[Afghanistan’s most striking grass-roots movement for peace in recent years started with just eight people. I started watching their movement then, when it was a hunger strike born out of pain and outrage at a suicide bombing that killed and wounded dozens in Helmand Province. A group of young men pitched a protest tent next to the carnage. Their blood had become cheap — too cheap, they said. For too long, they had been dying in silence.]
By
Mujib Mashal
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Members
of the peace march walking to Wardak, Afghanistan, from Ghazni on
Tuesday. Among them are day laborers, farmers, retired army officers and even a bodybuilding champion.CreditJim Huylebroek for The New York Times |
GHAZNI,
Afghanistan — As they march
for peace through Afghan villages laced with roadside bombs and bottomless
heartache, their numbers keep growing.
They come from all walks of life, ages 17 to
65. Among them is a high school student who went home to complete his final
exams before rejoining the others; a poet who still carries in his chest one of
the four bullets he was shot with; a bodybuilding champion who abandoned his
gym and has lost 20 pounds of muscle on the journey. They are day laborers,
farmers, retired army officers, a polio victim on crutches, a mechanic who was
robbed of his sight by war.
Afghanistan’s most striking grass-roots
movement for peace in recent years started with just eight people. I started
watching their movement then, when it was a hunger strike born out of pain and
outrage at a suicide bombing that killed and wounded dozens in Helmand
Province. A group of young men pitched a protest tent next to the carnage.
Their blood had become cheap — too cheap, they said. For too long, they had
been dying in silence.
Then they began marching north toward the
capital through some of the most devastated parts of southern Afghanistan. We
joined them this past Sunday, 30 days and 300 miles into their journey, as they
rested their blistered feet in the cool of a small mosque near the city of
Ghazni.
By that point, their numbers had grown to 65,
and they kept walking through the Ramadan fast, taking no food or water through
the 100-plus-degree daytime heat.
They are marching to say this: that the war
has turned into a monster with a life of its own, feeding on the poor at the
rate of more than 50 a day. The longer it drags on, the more difficult it
becomes to reach a settlement. Killings turn into blood feuds that lead to more
killings.
They want it to end, to give them a chance to
live. At every stop, hundreds gather to hear their stories of loss and share
their own.
One of their latest members is a shopkeeper
from the western province of Herat named Mohamed Anwar. He arrived on a bus
with three changes of clothing tucked under his arm and three pairs of prayer
beads in his pocket.
“I told my wife I am going to join my
friends,” Mr. Anwar said.
Despite the simplicity of their protest, they
know that bringing an end to four decades of war is no easy thing. There are so
many competing interests: the Taliban insurgents emboldened by recent success,
the harried and corruption-riddled Afghan government, the Americans and
Europeans struggling for any positive outcome, the host of international
players — Pakistan, Russia, Iran — for whom the war is a chessboard.
The beating heart of their march is each
village mosque along the way, where they meet residents and rest for the night.
They rely on the generosity of villagers who feed them, take their clothes home
to wash and exchange stories.
In Shajoy district, the marchers met an older
man whose daughter-in-law was abducted by a local police commander and married
to one of his men. The woman’s husband and his brother joined the Taliban. The
brother’s dead body came home within a week.
At a public bathhouse in the Moqor district
of Ghazni Province, they met the commander of a small pro-government militia. A
longtime rival of the man’s family, now operating under the Taliban banner, had
killed one of his uncles, then another, then another, then another. The man
took up arms for the government because he feared he could be next.
In the countryside, both the Taliban and the
government can take the role of oppressor. Sometimes it is not even clear who
pulled the trigger.
As their numbers grow, the marchers’ routine
remains the same: walking for about 15 miles along the edge of a highway, in a
single file, and then camping out at the next mosque. The walk is often lonely,
through sparsely populated areas. During the daytime heat, they drag their
feet. When the evening comes, the confidence returns in their steps.
When they approach a crowd, they begin their
chants, followed by a description of who they are and what mosque they would be
stopping at next if the onlookers — a young student stopping his bicycle, one
foot on the ground; a mechanic covered in grease; a watermelon seller peeking
above his pile of striped fruit — wanted to hear more.
“That our life is ugly!” one marcher, Bacha
Khan Mauladad, shouts through a megaphone.
“It is war, it is war,” the men respond.
Mr. Mauladad, 27, the oldest man in his
family, will miss his sister’s wedding next week to continue marching.
The youngest marcher, 17-year-old Mohammed
Tahir, is usually at the head of the file, pushing a stroller packed with
emergency necessities — a pair of crutches, umbrellas, a plastic rug, some
spare sandals and a solar panel they use to charge their phones.
Among the items in his own backpack, Tahir
carries a book, a comb, a bar of soap, a roll of toilet paper, a toothbrush,
hair gel and packets of vitamin C.
One of the most cheerful marchers is Bahlul
Patyal, a rotund pharmacist who left his drugstore and month-old infant
daughter in Lashkar Gah to join. With the feet of some of the marchers having
shed skin as many as four times, he has become a traveling medic in high
demand.
Mr. Patyal carries a heavy sack of medicine
on his back, and a first-aid kit. When they stop at a mosque to meet villagers,
he holds clinic in a quiet corner. Dipping a needle in antiseptic, he punctures
blisters and patches them with thick balls of gauze.
When a marcher curls up in pain, Mr. Patyal
gives him a bottle of cleaning alcohol to sniff. It helps with churning
stomachs.
His humor helps ease other kinds of hurt.
“You know,” he likes to say, “my wife told me
that I shouldn’t even dare coming back through the door if I don’t lose weight
on this march.”
The only village where they were deprived of
a meal was in the Nanani district of Ghazni. As they gathered around the food
prepared by villagers, members of the Taliban’s elite force — known as the Red
Unit — arrived and told them to leave. An offensive was planned and fighting
could start any minute. The Taliban were also angry because the men had walked
through an area laced with mines that could have been activated any minute,
leaving their blood on the Taliban’s hands.
Cities, however, have disappointed. The
marchers find the political bickering and the superficial formalities there too
much.
As they approached the Afghan capital, Kabul,
the final destination for their message, they were nervous — about political
opportunists who could hijack their message, and about the elites of a capital
long separated from the pain of the countryside.
Iqbal Khyber, 27, a soft-spoken medical
student, has become one of the marchers’ leaders. In addressing crowds, he
draws on the group’s personal stories of loss, and recounts other testimonies
they have heard during their journey.
“The tall buildings, the fancy cars, that is
not our life,” Mr. Khyber told a crowd of about 300 in a mosque near the city
of Ghazni.
Pointing to the three men who were standing
with him, and whose stories he went on to tell, he said: “This is our story.”
One of them was Zaheer Ahmad, 21. He was 7
when American planes bombed their neighborhood in Greshk district in Helmand
Province, leaving a crater so large that no trace of his father and uncle could
be found.
As the war intensified in Helmand, their
extended family moved to other provinces. Young Zaheer became a mechanic’s
apprentice in Kandahar. He was so good that by the time he was 16, he had
opened his own shop.
One day, about four years ago, Zaheer booked
two bus tickets and set off to the city of Herat, where he would drop off his
15-year-old sister at the house of another displaced relative. They were seated
in the fourth row of the bus when a Taliban bomb detonated on the roadside.
Zaheer remembers feeling blood on his face,
fire around him, and the screams of his sister. She did not survive. Zaheer’s
world, from that moment, went dark.
“I want to let out my pain,” Zaheer said.
“There is a lot of pain tight inside me.”
At night, some of the march leaders continued
to meet locals and worked past midnight to plan for the next day. For the rest,
there was little talk of war and peace. They were travelers, sharing stories,
cigarettes, and tea in the cool breeze on the mosque porch.
Between drags on a cigarette, Ataullah Khan,
a 65-year-old retired army colonel, talked about his moment of fame in 1980.
While he was serving in western Afghanistan, a Russian photographer snapped a
photo of him in uniform, his impressive mustache curled up, as he raised a
child up for the camera. The photo made it to the cover of a magazine, and from
there to frames on the walls of ice cream parlors in his hometown, Jalalabad,
the capital of Nangarhar Province.
The bodybuilder, Zmaray Zaland, showed videos
on his phone of an international competition he won. They giggled as they
watched him perform in a skimpy Speedo, glistening with oil. He flexed his
muscles, and shimmied in a little dance.
“I had never heard of that music, or done
that dance in my life before that day,” he told them.
Most of the marchers get barely four hours of
sleep. Around 2:30 a.m., villagers bring a quick meal before the day’s fast: a
cup of sweetened milk, some cookies and bread. They pray the dawn prayer, grab
their bags and set off single file into the soft dawn light.
Their 64th member, a sharp-eyed mason named
Mohammed, arrived on Sunday with just a change of clothes knotted into the
shawl on his back. He had tracked the march’s progress on his phone during rest
stops as he rode the bus toward them.
When asked how old he was, Mr. Mohammed did a
calculation.
“I was 15, in eighth grade, when the war
started,” he said. “It’s been 40 years since then.”