Reviving the Songs of Old

A village struggles back

Each night convoys of anywhere from 600 to 1,500 men begin the long march westward. They load down their mules and camels with mortars, heavy machine guns and mines, then scramble along steep, rocky trails through an eerily deserted landscape. Stealing past a government fort and fields still littered with bomb fragments and mines, ignoring the distant thunder of MiGs and flares on the horizon, they cross the highlands along the border and descend toward battle.

The men are Afghans who have spent several years in refugee camps in Pakistan. Haunted by homesickness and inspired by a determination to conduct a jihad (holy war) against the Soviet occupiers of their country, they are going back home. What they find is not encouraging: entire villages destroyed, orchards burned, fields defoliated. Yet the returning men are rebuilding the fallen roofs and tumbled walls of their former homes. They dig tunnels and enlarge caves to accommodate dwellings, schools and medical clinics; they farm by night, when no MiGs or helicopter gunships fly overhead; they use homemade weapons and their knowledge of the difficult terrain to foil the relentless ground attacks of the Soviets. Robert Schultheis, an American freelance writer, spent ten weeks with the men who went back to Dobanday, a once prosperous village that was leveled by the Soviets in 1978. His report:

Afghanistan is a nation of villages. They are the basis of its social structure and its Muslim faith. At communal events like weddings, villagers come together for days to feast, dance and race horses. More practically, the Muslim system of zakat (tithing) binds the community together by ensuring that a part of its wealth goes to its poor. Villages have therefore been the primary source of food, support and intelligence for the mujahedin guerrillas who oppose the Soviet-backed regime of Babrak Karmal. That is why the Soviets have used their bombs and tanks to reduce scores of communities to rubble. Of Afghanistan's 16 million people, more than half have been forced from their homes: up to 5 million have become internal refugees, many of them crowded into Kabul, the capital; 3 million more have fled to refugee camps in Pakistan; perhaps 500,000 have been killed or badly wounded.

The story of Dobanday is typical. Just six years ago, 20,000 people lived in spacious adobe houses scattered across the floor of a green, spring-fed canyon some 45 miles south of Kabul. "Life was good," recalls Haji Jumah Gul. "We had wheat, corn, rice, melons, apples, cherries, pears and mulberries. Almost everyone had cattle and sheep." Many of the villagers were prosperous enough to be able to afford a pilgrimage each year to Mecca.

All that changed in April 1978, when Noor Muhammad Taraki, a Soviet-supported Marxist, seized power in Kabul. It would be 20 months before Moscow would send the first of some 100,000 troops to occupy the country, but Soviet advisers were already leading the Afghan army in search-and-destroy missions across the countryside. The residents of Dobanday first became alarmed when they heard that the new regime was attacking religious leaders and traditions. The authorities then arrested two local elders and decreed that all houses in the settlement be thrown open for inspection.

The villagers rebelled. They were armed with nothing but axes, sticks, scythes, eleven ancient British .303 rifles and a few muskets that had last seen use in battles against the raj. But they fought with spirited tenacity. As one patriarch remembers, "We sang songs as we fought the Communists." They demolished the government military post at nearby Khoshi and barricaded the road into Dobanday. For eight months they fought a series of bloody battles, resisting the force of gunships and armored convoys with captured machine guns, homemade grenades and Molotov cocktails.

The people of Dobanday quickly discovered that their attackers did not make war by the gentlemanly rules favored by their imperial predecessors. "My uncle fought the British on the border after his father was killed by them in battle," recalls Haji Khan, a rheumy-eyed septuagenarian. "But the British did not kill old people, children and women; they would not aim their artillery at innocent people." The Communists, by contrast, massacred civilians. Worst of all, when government troops finally broke through to Dobanday, a Soviet adviser marched into the central mosque, tore up the Koran and put a torch to the building.

By November 1978 the superior firepower of the Soviet-backed government began to tell. Whole blocks of houses had been destroyed, the fields lay fallow and 220 residents were dead. When word spread that an overpowering government assault was imminent, the villagers called a traditional council. "We decided that we all had to leave that very night and take our families to Pakistan," remembers Amin Jan, now a mujahedin commander.

"There was not enough food for the winter, and no shelter. Already the high mountains had snow on them."

At sunset the entire village assembled. "There was a fine mist of clouds around us, and the moon rose behind it," Amin Jan recalls. "The women and children were weeping." Those who owned trucks loaded them high with blankets, heirloom carpets, anything they could salvage from their bomb-shattered homes; others piled precious possessions on top of mules and camels or carried what they could: a lantern, a teapot, a generations-old copy of the Koran. While it was dark, they traveled fast along the rough mountain roads; during the day, when planes or helicopters reappeared in the skies, the refugees took shelter amid the rocks and trees.

As they continued, the road grew more treacherous and the sky more turbulent. The trucks were abandoned, and the fugitives continued on foot. On the second night three children died of cold and exhaustion; the following dawn, as the weary procession reached the border, two pregnant women and a teen-age girl lay down and died. Nonetheless, the group was relatively fortunate: only a few hours after the villagers arrived safely in Pakistan, the first blizzard of the winter obscured the horizon. Dozens of people from neighboring villages who had left just one day later died in the driving snow.

The refugees from Dobanday ended up in two sprawling camps on the barren outskirts of Peshawar in Pakistan's North-West Frontier province. Built on unwanted land, the encampments resembled well-populated ghost towns: they had no water, no trees, only dead earth. The men were farmers without fields, traders without businesses, herders without flocks. Proud men accustomed to self-sufficiency, they were now dependent on rations and a monthly allowance of $4 from international relief agencies. A lucky handful, like onetime Farmer Shair Ali, managed to find menial labor; 90% of the men were idle. As one of them put it, "Our life today is nothing."

It was almost less than nothing for the women of the camps. Surrounded by strangers, they had to remain veiled and felt like virtual prisoners at home. According to Ekber Menemencioglu, a Turkish-born aid official who has worked in Afghanistan for several years, "Many refugee women have stress-related medical problems: disruption of their monthly cycles and a tremendous amount of tranquilizer use to deal with hysteria." One recent wedding, which would have been an occasion for revelry and jollity at home, might almost have been mistaken for a funeral. Says Saib Khan, Amin Jan's brother: "There was no singing, nothing. We left our songs in Dobanday."

Now many of the men have decided to forsake the indignities of life in the camps and return to retrieve their songs. In tributary canyons and along hidden hillsides around Dobanday, irrigation ditches have been repaired and plots of field resown. Potatoes, wheat and corn are being harvested to sustain itinerant guerrillas. Saib Khan has come back to scout possible locations for a clinic that would serve war-wounded mujahedin who might otherwise die on the long journey through Dobanday to Pakistan. Bombed-out houses now are base camps for the guerrillas. One enterprising group of mujahedin has even been growing marijuana to sell to Soviet soldiers on the black market in Kabul (1 lb. of hashish fetches a few clips of Kalashnikov ammunition).

Once or twice a week during the summer the Soviets launch aerial bombardments, but the mujahedin make up in resourcefulness what they lack in weapons. Local rumor has it that one group knocked down a low-flying Mi-24 Hind gunship last year by flinging rocks at it.

On the ground the guerrillas are even tougher to beat. Shinwari, a narrow-faced, fiery-eyed commander, explains their normal strategy: "We put two mines together [along the main highway south from Kabul], rigged so they will go off only when something as heavy as a tank runs over them. The two mines lift a tank 50 ft. in the air, stopping the convoy. Then we fire everything we have until we are out of ammunition. Then we retreat back into the mountains."

Each day in summer, 1,000 or 2,000 fighters from other villages pass through Dobanday. At dawn, having spent all night crossing the mountains to the east, a small army of guerrillas will suddenly materialize. "May you never be weary!" they call out in greeting to the locals. "May you be at peace here!" answer the men of Dobanday. After a day of rest, the visitors head off again as evening falls; some will travel up to 17 days to distant battlegrounds along the Soviet border.

As the guerrillas, many of them teenagers from different tribes, vanish into the hills, the returned villagers wish them well. "Before the jihad, we never knew people like that, and we would not speak to them," says Saib Khan. "But now that we have fought together and bled together, we are brothers forever." The men of Dobanday, he suggests, are fighting not only for their home but also for their companions throughout their once faction-ridden homeland. The Soviets, it seems, have succeeded only in uniting the resistance they had hoped to shatter.