Tense Afghans Predict More Suffering

As the United States prepares for possible military action in Afghanistan, residents of America’s largest Afghan community condemn last week’s terrorist attacks on the U.S. but also fear for their beleaguered countrymen in any U.S. military retaliation.

A number of the about 40,000 Afghan immigrants and refugees here and in the surrounding Bay Area--no strangers to violence and misery after years of civil war in their homeland--see only more suffering ahead.

“People are already in very bad condition in Afghanistan,” said Imam Safiyullah Samady, religious leader of a mosque in nearby Hayward. “I fear that with any military operation, more innocent people will die.”

Many in this community, believed to be the largest concentration of Afghans in the United States, say they suffered a double blow last week: first the assassination of a popular rebel leader in Afghanistan and then terror in their adopted country.

Many say they would support U.S. military action to roust the alleged author of both acts, suspected terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, from his Afghanistan hiding place.

“If the United States goes into Afghanistan, the people here will not react against it,” said Hayward restaurant owner Gulalai Rahimi. “But we also hope there will not be a lot of casualties” to a civilian population already thinned by three decades of war.

Rahimi, daughter of a former Afghan army general, said she has received telephone calls from friends in Kabul, the Afghan capital, begging for money to help them flee to neighboring Pakistan before the anticipated American assault. “I feel if I don’t give them help, I will have their death on my hands,” Rahimi said.

Adding to their troubles, the Bay Area Afghan community has suffered some of the same abuse and hate-related episodes that have plagued Muslims and Sikhs across the country, although it has not been widespread here. About half of the about 100,000 Afghan Americans live in Northern California, with smaller populations in Washington, D.C., New York and Los Angeles, which is home to about 15,000 Afghans.

The rash of anti-Muslim sentiment has caused some local citizens to shed their traditional garb and peel Arabic stickers from their automobiles. Religious leaders note a sharp drop in attendance for the five daily prayers practiced by devout Muslims.

Rahimi, whose Mission Paradise Restaurant has a 400-seat banquet hall that hosts many Afghan celebrations and weddings, removed a sign advertising Afghan cuisine from her front window and covered it with an American flag.

In the days after the terrorist attacks, some high school students ripped scarves from the heads of Afghan girls. Mosques have been subjected to crude hate calls, and a suspicious fire gutted an Afghan restaurant--incidents that local leaders have accepted with tolerance.

“We talked about it in the mosque,” said Anwar Muzafary, 52, a former Kabul University English professor who works as a volunteer at the Ibrahim Khalilullah mosque, tucked in a colorless storefront of a Fremont shopping mall. “We decided the people did these things because they were hurt. We sympathize with them. No good Muslims could do those things in New York and Washington.”

Mosques Get Hate Calls

Muzafary played some of the telephone voice recordings received by the mosque in recent days: “Go home! You are no longer welcome here,” hissed one caller.

“Your religion is sent from hell. It is sent from the devil to curse the Earth,” said another. Many of the calls were profane.

Like many Afghan business and religious sites here, the shopping center mosque displays an American flag in its front window as well as a statement written by Muzafary condemning the U.S. terrorist actions as a “filthy, heinous attack.” The statement concludes, “God Bless America.”

Most of the Afghans in the cities of Fremont, Union City and Hayward fled their homeland after 1980, when it was under Soviet occupation, and are no friends of the fundamentalist Taliban regime now in power.

Still, among the most recent immigrants and those from rural areas, the Taliban has some hard-core followers.

Imam Samady, leader of the Mujareen Mosque in Hayward, said that about 20 of the 400 worshipers who attend Friday prayers are strong Taliban supporters.

But he said that at recent religious gatherings, they have been widely criticized for condoning a regime that harbors a man accused of taking the lives of innocent people in acts counter to Islam’s teachings.

That political division mirrors the one in Afghanistan, with supporters of the Taliban pitted against the forces of the opposition Northern Alliance, which controls large parts of northern Afghanistan.

The divide plays out on several Afghan-language radio programs in California. The programs aired by Orange-based Radio Payame Afghan include some that are sympathetic to the Taliban regime and very critical of the Northern Alliance.

Afghan Radio Airs Both Sides

Radio Payame owner Omar Khatab insists he favors no side. “I’m critical of all these guys who have ruined my country. We are not a partisan radio program,” Khatab, who has lived in the United States for 23 years, said in a telephone interview.

When the terrorists hit New York and Washington, Khatab said, “I was just as upset as every other American. It was horrific.”

The Northern Alliance suffered a serious blow last week when two bomb-laden agents, believed to be Algerians affiliated with Bin Laden, killed opposition fighter Ahmed Shah Masoud after infiltrating his camp by posing as television journalists.

Homayoun Khamosh, 38, owns the Pamir Grocery Store in the downtown area of Fremont known as “little Kabul” because of the many Afghan shops and restaurants there.

Before Khamosh came to the United States in 1990, he said, he served as a medic under Masoud, the “Lion of Panjshir” who fought the Soviets and emerged as the leading force against the fundamentalist Taliban.

Like many in the Afghan community, Khamosh believes the assassination of Masoud was directly tied to the subsequent attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

“Many believe that Masoud’s assassination was a green light for those guys here,” said Mohammad Koshan, editor of the Washington-based Omaid Weekly, a leading U.S. Farsi-language newspaper.

“Masoud was the one man who could unify Afghanistan,” said Khamosh. “He never sold himself to Pakistan or anyone else. He was for Afghanistan and nobody else.”

As Khamosh talked of his fallen hero, a young Afghan woman used government food coupons to purchase tins of green tea and a box of sugar-coated almonds. Piled high in the back of the store were bags of rice. Spice racks stocked with cardamom, fennel seed, mint and dill weed used in Afghan cooking lined the walls. Two teenage girls ogled a wall of Afghan CDs.

The day after the attack on the World Trade Center, Khamosh said, he was down the street in an apartment building when he heard a commotion in front of his store.

He arrived in time to see a young white male throw a bottle at his store window.

“The police caught him and called me down to identify him. But I said he was not the guy. I knew it was just the first day after a terrible event. I’d seen worse things in Afghanistan. I decided to not make it into a big thing.”