– Uzbekistan – to the city of Mazar-e-Sharif. He takes us back to May 1997. The Taliban have just occupied the city:
Then fighting broke out. The Hazara especially – Shias distrustful of the fiercely Sunni Taliban – turned on the invaders in a wholesale massacre. The Taliban were mown down in streets they did not know. Some two thousand were taken west into the desert at Dasht-e-Laili, where they were thrown down wells, or asphyxiated in shipment containers. Even those sheltering in the Hazrat Ali shrine where I walked were taken out and shot.
But the next year, in August, the Taliban returned. They drove their jeeps into the city, machine-gunning shopkeepers, women, old men, children, even donkeys and dogs. Then they hunted down the Hazaras, house by house, killing the men with three shots, to the head, chest, and testicles. Their leaders broadcast from the mosques that the Hazara were pagans, and so licensed their death. As refugees streamed from the city, Taliban aircraft strafed them at will…
In the nearby village of Qezelabad, Thubron talks to a group of men:
When the Taliban came, they said, they had escaped into the mountains, and at last to their fellow believers in Shia Iran. But their old people were left behind, with those who could not flee. They had been shot or stabbed to death. None were left.
“People came from the outside to bury our dead,” a man said. “They were lying in the streets, they told us, and in the houses. Old people, harmless. They were our elders. It was four years before we could return, after the Taliban left. And nobody knew their graves.”
“There were three hundred families here,” said another man. “Now there are barely a hundred. They killed thirteen people from my family.”
At the village school:
Threadbare carpets covered the earth floor of a gutted house, where forty children sat. There was no furniture, no light. A blackboard stood in a crumbled alcove, where a young woman was teaching geography. In the sunlight falling through the fractured walls, the children turned to stare at us, clear-faced and smiling. Under the gaping roof next door a young man was holding an exam among older students, some of them adults, male and female mixed. A few of the women were miraculously beautiful. The teacher stood in a patch of broken sun. I stayed and listened for a while, wishing I spoke their Persian. His voice made a nervous music. But it was the women who burnt the eyes with tears. The Taliban had hated them. All schools were closed to them. Together with a ban on music, chess and the flying of kites, no woman’s voice was to be heard in public – on pain of whipping – nor her laughter, nor even her footsteps.
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