laden and his Arab allies was so deep, they seemed to want little to do with Arabs. And after all, Arabs posing as journalists two days before the attacks in the U.S. had assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Northern Alliance's charismatic defense minister. The man from MBC was the only Arab journalist I came across.
The only way to get to Afghanistan from Dushanbe was via a convoy led by Tajik officials, so along with Pete Souza, a Chicago Tribune photographer, I joined a caravan of mostly Soviet-made jalopies. After several hours, we passed strikingly beautiful mountains and enormous cotton fields that filled whole valleys. The road vanished, replaced by a dusty plain. We reached the Afghanistan border at nightfall, and Russian border guards flat out refused to let anyone pass. They ran the border, not the Tajiks, who insisted they had all of the proper paperwork needed for the departing journalists. But since the Russian commandos were the masters of the border, invited to guard it by the Tajiks because of their fears of the Taliban and other militant Islamic groups, the Russians reserved the right to decide whether to open it or not. They eventually did, but hours later, after many pleas by the Tajik officials. They also set up their own scale of exit fees for the foreign journalists. Two Swiss journalists in front of us pleaded poverty, but got pinched for $100 each. Rumor had it that a bunch of Japanese journalists had handed over bundles of cash. I mumbled something in my limited Russian and, astoundingly, we went free.
We crossed a narrow stretch of the Amu River in pitch darkness aboard a rickety metal barge. Turn off your flashlights, shouted an Afghan soldier with the Northern Alliance. Taliban snipers on the mountaintop can see us, he said. (This was back when the Taliban had squeezed the alliance into a relatively small corner of the country, not vice versa.) On the other shore, we piled into waiting jeeps and headed for Khodja Bahaudin, a dusty, miserably poor town that had only come to life when the Northern Alliance and its warlord members, fleeing from advancing Taliban troops, had stationed some of their fighters there several years ago. The jeeps heaved and tossed in the darkness. There were no roads, and there were ruts and deep holes left from the fighting with the Russians and from the rains that turn some parts of Afghanistan in the winter into a sea of mud.
There were about thirty of us bouncing around. "Where's the press hotel?" shouted a Serbian journalist suited up in an army camouflage outfit. He described himself as a military expert and rattled off the battles he had seen in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere. But at the Northern Alliance compound, where most journalists were staying, there was only the ground to sleep on. All of the Iranian Red Crescent tents were taken. So we slept briefly, awakened by the morning call issued by the chickens, donkeys, and dogs.
Pete and I were in a hurry. We wanted to file a story soon. And
so, we found a translator and a driver, each demanding the $100-a-day
rate set by the Northern Alliance, and rushed off in search of
refugees. I was supposed to explain the mindset of the Taliban
and their rivals, to feed into daily coverage coming out of the
Pentagon and Pakistan and to capture the look and feel of life
in such a tortured place. Not a light load. But Afghans did not
shy from telling their stories. Nor was their misery hidden. In
no time, we discovered a group wandering in the blazing sun. They
had been fleeing the Taliban for days on foot. It was a stunning
picture, the women, covered from head to toe in brightly colored
burkhas, plodding along on the sun-baked earth. The middle-aged
father who trailed behind his wife and daughters was convinced
that they would die of hunger soon. Just beyond them we found
a newly created refugee camp. Most of the people were sick and
starving. One man held up all he had to feed his family, a piece
of bread so stale it seemed petrified. Our work had begun.
Driving along one day, we came across
a mass of people lined up for a weekly food distribution from
one of the few foreign relief agencies on hand. What was so compelling
about the scene was the young girls who raced forward every time
a bag was hefted off the truck. They would rush to scoop up into
their aprons the few kernels of wheat that had tumbled into the
dust.
Most stories seemed to come that way: they simply tumbled into our laps. Many times Pete saw a photo essay in his head, and that's what led us to the story. There was an army commander who complained that many of his soldiers were illiterate youngsters who could not read a map. Thus, a story about boy soldiers. ("I would like to write a letter. I would like to read a letter," one of them told me.) And there was the new whitewashed schoolhouse in the refugee camp set up by a foreign relief agency, where the children were so starved for education that they swallowed up their learning. Thus, a story about teaching young girls to read. And there was the doctor at the four-room mud hut called a hospital, who lamented the fact that most land-mine victims would never receive new arms and legs because rehabilitation facilities were so sparse. Thus, a story on land mines, in one of the nations most afflicted by land mines. Without pictures, the stories would have never really captured the moment.
And some stories simply fell on us, as on the night that peanut butter and jelly dropped from the starry-eyed sky.
At first, half asleep in the middle of the night, I thought that
the Taliban were attacking with mud bombs because that was the
sound of the little plastic packages hitting the house made of
mud and straw where we had found a room. I was too tired to get
out of my sleeping bag, so I listened to the pounding on the roof
and walls, hoping the Taliban would just go away. But when I heard
the carnival-like cheering out in the streets, I wandered out
and discovered hundreds of people, clutching flashlights or gasoline
lamps, scooping up the small food packages dropped by the Americans.
The next day children kept rushing up to me, saying "teshekur,"
or "thank you" in Dari, a derivative of Farsi, the language
spoken by Tajiks. But there was no joy among the refugees who
lived far from the U.S. food drop and therefore did not get any
food. They begged me that day to let the Americans know where
they were. They were so sure the Americans would come back. They
also wanted the Americans to know that they were cold and needed
tents for the winter.
Beyond what we could see and hear,
we were living and reporting in a bubble. My editors back in Chicago
realized this, and thankfully accepted the fact that I could not
provide them with the up-to-the-minute big picture. We talked
twice daily by satellite telephone, meaning that I could call
them, but they could not reach me. I could not keep my phone running,
because electricity was so valuable. At first we scrounged electricity
from a Northern Alliance office, plugging in our equipment for
hours at a time there. But when other journalists claimed the
outlets we had to resort to buying a car battery, and finally
a generator. Most of the time in our pre-generator period, however,
we depended on gasoline lamps for light, and I wrote at night,
wearing a mountain climber's flashlight on my forehead.
My editors seemed to welcome the stories, in which I tried to get across a sense of the people and the land, a stretch of breathtaking, barren, russet-colored mountains and a desert-like plain parched by a lingering drought, worse than many Afghans could remember. When a terrible dust storm blew in, announcing the coming of winter, I wrote what it felt like to be pelted by a bone-chilling wind and blinding dust in the northern Afghanistan towns, where electricity and running water do not exist and food supplies were dwindling.
The problem with getting the bigger picture was that it was not there, at least not for me. The Northern Alliance's offices were spread out, making it almost impossible to find out what was happening. The opposition officials in Khodja Bahaudin were not very helpful either. Telephones did not exist, and a trip to the next major city was a risky all-day adventure, taking pains to skirt land mines laid by the Taliban or clinging to narrow mountain roads. Different sources gave vastly different versions of the military situation
I quickly learned to rely on the foreign relief agencies for their reading of the military and health situations. They were certain early on — correctly as it turns out — that the Northern Alliance would attack, and so were planning to set up emergency medical facilities to back up the fighters. The Northern Alliance had no such support otherwise. They were also convinced that the potential for famine was great in several areas if food supplies were not stocked before the treacherous Afghan winter began and mountainous villages became isolated by thick snowstorms. So, too, they worried what would happen if the Northern Alliance swept across the country, opening up new rivers of refugees traveling in a country long without order or stability. Again, they were right. Refugee camps swelled. Roads were lined with people fleeing the fighting or headed back to where they came from. And food and medical supplies were insufficient. Death and hunger stalked everyone everywhere.
The relief agencies also supplied me with informal briefings on the warlords. One was a peculiarly reclusive and dramatic fellow who preferred to sit in the darkness, wearing sunglasses and twirling his prayer beads. On his desk were several small green flags from the Party of Islam, one of the more radical Islamic factions among the Afghan mujahedeen, or holy warriors, with whom he had once fought. At the end of an interview, he demanded that I write a statement in English in his diary, disavowing any criticism of warlords. But another warlord was much more open and welcoming, allowing several foreign journalists to live on his compound in Dashti Cala. By time we arrived, however, there was no room for us.
He was an Uzbek, one of the minorities that dominate the Northern Alliance. I speak Turkish, learned years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer. And since Turkish comes from the same family as Uzbeki, we chatted along in Uzbeki and Turkish, each of us missing every other word, but somehow grasping the greater meaning. He become my best source. Our young Afghan translator, a Tajik who had studied English for one year in high school in Pakistan, improved his command of English daily, too. He no longer said "many Talibans are surprising today" when he meant that they were surrendering.
At night, I studied Dari with a middle-aged Afghan who once was
a high school teacher, and who had learned English thirty years
ago from a Peace Corps volunteer. He had later become a lawyer
for the government in Kabul. But he was now working as a servant
in the small guest house where we lived. He had fought against
the Russians, suffered several serious and long-lasting injuries
in the decade-long struggle, and had lost three of his own children
as a result of the Russians' bombing of his village and of living
without adequate food or health care. I wrote a profile of him,
a sort of reporter's notebook, hoping his story would be seen
as a metaphor for Afghanistan's dismay and tortured disintegration.
We lived at first on bread and rice
and potatoes. Then we added raw onions, and then one day we added
honey when we found a bottle for sale in town. If we remembered,
we carried PowerBars when we were traveling around so we would
not be famished. Since so many journalists had been sickened by
the food and water, we were being extra cautious. We drank whatever
bottled water we had managed to carry with us from Tajikistan,
and endless cups of the green tea favored by Afghans. Still, something
horrible eventually attacked my stomach, for which I took medicine
upon returning home.
We learned from others what trips and what sources would pay off. We quickly realized that no long trips should be taken without companions in case one vehicle broke down. Among the foreign journalists, it did not seem to matter that much where you came from. If you spoke English, and most did, you had something in common. At the compound of Commander Hassan, the friendly Uzbek warlord in Dashti Cala, one of these journalists was Volker Handloik, forty, a war-savvy, veteran free-lance writer with the German magazine, Stern. On the road out of Dushanbe I had met his colleague, a middle-aged photographer for Stern, who appeared to have witnessed almost every chaotic event of the last few decades and seemed unruffled by all of them. We talked about the loneliness of such work and the price that families back home pay for it.
But Volker stood out. He was tall and muscular with long, curly blond hair that he sometimes wore tied back. He sometimes wore a bright green Uzbek overcoat that was about as out of place on him as possible. He seemed to know everything first, as well as everyone who mattered in the Northern Alliance, and to take a special pride in his instincts. But he was always helpful, sharing his advice in careful whispers.
When the Northern Alliance attack finally began, he went off with five other journalists in a Russian-made armored personnel carrier along with a commander to take a nighttime view of what they had been told were deserted Taliban trenches. They weren't. The Taliban attacked in the darkness with grenades and other weapons. Some of the journalists were thrown from the carrier as it wildly raced up and down hillsides for safety. Along with two French journalists, Johanne Sutton, 34, and Pierre Billaud, 31, Volker was thrown loose and killed by the Taliban gunfire. Their looted bodies were later recovered from the Taliban trenches.
Strange, I can still see Volker, so sure and savvy.
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