[A new wave of violence and a
growing uncertainty about the country’s future have left Afghans in the capital
with a constant sense of fear.]
“When you’re in the car you feel
fear, when you are walking you feel fear, and when you are in the shop you feel
fear,” said Shamsullah Amini, a 22-year-old shopkeeper, while watching over his
vats of dried grains and beans in the Taimani neighborhood. “If there was any
security at all, we wouldn’t all be thinking about leaving the country.”
“Fear is omnipresent,” said
Muqaddesa Yourish, an executive at a leading communications firm. “It’s gone
from a state of fear to a state of being.”
Fear has long been part of life in
Kabul, with the possibility of sudden death from a Taliban strike. But these
days — even as the Afghan government tries to negotiate peace with the Taliban
— there is a heightened sense that life is fragile here. With the Taliban
active in most of the country and almost daily reports of government forces
beaten back, there are new questions about whether a grim return to extremist
rule is on the near horizon
On Sunday morning gunmen killed two
female judges on a street in a central Kabul neighborhood. The women worked for
Afghanistan’s Supreme Court. Shaharzad Akbar, the chairwoman of the Afghanistan
Independent Human Rights Commission, wrote on Twitter afterward that the
country is suffering “what seems to be a systematic massacre & the world
seems to be just watching.”
In the first two weeks of January,
bombs went off in several Kabul neighborhoods; a car bomb killed a government
spokesman and two others; and a police officer, a military pilot, a soldier and
a member of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency were all gunned down, according to
a New York Times report. The list is not exhaustive.
“Right now, I can’t be sure of my
own security,” said Omar Sadr, a political scientist at the American University
of Afghanistan. “But it’s not just about being targeted. It’s about an
atmosphere of fear. If it continues, you won’t have the space needed for a
democracy.”
The assassination campaign, aimed
mostly at government workers, activists, journalists and members of the
military, is thought to be the Taliban’s attempt to pressure the Afghan
government during the halting peace talks, though the group has denied
responsibility for the attacks.
It is also a means of silencing
critical voices, now and in the future. More than 300 people were killed in
targeted attacks last year, including at least six journalists over the last
seven months, according
to a New York Times tally.
Some who are able to get visas have
left.
“It is pretty morose,” said
Farahnaz Forotan, a leading television journalist, who fled to Paris in
November after her name turned up on a hit list.
In the capital, a veneer of
normality masks the dread. In the early evening, storefronts are brightly lit
against the darkened streets, and a frenetic bustle of shoppers and street
vendors, darting through the perpetual traffic jam, is undamped by the
coronavirus.
But even these last shreds of
routine could disappear if the Taliban return or Afghanistan descends again
into civil war.
The latest wave of violence evokes
memories of the early 1990s strife that destroyed the capital. The internal war
has already begun, some here say; the near-daily bombings and shootings, many
unclaimed, foreshadow it. At night, the occasional burst of automatic gunfire
has become familiar.
“There is no safe area,” said Mina
Rezaee, who runs the Simple Café in the bustling Karte Seh neighborhood, packed
with inexpensive clothing stores. “People are killed at the mosque, they are
killed in the street, they are killed at work. And this is something that’s
always with me.”
Portraits of Simone de Beauvoir,
Hannah Arendt and Virginia Woolf hang on one of the cafe’s walls next to a
quotation from Michel Foucault about love and sensuality.
How many explosions has Ms. Rezaee
witnessed up close? “It’s common for me,” she shrugged, noting that she was
near a massive truck bombing outside the German Embassy that killed 90 in 2017.
In a photograph on her Facebook page, taken after the 2016 Islamic State
bombing in Kabul that killed over 80, she clutches her hands to a face
contorted with anguish.
“Nobody wants to die young,” said
Saib Nissar, 25, who runs one of the glassed-in storefront bakeries that dot
the capital. “But here in Afghanistan, no one can think of anything but the
insecurity.”
The most banal aspects of daily
life have become a torment.
“Every morning on the way to work
I’m waiting for an explosion,” said Zahra Fayazi, a customer at the Simple Café
and a former top national women’s volleyball player who now works at the state
electricity company. “If it doesn’t happen in this square, it will happen in
the next one.”
“When we get to the office,
everyone is talking about the latest explosions,” she said. “I can only breathe
again when my daughters return home from school.”
The consequences of the violence
are both psychological and practical — especially for the government workers,
academics and activists who are the biggest targets.
Ms. Akbar, the chairwoman of the
country’s human rights commission, said, “If you are spending your mental
energy thinking about how to survive, inevitably all your days are tense and
stressful.”
Mr. Sadr, the political scientist,
said he sold his car, worried it would be a target. “I’m trying to use taxis
instead,” he said. “I’m trying to be cautious and move less.”
He also said he worried about
whether something he said would attract unwanted notice from the Taliban.
“We’re all cautious about speaking, about the implications of speaking,” he
said.
Ms. Yourish, the communications
executive, who is also a former deputy minister, said she no longer has a
routine. “I change my routes, I change vehicles,” she said. “I need to be on
extra alert about my surroundings. You do get these thoughts of, ‘What if this
is my last moment?’ It’s like, taking every day as it comes.”
“But I can’t,” she added.
There is little confidence that the
government can hold out against the Taliban, either on the battlefield or at
the negotiating table. Some here who have met with them say Taliban negotiators
don’t hide their contempt for the Afghan government, regarding it as a puppet
of the Americans. There is deep unease about what will happen when the last
American troops withdraw, tentatively scheduled for May.
“What will they think of our
rights, our women’s rights?” said Ms. Rezaee, the cafe owner, who has all the
more reason to fear as a member of the ethnic minority most persecuted by the
Taliban, the Hazara, like many of her customers.
An Afghan rapper and his musician
friends, sitting together at the cafe, were not optimistic. “I sing of a life
that doesn’t exist,” Mustafa Saher, 27, raps in his music video.
Mr. Saher put his tattooed arm on
the table. “If they see this, they will cut my arm off,” he said. “They say,
this is the opposite of Islam.”
After he posted his video online,
he received a threatening phone call saying: “What you are doing? It is against
Islam. You are an infidel!”
“I am scared of my own people,” Mr.
Saher said. “This fear is depressing people and forcing them to isolate
themselves,” he said, adding that it had become impossible, already, to hold
concerts in many parts of Kabul.
“All we want is freedom, and
justice, and maybe a little bit of peace,” he said.
Fatima Faizi and Najim
Rahim contributed reporting.
