TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061890/06180010.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.1 KB | 213 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 32

COVER STORIES

AFGHANISTAN

When Allah Beckons


By Alessandra Stanley


    Mohammad Anwar, 13, has fought in seven battles, and during
the last one, an assault on a government garrison outside the
village of Dara Noor, he killed at close range for the first
time. He had followed the fighters through mined fields,
running like crazy, and was in the first wave that captured the
enemy post. He and a friend came upon three soldiers scrambling
down a hill. His friend shot one. Mohammad Anwar shot the other
two, thumping the bodies with his rifle butt to make sure they
were dead, then calmly removing a revolver from the first
corpse.

    Asked what he thinks about killing, Mohammad Anwar looks
puzzled. "I was happy because I killed them," he says. During
the attack, Mohammad Anwar's older brother and some other
mujahedin seized four soldiers. They bound the prisoners'
hands, blindfolded them and marched them to Dara Noor. After
the mullah arrived, they lined up the captives and shot them.
Mohammad Anwar and his friend watched. How did he feel about
that? He lifts an eyebrow and this time answers deliberately,
as if talking to a slow-witted child. "I was happy," he says.

    A goatherd's son, Mohammad Anwar has been fighting since he
was ten. He has never been to school and insists that he is
glad not to have to go. With his olive-brown eyes and brown
curls peeping out from under his wool cap, he looks like any
of the thousands of Afghan boys who loiter, energetic and
restless, in Pakistani refugee camps. But there is something
different about him. It is not in his face, which is babyish,
or his hands, callused and blackened. It is the look behind his
eyes, the dulled expression of a seasoned grunt.

    In a jihad, or holy war, there are no age guidelines for
combat. If a commander decides a boy is ready, then he fights.
Fathers take their sons with them to the front. Orphaned boys
go with their brothers or uncles. Mothers who demur are
ignored. Forcing boys into battle is rare, since nearly all of
them volunteer. It is what their ancestors have done for
centuries, it is expected of them, and it is not to be
questioned. "I was happy."

    Islam Dara is a small mujahedin supply base nestled in
jagged rocks beneath a circle of mountains, a desert oasis fed
by a cold thin stream. Except for the sound of aerial bombing
that burns red rings of brush fire above the enclave, Islam
Dara seems sheltered. A few canvas tents are pitched amid
boulders and mounds of ammunition: RPG-7s, launchers, bazookas.
With its cool caves and grassy marshes harboring frogs, Islam
Dara is a boy's paradise out of Kipling. But the dozen or so
boys who stay there are living an idyll of war.

    At the slightest sound, the sentries -- rifle-carrying boys
in gray or brown robes -- emerge from behind rocks. Under the
direction of a handful of older soldiers, they work in the
camp, fetching water, cleaning guns, tending the pack mules.
Each night two or three of them slip into the desert alongside
mules laden with water, food and ammunition and cross past the
enemy to the forward posts three hours away. Each boy has his
own AK-47, the only valuable object any of them has ever owned.


    Sahin Shah, 10, a mujahedin with a pretty face and mountain
flowers tucked into the brim of his cap, is offended by the
notion that life in Islam Dara could be fun. His back stiffens,
and he retorts with a frown, "We came here to fight. We don't
want to play." As if to prove his point, he yanks the flowers
from his cap and strips apart his Kalashnikov. When he cleans
it, his motions are slow, loving. Like most of the others, he
comes from a small mountain village. His father was killed in
combat two years earlier. He says he has been in a battle twice
but isn't afraid of dying. He is fighting the jihad, and in
jihad, there are no unhappy endings. "Either we kill them," he
says, as if reciting a proverb, "or they martyr us."

    His best friend, Akbar, also 10, watches Sahin Shah take his
rifle apart, then decides to race him and quickly strips his
own. Sahin Shah wins. Akbar has a smart-aleck face, a raspy
voice, and wears a dirty plaid waistcoat over his robes, a
good-luck gift from his father. Unlike many of the boys'
fathers, Akbar's is still alive, but he is based at a nearby
camp. A week earlier Akbar's father went to visit his wife and
five younger children in a refugee camp in Pakistan. He wanted
Akbar to go with him, but the son refused. "If I went there,"
he explains, "then my friends would be alone."

    Akbar has been shot at and has returned fire at the enemy,
but he is not sure if he has killed. Hesitantly, he explains
what battle is like. Mostly it is noisy and inconclusive. "I
fired," he says. "But I don't know if I hit anybody."

    The gaunt officer in charge, Mohammad Wali, 30, keeps an eye
on which boys show promise for battle. Seven of the dozen are,
to his eyes, ready for combat. The youngest is nine, the oldest
13, but Mohammad Wali is content with their abilities. "They
are the same as the mujahedin -- better, because they are not
afraid." Boys also have more energy than older fighters, but
they still have to be watched. "Sometimes they behave like
children," Mohammad Wali says, his eyes narrowing accusingly
at Sahin Shah, "shooting at stones or teasing the mules." He
too shrugs off questions about fear or death. In jihad, he says,


    Jihad is learned at an early age, absorbed by children at
home, in the mosque and, for those who can go, in school. There
are not many schools in mujahedin-held Afghanistan, but the
remaining few, called madrasas and run by mullahs, have a
curriculum molded by war. "The madrasa used to be 80% ordinary
subjects and 20% Islam," says a former Kabul schoolteacher now
doing refugee work in Peshawar. "Today it is 80% about Islam."
In the refugee camps in Pakistan, Afghan teachers instruct
Afghan children, and the course material is almost entirely
about jihad.

    In a dark, windowless classroom in the Nasserbagh refugee
camp in Peshawar, 25 eighth-graders, heads shaven and
obediently bowed, listen to their teacher. An algebra problem
on a blackboard shows that Allah is one. History class is about
Mohammad and Islam. So is geography. The teacher asks who is
ready to fight. Every hand shoots up. Six-year-old Ahmad Zia,
tiny but fierce in a black jacket and cap, rises from the floor
and, with a pet student's earnest intensity, leads his
classmates in a well-practiced chant: "I will not let the
foreigner's foot into my country/ Either I will be martyred or
I will kill him."

    Afterward, he marches up to the teacher, salutes and marches
back to his place. Ahmad Zia says he wants to go to the front
in June, and the teacher doesn't smile. The child is not being
cute. "I want to fight the jihad." Asked to define jihad, he
replies, "Jihad is to fight Russians."

    Never mind that Soviet troops left Afghanistan long ago. The
mujahedin are now fighting other Afghans and even one another,
but the curriculum has not kept up. To schoolboys, "Russians"
remains an indelible synonym for enemy.

    It is recess, and the boys head to the courtyard to perform
a drill. Three of them, carrying Kalashnikovs carved of wood,
step across imaginary mines, break into an enemy post and
surround two "Russian" prisoners. The boys act out the taking
and holding of the prisoners, the blindfolding and the stiff
parade back to the base. What happens next to the prisoners is
not acted out.

    On the second floor of Kuwait Red Crescent hospital in
Peshawar, in the farthest bed next to a window, the sprawled
body takes up only a fragment of the cot. Rahmat Hussain, 10,
is not the only child on the floor, but he is the most
seriously injured. Most of the time, the bandaged wound is
covered by a thin, dirty green blanket. With a tentative smile,
as if offering a guest a cup of tea, his older brother, Tor
Kham, volunteers to pull back the blanket.

    Tor Kham has been sleeping on the floor next to his
brother's bed, waiting, watching and helping the nurses clean
the wound twice a day. It is a task he dreads. Tor Kham and the
nurse have to tie Rahmat Hussain's wrists to the bedpost with
strips of gauze to keep him from reaching down while they
remove the bandages. All the skin has been torn from Rahmat
Hussain's inner thighs and groin to his stomach, and the pink,
raw flesh forms a vast inverted horseshoe two inches deep --
as if he had mounted a burning saddle that seared deep into his
body. He was injured during an attack in a village called
Allishir, in the Khost province. The mujahedin were advancing,
and the man next to Rahmat Hussain stepped on a mine. The man
was blown to bits; when the doctors first treated Rahmat
Hussain, they found a piece of the man's flesh lodged inside
his wound. His father had died in battle a month before Rahmat
Hussain was injured.

    A cousin, seated on the windowsill, waves a straw whisk
broom to keep flies away. As they work, the nurse, the brother
and the cousin remain silent, as do the rest of the men lying
in nearby beds. Rahmat Hussain moans, "Pain, pain, I feel
pain." Once or twice, he calls for his mother, but it is a
muted, passive lament.

    It takes more than half an hour to peel off the gauze, dab
antiseptic on the livid flesh, and replace the bandages. Tor
Kham, who never says a word, grows paler. When the procedure
is over, he takes a moment, really no more than a deep breath,
then places a hand on the boy's lips to silence him. His hand
falls to the boy's chest and lingers there, an offer of
consolation. After another nurse arrives and administers
morphine, the boy drifts to sleep. His brother pulls the
blanket back over his bandages.

    Tor Kham explains that he will go back to jihad once his
brother recovers. And Rahmat Hussain? He too will want to
return to the fight, Tor Kham says. Asked how he knows that,
Tor Kham shakes his head. After a long silence, he looks away
and says, "There is no jihad for him now. He is in the world
of pain."