[On Saturday, the Taliban launched a massive assault on Kunduz city, attacking from several sides as residents fled intense fighting. At least 10 people were killed in an insurgent suicide bombing. A government spokesman said the attack, which came as U.S. and Taliban officials were finalizing a possible peace agreement in Qatar, showed that the insurgents “do not accept the opportunity for peace” being offered.]
By
Pamela Constable
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Afghan
Army Capt. Lemar Safi poses with an assortment of military rifles on a village
rooftop
during operations against the Taliban in early 2017. (Family photo)
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KABUL
— The 29-year-old was a
gung-ho Afghan army captain with a university degree, fighting a war with
bullets and Facebook posts against an enemy with a medieval vision of Islam.
Often, he posted photos of himself between bouts of fighting in northern
Afghanistan, hefting a weapon or praying in a field.
Just a few weeks before he died, Lemar Safi
posted an image that posed a defiant question to the Taliban. In it, he is
sitting on a low mud wall, with his rifle resting beside him, holding up a
hand-lettered sign. “I am a Muslim,” it reads in large English letters. Above,
in Dari script, it adds: “Do you really want to kill me?”
That was in the spring of 2017, in Kunduz
province, where Safi had spent more than a year on combat duty with the Afghan
National Army and fought in a series of battles for control of the province’s
strategic capital and main highway. Dozens of his comrades perished. Safi was
shot by a Taliban sniper in a predawn ambush and died instantly, according to
his commanding officer.
On Saturday, the Taliban launched a massive
assault on Kunduz city, attacking from several sides as residents fled intense
fighting. At least 10 people were killed in an insurgent suicide bombing. A
government spokesman said the attack, which came as U.S. and Taliban officials
were finalizing a possible peace agreement in Qatar, showed that the insurgents
“do not accept the opportunity for peace” being offered.
Nevertheless, Safi’s parents in Kabul have
been praying that the peace process will bring a permanent end to decades of
conflict, destruction and personal loss. Their first son, Khalid, died in the
Afghan civil war during the early 1990s. Another son, Hamun, 44, a high school
principal, lost his left leg in a land mine explosion during military training
in 2005.
Safi’s message to the Taliban was a pointed
challenge to the insurgents’ assertions that they are a pure Islamist movement
fighting an “infidel” foreign army and its Afghan minions. The vast majority of
those killed by the Taliban have been fellow Afghan Muslims, including civilian
government workers and random bombing victims as well as security forces.
“Lemar’s death has been a heavy burden for
our family to bear, but we don’t believe that his sacrifice was for nothing,”
said Khybar, 38, another brother who works in the Afghan judicial system.
“Thousands of soldiers like him have died for the same cause. He wanted to
fight to defend his country and its future as a democracy. He lost his life,
but he did it for the sake of peace.”
The Afghan government does not release
casualty numbers for security forces, but President Ashraf Ghani said in
January that 45,000 soldiers and police had been killed since he took office in
2014. In recent months, Taliban and Afghan forces have been fighting aggressively
to gain advantage in the peace negotiations. The continued high rates of
casualties for both civilians and armed forces, including those from U.S.
airstrikes, have intensified public demand for peace.
Both sides in the talks in Qatar say they are
close to reaching an agreement that would allow 5,000 U.S. troops to leave in
return for the Taliban vowing not to let al-Qaeda operate from areas it
controls. It is not clear if negotiators have resolved disagreements over a
permanent cease-fire, a timetable for remaining troops to leave, and whether
the Taliban is willing to meet with Afghan officials.
By all accounts, Safi was an enthusiastic
soldier with an unusual profile. He had a college degree in child psychology
and a talent for poetry. He was not married, and he had spent time as a
translator for the U.S. military. To his family’s initial dismay, he decided to
enlist in the army when he was 26, enrolled in its officer academy and
graduated as a captain one year later.
“We wanted him to stay home, to become a
teacher, but he had strong feelings about the war, about wanting to stop the
Taliban and the terrorists,” said his father, Mohammed Akram, a retired
security officer in his 70s.
In 2016, Safi was assigned to a combat unit
in Kunduz, a province near the border with Tajikistan where the Taliban had
briefly seized the capital in weeks of heavy fighting the year before. The
surrounding region and link roads remained under siege for months. Safi soon
became known as a driven fighter who took risks and inspired others to do the
same.
“He hated to hang around the base and always
wanted to be out looking for the enemy,” said Lt. Col. Hamid Saifi, his former
commanding officer, in a phone interview from another province. “He volunteered
for everything. His morale was very high. We rarely see such soldiers in the
army.”
Saifi described a series of intense
skirmishes with the Taliban during that period. At one point, the army’s forces
were trapped for five days under fire in the Khanabad area. At another, he said
they were cut off by Taliban fighters and unable to reach the capital. Safi’s
unit, he said, “established a strong line and fought hard,” opening up the way.
“I lost a lot of men in that war,” the
commanding officer said. “Then I lost him.”
Safi also had an affinity for social media
with an exhibitionistic flair. He frequently posed for war-zone photos and
posted them with comments. He spoke to his family by cellphone almost daily,
reassuring them that things were fine. He recorded and sent out dramatic
videos, including one of a village patrol, punctuated by bursts of gunfire,
that shows soldiers scrambling and shouting.
Akram said his son had dreamed of joining the
army’s special operations forces but died while waiting for his application to
be reviewed. Hours after the family got the news from Kunduz, an army official
in Kabul called to say they needed his final paperwork for the transfer.
“We told the man we were waiting for his
body,” Akram said.
There was no posthumous military award,
though Safi’s family received a $2,000 payment that the Afghan defense ministry
provides in all war deaths. Help for Afghan Heroes, a nonprofit group in Kabul
that assists families of slain or disabled service members, arranged for his
death certificate to be sent from the war zone so the funds could be processed.
Safi’s death received considerable attention
among Afghans on social media, where his photos and poems from the front lines
had attracted thousands of followers on Facebook. His relatives also organized
activities to commemorate him, making posters and banners to display on
holidays.
In the lobby of the high school where Safi’s
brother Hamun is the principal, near the family’s apartment in a crowded suburb
of east Kabul, a large wall-hanging depicts several of Afghanistan’s historic
heroes, including King Amanullah Khan, a reformist monarch from the 1920s, and
the late anti-Taliban commander Ahmad Shah Massoud.
There are also four photos of Capt. Lemar
Safi in uniform, including one with his pointed message to the Taliban: “I am a
Muslim.”
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