‘No Place for Escaping This War’ : Kabul’s Children: Mines, Flares, Hunger Take Toll

As she cradled the badly burned body of her 9-year-old brother one day this week, Gul Sharin explained without a trace of emotion how it came to be that her family of six moved to this war-torn capital three years ago.

“My mother was shot in the heart,” the 16-year-old girl recalled in flat tones. “Our village was caught between a government post and the soldiers of the moujahedeen “--the Muslim rebels fighting Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed government.

“A bullet came. I don’t know from which side. My mother was dead.”

So the family fled Parwan province for the apparent safety of Kabul. But the war soon followed.

This week, as her two younger brothers played near the family’s mud house, a magnesium flare--one of the thousands that pour out of Soviet aircraft bringing desperately needed military and civilian supplies to Kabul each day--landed nearby and burned both boys so badly that their features were unrecognizable.

“Yes, I am sad,” Gul Sharin said, surrounded by nearly a dozen other flare-burned children who had come from other parts of the city to the surgical ward of the Indira Gandhi Hospital this week. “But war hurts. And there is no place for escaping this war now. The war is everywhere.”

Everywhere in this beleaguered, battered and destitute city are the

signs and scars of the decade-long Afghan war that refuses to end, marks that have been etched deeper since the Soviet Union withdrew the last of its troops from Afghanistan two months ago. Even the Soviet Embassy compound suffered a direct hit from a rebel rocket Thursday.

Bread lines form every day outside every city bakery. Almost no one can afford meat anymore. Food has become so scarce that children in rags occasionally can be seen in downtown parks crawling on all fours, picking clover and eating it raw.

The markets are full of one-legged war wounded hobbling about on crutches. Few young men can be seen. Most of them have been conscripted into the army to resist an intensifying rebel campaign against the government-held cities. As the rebels had warned before the Soviet troop withdrawal, they have not given up their 10-year so-called holy war against the government now headed by President Najibullah.

Most Have Lost a Relative

Now, it is difficult to find a single Kabul resident who has not lost at least one relative to a conflict that has claimed more than 1 million lives.

But there is another side to the war in this ancient city known for its resilience: The war has spawned a whole new society of scavengers, stoics and, most of all, survivors.

“It is almost bizarre when you stand back and look at it,” said one of the few diplomats remaining here. “Aside from Beirut, there are few cities in recent history that have been worse-hit by war. And yet Kabul refuses to roll over and die.”

The symbols of that survival instinct are as common as the images of war.

In the same market where bread lines choke the sidewalk, Abdul Saddiq, 55, a peasant who can no longer farm, sells dead sparrows for 18 afghanis (about 40 cents) each. One bird can feed a family, he says.

Vendors Sell Array of Junk

Scores of crumpled street vendors sell a dizzying array of junk--battered funnels, bicycle bells, broken springs, scraps of iron, telephones and hot plates, discarded wires, fan belts, drill bits and ancient screwdrivers.

Once-thriving clothing merchants have turned to scavengers for survival.

Musgidi, whose weather-beaten face and creased hands are like a road map of Kabul’s decade-old struggle, runs a scrap metal shop that thrives on the war. He pays 12 afghanis per kilogram to the old women and children who spend their days gathering the twisted nose cones of spent rebel rockets and artillery that occasionally rain down on Kabul, as well as the fragments of government flares and land mines that indiscriminately claim the innocent.

“No, this is not a good business,” he said, as ragged peasant women and children unloaded soiled sacks of scrap metal they had risked their lives to gather during rocket or flare barrages on the city. “It is very difficult for the children. But this is my shop and I have to sell something. I must survive.”

It is those same mines and flares, though, that also cast the war’s dark side in stark human terms. The starkest images of all are to be found in the Indira Gandhi Hospital, in the wards for war-wounded children where Gul Sharin stared blankly this week at her two terribly wounded brothers.

Although the rebels fire a few rockets into Kabul each day, residents say their biggest fear at the moment are the flares that shower the city throughout the day as Soviet aircraft try to keep the Afghan military well supplied and its civilians fed.

Government spokesmen say the flares are a necessary evil, their only defense against the rebels’ U.S.-supplied heat-seeking Stinger missiles, which could easily be used to shoot down the Soviet supply planes that now are Kabul’s principal lifeline to the outside world. The flares are meant to draw off the missiles, but their heat is as deadly to those on the ground as it is vital to the pilots in the planes.

As the aircraft take off or land, they spew out scores of the decoy flares, filling Kabul’s daytime skies with symmetrical patches of smoke and light tracings. Often, though, the flares are still burning when they they land in residential neighborhoods. All too often, the burning magnesium scorches the skin of children playing outdoors.

“It is criminal,” said one Kabul resident, who asked not to be identified by name. “Now, when people hear a plane, they hide themselves. but the children don’t know better. They don’t listen. They are always the ones who bear war the worst.”

Near the burn ward where Del Sharin and his brother were lying in tears, there was another painful symbol of the war’s toll. It is the osteopathic ward for the victims of land mines, which were planted by the government to keep the rebels out of the capital. Despite government warnings, they occasionally have claimed Kabul’s own.

Zarif, 9, was out looking for firewood, a commodity so scarce in Kabul that many people use discarded shipping containers for their homes and shops. A government soldier warned Zarif to stay away from a field near the airport.

Zarif did not heed the warning. He stepped out into the field--and onto a mine that shattered his left leg. A few weeks later, the boy said, his father was in the same area. He, too, stepped on a mine, and was killed.

On the bed beside Zarif, 13-year-old Mohammed Ullah was crying loudly. Surgeons had just amputated his right leg, and his mother, Bobo Gul, cradled his head and rocked him.

Mohammed, she explained, also was injured by a mine. He, too, had been warned away from the area by soldiers. But he, too, refused to heed. The boy, she said, was looking for food--weeds, roots or anything else that would keep the family alive for another day.

“We don’t know who is right or wrong,” she said. “We want only for peace to come here.”