Afghan Villagers’ Anguish Is Audible at Last

In this village that no longer exists, the dead outnumber the living.

A mound of gray earth beside the gutted village school covers 42 corpses. Across the road is a smaller grave with six corpses. Up a donkey path, toward the silver-peaked Baba Mountains, villagers say they have found more mass graves.

All of the dead were Hazaras executed by the Taliban, said Abdul Rahman Shaidani, head of the village shura, or council of elders. The Taliban burned and sacked Shaidan not once but twice during the last three years, he said.

Across the soaring mountains and plunging gorges of central Afghanistan, local residents said, the Taliban conducted a reign of terror against the Hazara ethnic group.

For nearly five years, Hazara leaders said, the Taliban jailed, tortured and executed thousands of Hazaras.

Now, with the Taliban routed from the region and Hazara survivors slowly drifting back from their hide-outs in the mountains, the extent of the persecution is becoming clear.

Burned to the ground were villages such as Shaidan, where earlier this month Shaidani escorted the first journalist to visit since before the Taliban took power here in early 1997. Shaidan, a nine-hour donkey ride over a heavily mined dirt track from the city of Bamian, the provincial capital, was once home to several thousand people. Fewer than 20 families remain, Shaidani said.

Those who fled the killings hid in mud huts and caves in the mountains, villagers said. Those who stayed were shot and dumped in mass graves with their hands tied behind their backs with the cloth from their own turbans, they said.

The Taliban forces torched and looted every house in his village, Shaidani said. They burned the school and the bazaar. They stole the goats and horses and donkeys and the village’s entire supply of wheat. They desecrated the cemetery. They ripped the pumps from several wells. They burned the mosque.

“What kind of Muslim burns a mosque?” Shaidani asked, standing in the charred ruins of the home he had built into the red clay face of a cliff. “These Taliban . . . were Muslims only in name.”

The Taliban members, who are Sunni Muslims, consider the Shiite Hazaras kafir, or infidels. The Talibs who sacked Shaidan in 1999 and again late last summer spray-painted insults to the Hazaras on their homes. One message, spelled out with holes punched into soft adobe walls with the round end of a shell casing, was a calling card: “Organization of the Taliban.”

Hazaras, descendants of Mongols, make up about 20% of Afghanistan’s population. Historically the enemies of the Pushtuns, who made up the majority of the Taliban, they say they were targeted from Bamian province north to Mazar-i-Sharif. There, Hazara residents this month said they had found mass graves containing thousands of victims of a Taliban massacre in 1998. That killing spree was said to be in retaliation for earlier executions of Talibs by Hazaras.

In the city of Bamian, where the Taliban destroyed two massive Buddha statues last March, Western aid officials said they witnessed the exhumation of half a dozen corpses in January. Near the Bamian airstrip are three more pits where the Taliban dumped six, four and 12 corpses, said Karim Khalili, the Hazara warlord whose guerrillas drove the Taliban from the region in November with American military support. He said he expected that more mass graves would be found when the snows melted.

More than 3,000 Hazaras have been killed or have disappeared and 5,000 homes burned by the Taliban in Hazarajat, the Hazara homeland in Bamian and neighboring provinces, Khalili said.

“We have a very long main road in Yakaolang [district], and all along this road, on both sides, every house has been burned. Every single house,” Khalili said at his adobe headquarters in a valley below the crushed remains of the Buddhas. “There is not a single Hazara family that has not lost someone to the Taliban.”

When he returned in triumph to Bamian the second week of November, Khalili said, he did not recognize his former capital. His office and home had been plundered, and he had to stay in the tuberculosis ward of the ransacked local hospital, prompting rumors that he was ill.

In Shaidan, the destruction was even more systematic. The remote village was once a thriving farming center, producing wheat, barley, beans and cabbage. It is set in a broad valley ringed by red clay cliffs that turn orange and yellow in the brilliant mountain sunshine. A grove of trees once sheltered a community garden and park that are now an expanse of crumpled adobe structures and gray dust.

The only sound recently was the winter wind in the icy passes and the steady drone of a U.S. warplane circling lazily overhead. The wind carried the acrid scent of ash.

In the ruins of a roofless house, two brothers in ragged clothes had pinned a cardboard sign on the courtyard wall that read: “Hotel.” Chaman Ali, 18, and Mohammed Hassan, 16, sold tea and a place to rest to survivors hiking to Bamian in hopes of securing food from aid organizations based there. Their father had been killed by the Taliban, the boys said, and they lived now with their mother in the family’s gutted home.

For two miles along a dirt track that ran past the blackened shells of homes and shops, the only human being in sight was Mohammed Eshaq, a stooped figure trudging in the dust. Eshaq, 55, said he was heading for Bamian. He had walked four hours from the village of Qarghanto, which he said was as devastated and devoid of life as Shaidan. Taliban marauders had reduced Qarghanto’s population of several thousand to a handful of hungry survivors, he said.

In 1999, Eshaq said, he was held captive by the Taliban for 40 days until his female relatives pleaded, successfully, for his release. He had been tortured with electric shocks, he said, and six of the men who shared his cell had been executed. His brother was seized from his home one night and killed by Talibs, he said.

Shaidani listened to the man’s tale and shook his head. “So you see,” he said. “Shaidan is not the only village to suffer.”

He waved his arms toward the mountains and recited the names of several surrounding villages he described as having been burned and pillaged: Sheberto, Achaqulha, Aq Rabat, Akhshai, Gulistan, Gunbad.

But in Shaidan, he said, the Taliban was especially vindictive. Inside a classroom at the plundered school, a Talib had left a spray-painted taunt to survivors: “I am a Talib from Loghar. If you’re a real man, you’ll come after me.”

Shaidani, 42, led the way to a tiny bathroom inside an adobe home carved from a hillside. The floor was stained brown. It was the blood of his friend, Ghulam Hussain, who he said was cornered in the room by Talibs, who then slit his throat and watched his blood flow into the gutter.

Shaidani walked carefully from his friend’s ruined home, staying to the worn dirt path to avoid land mines left by the Taliban. He was feeling empty and defeated, and he stood for a long time staring at the spectral remains of his village.

He moved at last to the rocky village graveyard. The headstones had been smashed, including those that marked the graves of his parents. He bent his head and prayed. His grandfather and great-grandfather were also buried in this place.

In his black leather jacket and tall fur hat, Shaidani cut a stark profile against the barren landscape. He disappeared into the wreck of his cliff-side house, which once had been a fine dwelling with airy rooms and a spectacular view. It had been ransacked, rebuilt and ransacked again. He lives now in Bamian in an adobe house his family shares with eight other families from Shaidan.

Shaidani said he had fled the village twice to escape the Taliban. On one journey through the mountain snows, in 1999, his infant son and daughter died of exposure, he said. His brother, who stayed behind, was executed.

It was all too much. Shaidani stood in his blackened doorway and wept.

When he finished, he wiped his face with his head scarf. He had wept in sorrow, he confessed, but also in joy and relief at the arrival of a journalist in his wasted village.

“During the whole time of the Taliban, we cried out to the world and no one heard us,” he said. “Now, finally, our story will be known.”