Vengeance Takes Its Toll After Taliban’s Fall in Afghanistan

The killing began at 10 a.m. on the 20th day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Four hours later, 37 Pushtun villagers had been dragged from their homes and slain by paramilitary forces from the rival Hazara ethnic group.

The roving executioners tore away in four-wheel-drive pickups, leaving no explanation for their pillaging on that day in early December. But witness accounts as well as similar stories from remote Pushtun villages strung across Afghanistan’s arid northern plains paint a brutal portrait of ethnically motivated revenge attacks against the group most closely associated with the fallen Taliban regime.

Since December, Pushtuns have been fleeing their villages across the north, long the bastion of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. They began showing up by the thousands in faraway refugee camps on the southeastern border with Pakistan throughout January and February, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

An unknown number are simply blending into other villages or major cities, according to aid workers, U.N. officials and Pushtun villagers who spoke with The Times.

“We’re getting reports of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the north, where ethnic Pushtuns are being pushed out” by other ethnic groups, said Mohammed Adar, senior emergency coordinator for the U.N. refugee agency in Peshawar, Pakistan.

Another top U.N. official warned that the problem threatens to undermine Afghanistan’s fragile peace process.

“There’s a very systematic practice, which has happened regionwide, where Pushtuns are being targeted,” said the U.N. official, who requested anonymity. “I hear from people in Kabul that the peace process is fragile and we have to protect it. But at what cost? If we don’t address this, we are just pruning the branches.”

Factional fighting tore Afghanistan apart after the fall of the Soviet-backed regime in 1992 and paved the way for the Taliban to take power. Many fear that with the Taliban gone, the truce among ethnically divided parties whose members worked together to defeat the Taliban is slowly giving way to the era of cyclical massacres and retribution.

That is especially feared here in Chimtal district, where the minority Pushtuns had readily allied themselves with the Taliban.

There is plenty of bitter history between the Pushtuns and Hazaras. Thousands of Hazaras, a minority of the Shiite Muslim sect, were wiped out by the Taliban, who brought a draconian interpretation of the Sunni Muslim faith into a region dominated by a mix of Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras.

A pit outside the northern capital, Mazar-i-Sharif, has revealed hundreds of Hazara bodies, testimony to the Taliban’s revenge on them for the thousands the regime lost in battles for the city in the ‘90s.

Bargah paid for that brutality with 37 lives, according to villagers here.

A crowd of men stood outside the baked mud walls of the village this week, gesturing angrily at the graves of the victims, marked by traditional flags already torn by the cold desert winds.

“I am from another village, and I was a guest here,” Mohammed Ghafur said. “I buried a lot of people. When the women looked over the walls, they shot at them. I saw them put a gun in a man’s mouth and shoot him.”

Inside a home, a woman who goes by the single name Makai held the cap that her son was wearing when he was killed, its embroidered fabric torn open where one of the paramilitary soldiers slashed him with a bayonet. Like many of the women, Makai threw herself between the killers and the victims. But she could save only one son. Her other son and her husband were dragged out and shot.

“They shut all the women in one room, and they shot my husband right outside. And my son they shot in front of the house,” Makai said. She clutched her surviving son, Abdul Bashir, 15, and grabbed at the shirt of a village elder, acting out the drama. “When they pointed the guns at my son, I grabbed the commander’s collar and said, ‘Don’t kill him,’ ” she said.

Village elder Khan Wulus said about 300 men participated in the carnage, also taking three cars, two tractors, a motorcycle and six horses, as well as most of the wheat the villagers had stored. They would have taken a third tractor, he said, but it wouldn’t start.

At first, they demanded guns, but the villagers had already surrendered their weapons to an Uzbek militia. Wulus held up a handwritten note from an Uzbek commander.

“These gentle people surrendered their weapons,” it read, giving an Arabic calendar date nearly a month before the massacre.

Villagers said that they fell in with the Taliban when the regime swept through the north but that they were never politically active.

“During the Taliban, we were ordinary people, taking care of our cows and crops. We didn’t know anything about politics,” said Haji Raz Mohammed, a village elder.

Local Hazara commanders avoid questions about who was responsible for the Bargah massacre, even as they blame Pushtuns for past atrocities.

“Yes, that’s right, something happened,” said Hazara commander Rajab, who controls a large swath of Chimtal district. “But when the Taliban first came, there were 2,000 Hazara families in Chimtal. These Pushtun people killed about 300 Hazara people and put 500 in jail. They looted the Hazara people’s houses. They looted my house and knocked down the walls. . . . They killed about 300 people, and we killed maybe 10. We took cattle from dead people, but it was cattle they had taken from us.”

Rajab waved off questions of who was responsible for the December killings.

“No one knows who did this,” he said. “But these people who are living in Bargah now--in the time of the Taliban, they oppressed people, they looted houses, and they raped people.”

After the attack by the Hazaras, Bargah sought protection from the predominantly Uzbek militia led by Gen. Rashid Dostum.

The town’s neighbors just five miles northeast, in Tagabi, made a different choice. After an Uzbek militia looted their homes in early December, they requested protection from the Hazaras.

Such choices have become common, as Pushtuns seek shelter with the group that appears to be their lesser enemy and the factional leaders vie for their loyalties--and a larger sphere of influence when the political lines of Afghanistan are redrawn.

Other Pushtuns simply left, although no aid agency here has tracked their numbers. Tagabi lost nearly half its 60 Pushtun families, and the remainder are too afraid to pasture their sheep in distant, rain-fed grasslands where they say Uzbek bandits prowl.

They’ve resorted to raising a reliable crop that uses less water in these times of drought: the opium poppy, once banned by the Taliban. Villagers showed several acres of the hardy plant, its first leaves already spread out to the size of a hand.

“If it goes on like this, we’ll leave and go to the city, someplace where we are secure,” said Tagabi resident Abdul Ghafar.

But even Mazar-i-Sharif isn’t safe for Pushtuns, aid workers say. Displaced villagers who had set up camp next to another refugee village in Mazar were attacked as soon as the city fell, according to aid workers. Many have wandered off to unknown destinies.

“As soon as the Taliban fell, people attacked them,” said Ahmed Idrees Rahmani, a deputy field coordinator for the International Rescue Committee. Most were from Chimtal district, Rahmani said.

“After the fall, the whole population became suspect,” he said.

Out in these desert villages, residents are jittery. In one small settlement near Bargah, a Hazara militiaman barely in his teens chased a reporter’s vehicle, firing shots at it, while another aimed a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, forcing the vehicle to stop.

“I didn’t realize you were Americans,” the Hazara militia member offered apologetically.

“The situation is dangerous around here,” he added.

The Pushtuns aren’t the only casualties of warlord feuding. Battles over territory since the fall of the Taliban are claiming victims from all sides, particularly around Mazar-i-Sharif. But although observers here write off the urban violence as jousting among political parties that are at least nominally multiethnic, out in the countryside, the skirmishes smack of ethnic warfare.

“In Mazar, things happen not just because of local politics but generational animosity,” the U.N. official said. “Sometimes it’s money, and sometimes it’s politics. But outside Mazar, it’s strictly ethnic.”