Voices from Afghanistan: Noor Mohammed
Bamyan, Afghanistan. Noor Mohammed in Bamyan. Matt Reichel.
When you're the child of a poor family in Afghanistan, life is full of challenges. Even as a kid, you need to work; you need to support the family; you need to help your parents. I was one of those children, one of maybe a million children who had to find work on the streets.
I had to help my father get by, so I was doing lots of different odd jobs; I polished shoes and sold cold water for people to drink during the hot summer months. I was also still going to school. After a local apprenticeship, I trained to become a shoemaker, and I became quite successful with it. I was able to earn real liquid cash from doing that, more so than the other odd jobs I took.
But everything changed when the Taliban took over Mazar-e-Sharif.
The Taliban began their offensive in Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998. Their appointed governor, Mullah Niazi, called on their followers to exterminate the Hazara people. I remember hearing him on the radio inviting all the Taliban to kill Hazaras, and said that anyone who slaughters Hazara people would go to heaven. Many Taliban were happy to go to heaven, and they would kill us ruthlessly, without any mercy, just firing at people from their trucks on the street. They killed many thousands of innocent people during their siege of the city.
“Last year you rebelled against us and killed us. From all your homes you shot at us. Now we are here to deal with you...Hazaras are not Muslim; they are Shia. They are kofr (infidels). The Hazaras killed our force here, and now we have to kill Hazaras… If you do not show your loyalty, we will burn your houses, and we will kill you. You either accept to be Muslims or leave Afghanistan… Wherever you Hazaras go we will catch you. If you go up, we will pull you down by your feet; if you hide below, we will pull you up by your hair… If anyone is hiding Hazaras in his house he too will be taken away.”
-Mullah Niazi
My home was in Ali Chopan, an ethnic Hazara village on the outskirts of Mazar-e-Sharif.
The Taliban had just started to invade the city’s outskirts and were slaughtering people; it was a total war zone. Word had spread to get all the men out of the town, or the Taliban insurgents would kill them. Since our village was just outside the city center, in a way, we had advanced warning. My father and uncle fled into the Chaken Mountains to hide.
My grandparents, my mother, my aunts, my younger siblings, cousins, and I stayed behind in the village. In my family, I am the oldest boy, but I was still just an eleven-year-old child. My parents believed the Taliban would not kill children, women, or the elderly, so they thought it was okay to remain in the village.
The next morning the Taliban arrived at our door.
At first, a couple of Taliban commanders entered my home; they were searching for the men. When they opened the door, my mother was sitting in the corner of the room, and my brother and I were on the floor by the door studying the Quran, the Holy Book of Islam. They walked in and said to each other, “Oh, these are nice people, they are studying the Quran. They are Muslims.” They looked shocked, like wherever their commanders had told them about Hazaras being infidels was not correct, and then they quietly shut the door and left us without saying anything more. This incident shows that while most of the Taliban were savage, not all of them were evil people.
But the second time they came to my house things were different. The Taliban were brutal. After this encounter, my family realized just how dangerous the situation was for us, and my grandpa and grandma decided it was time for us to leave as well.
Our village was considered very sensitive to the Taliban. For the previous several months, our town fought against Taliban advances and succeeded in repelling them the first three times they attacked Mazar-e-Sharif. The Taliban had reached only to our village when they tried to take the city, but Northern Alliance forces stopped them each time. They did not like Hazaras, especially from our area, and considered us their enemies.
Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan. Women visit the most famous site in Mazar-e-Sharif, the Blue Mosque. Matt Reichel.
We left the village taking only the supplies that we could carry with us and walked for a couple of hours until we reached the middle of the city. We decided we would go to some of our relatives’ houses and ask them to give us a place in their yard to camp out. During this time, many people from the outskirts of the city fled into the city centre because they thought it would be safer for them. The city centre is ethnically mixed between Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, so in religious terms, Sunnis and Shias live in the same community. Therefore, it was not the primary target for the Taliban killing squads. The city center became overcrowded, and people were everywhere, many with nowhere to go.
When we reached the city, we started to knock on our relatives’ doors. The first few families we visited were already overwhelmed with people and had no space to house us. We went from house to house until, finally, one of our relatives accepted us and allowed us to camp outside in their courtyard. Thankfully it was summer, so staying outdoors was not too cold.
We laid out a mat on the ground and would cook our food that we brought from the village there.
After two days, we ate through all of our food supplies, and while water was plentiful, the pangs of hunger started to hit. My family had already depleted our savings; we had no choice but to return to our village to collect more food and supplies from our house that we had left behind.
With few options left, we walked back to the village in desperation early that morning. When we arrived, I saw lots of dead bodies strewn across the town; they were mostly people I recognized, just lying dead on the ground. We felt lost; people were running around in confusion. We started walking towards our house, but we noticed smoke coming from that direction on the way there. I was so worried that I dropped everything and ran towards the house. At that time, there was nobody we could call or receive information or warnings from; we didn’t have any telephones or ways to communicate besides word of mouth.
When I reached my house, it was already on fire. A neighbour told us the Taliban had left just five minutes earlier. They had torn the house apart, looking for guns and explosive devices that they thought they might find inside. But we had nothing like that. As they left, they torched it, and by the time I made it to the front door, flames had engulfed the inside. We ran in to collect whatever food supplies we could find, piling them outside. Other people went to the well to pull up water. They dumped bucket after bucket onto the flames, but it was of little use. The fire kept growing stronger. The situation felt helpless.
We spent the next three days sitting outside the house watching it burn to the ground. For those three days, it burned until nothing was left.
We packed up all the belongings we were able to recover-- flower, bread, and food products-- and returned to our relatives’ yard in Mazar-e-Sharif. We lived off those necessities for the next two weeks, not knowing what would happen to us. I did not know where my father was since he fled with my uncle into the mountains. We were on our own, penniless and running out of food with only women, children and grandparents.
Ghazni, Afghanistan. The mountains and villages of Ghazni Province as seen from a U.S. Airforce plane. Public release from the U.S. Military.
Two weeks later, the Taliban brokered a deal with the Northern Alliance forces in control of the mountains to the south of Mazar-e-Sharif. The Taliban wanted to traverse the mountains to strengthen their position over the city, but due to the Northern Alliance presence, the passage was too dangerous for them to cross. So the two sides reached a deal-- the Taliban would be allowed to pass through the mountains, and in return, they had to leave all of the Hazara civilians and townspeople unharmed.
At first, the Taliban followed the agreement. They passed through the mountains without incident, and the slaughtering of civilians mostly stopped. They publicly announced that all Hazaras, including the men, were allowed to return to the villages and go back to their normal lives. But nothing was normal anymore, and the situation we were facing deteriorated within three weeks because now we were entirely under the Taliban regime. They ruled with impunity.
After they cemented their rule over the city center, the Taliban would travel around town in their trucks to make announcements from loudspeakers. One day they decided to force us to go to the stadiums. I did not know why we were being told to go there, but they pushed everyone inside, shouting: “Oh, all you Muslims, come to the stadium!”
By the time I got inside, they had already started slaughtering people-- shooting them and stringing prisoners up by their necks.
This was so hard for me to watch, especially as a young Hazara boy. The Taliban would often stop me on the street, and they would ask: “Are you a Hazara?” I’d reply, “Yes, I’m Hazara.” They would continue questioning me, looking for any excuse to cause me problems: “Why do you have long hair?” One Taliban asked. I questioned him back, “Is my hair a problem?” “Yes,” he replied. And they would take out a pair of scissors and cut my hair in front of anyone passing by on the street as if I should be ashamed of myself.
Then they started coming to inspect our homes, patrol the streets, and harass people constantly. Every other day there would be a new rule we had to follow, and the rules were always changing. They were increasingly suspicious of Hazaras. Taliban would stop me on the street and ask questions like: “Where is your home? Where are your older brothers? Where is your father? What were they doing when the Taliban came into the city?” We were their number one target, and they were fishing for reasons to round us up.
Life was unbearable. We were sitting ducks, and nobody was convinced the Taliban would hold up their end of the agreement for much longer.
With nothing left, we fled to Malistan, my parents’ birth town in Ghazni Province in the middle of Afghanistan. We stayed there for a while, but life was getting tougher and tougher out there because we only had a small piece of farming land left by my ancestors to my parents. In its dilapidated state, that land was not enough to survive off of; we had to farm, cultivate crops, and work the fields. However, we were raised in the city, and none of us knew how to plant properly.
Ghazni, Afghanistan. Ghazni is an ethnic Hazara region in central Afghanistan where Noor’s parents were born. Public release from the U.S. Military.
After two months of trying to survive off this small piece of unworkable farmland, we had to leave. We had to go to Pakistan.
My mom and my youngest sisters stayed in Malistan, while my father, my younger brother and I illegally crossed the border into Pakistan. We stayed there making shoes on the streets for six months from 1999 to early 2000, but life in Pakistan was even more crazy and harsh than it was in Afghanistan.
Since we had no documentation, we had nothing to show to the police. We were stopped and harassed all the time. The police would take what little money we had. The situation became so much of a hindrance that my father decided we should just return to Afghanistan and try our luck back home.
I was 13 years old when we crossed the border back into Afghanistan in March of 2000, but by this point, life in Mazar-e-Sharif was awful. The Taliban were spread across the country and in control. They had already left their hometowns in the east and west of Afghanistan in Helmand and Kandahar provinces and were based in the north, clashing with Northern Alliance forces. They were killing people, adding strict new rules, and forcing people to pray according to their beliefs.
My father said, “Okay, all these Taliban guys are busy fighting in the north, let's go to Helmand Province, it's better because all Taliban have left this area, so it will be much easier to find work.”
We went from Quetta, Pakistan across the Khojak Pass to Afghanistan. From there, we trekked through the mountains and hitched our way to Kandahar, the Taliban capital. Instead of returning to our hometown in Ghazni, we went straight to Helmand, as my father suggested. Helmand is a strict tribal area made up of ethnic Pashtuns and is home to many Taliban fighters. Going there as poor Hazaras was a bit like entering the lion's den, but we had heard about a potentially lucrative opportunity. Since most of the local men were gone fighting for the Taliban, labour was in demand.
When we arrived in Helmand, it was mid-April-- peak opium harvest season. It was easy for us to find work as farmhands in the poppy fields. I did not cultivate poppies per se; rather, I was going into the fields to collect the sap on the bulbs. I was able to collect over a kilogram of opium this way. This was really good money at the time, and to put it bluntly, I made more selling that kilo of opium than we had earned making shoes the entire six months in Pakistan.
Once the opium harvest season passed, I started on a few new jobs in Helmand-- the first one was working as an attendant at a gas station helping people add fuel to their cars, and then I got a job as a cook. All this time, we were under Taliban rule living in their Pashtun heartland.
Helmand, Afghanistan. Afghan National Army and U.S. Forces shake hands with children cultivating opium poppies in Helmand Province. Public release from the U.S. Military.
My father did not like the situation. He did not want my brother and me to see this kind of life of menial jobs and no education and asked us to go back to our ancestral village of Malistan, where we would try to go back to our studies, as children should. However, the schools there were chaotic and barely functional. Students were studying in destroyed houses and mosques, with no roof, no chairs, nothing. Only one teacher was still coming; he would bring a blackboard and chalk, and we would sit on little mats that we brought from home, placing them on the ground around him.
I was supposed to go to seventh grade, but the school no longer had a seventh grade, so I repeated the sixth grade. School was boring for me because I was not learning anything new. I wanted to study English because I was studying English before the Taliban attacked Mazar-e-Sharif, so I asked my father to send me back to the city to continue my studies. Eventually, he agreed, and I went to live with my uncle-- my mother’s brother-- and my grandparents. They took good care of me and sent me to a private boys’ English school.
The situation had changed dramatically since we left.
Taliban officers would burst into our classrooms and force the students to wear turbans. They made us go through our textbooks page by page and black out the faces of girls and female cartoons with ink. They told us looking at the face of a woman was haram (forbidden). This ended up causing a lot of confusion because the English book used pictures and names to help us learn. So we didn't know who is saying what, or, for example, which person was named Lisa or Bob, who was a man and who was a woman, and since I could not see any of the faces, it was impossible to identify the characters in the dialogues. It took all the fun out of learning and just led to a lot of confusion.
After a while, I finally hit my breaking point and could no longer continue studying under these conditions. I went back to shoemaking.
At this point in life, I wanted something like a miracle to happen-- something that would push the Taliban out.
Radio announcements had become our only real source of news. We knew that in 2001 America decided to come to Afghanistan. I remember hearing on the radio the World Trade Center was blown up, but I didn’t know what the World Trade Center was. All I heard was that there were many casualties and destruction, but because I grew up seeing lots of dead bodies and war, it sounded like a normal thing to me. Nothing special. This was the first time I heard the name of the American president-- George W. Bush. People would whisper “George, George,” and while I didn’t know what this meant at the time, I knew one thing-- life under the Taliban was horrible and maybe something was coming from America that would change things.
One evening, we heard the sound of a big airplane soaring through the sky. There were no radio announcements indicating the Americans might attack Mazar-e-Sharif, so we did not know what to expect. It was very dark outside; the electricity was cut, which was an everyday occurrence, and we had gotten used to using oil lamps to light the inside of our house. All of a sudden, we heard a massive explosion. It was so loud that I thought a bomb went off right beside our house. The ground and walls were shaking. I had never experienced anything like this before.
My uncle ran back into the house from outside and yelled: “The Americans are attacking Mazar-e-Sharif!” By this point, everyone was worried, and my family members started to panic: “Oh, Allah, the Americans are going to kill everyone now.” They began to recite prayers and ask for help from God. It felt like pure hopelessness. I thought to myself: “We’ve tried to escape so many times, we’ve run for our lives, but now this is finally the end.” I accepted my fate.
Kunduz, Afghanistan. Northern Alliance forces gather in the mountains in preparation to attack Taliban positions in the north of Afghanistan. Public release from the U.S. Military.
Everything fell quiet.
Then doubt started to settle in. Something felt strange; maybe this time things were not as we thought. I went up to the rooftop to see what was happening. I looked out to the horizon, and at the very far end of Mazar-e-Sharif in the desert towards the Uzbek border there was a huge fire burning, and I could see explosives going off and flashes of light. Crazy sounds were coming from the fire, and I realized it was far away from our house, not next door, as I had previously imagined.
Five minutes later, after a long silence as we watched in bemusement, my uncle said, “The Americans are attacking right on the Taliban locations; they don't want to attack civilians; they don't want to bomb every single house in the city.” With that, we all began to relax, and then relief gave way to excitement.
God, thank you so much.
Every night that week, we would wait for nightfall, and then climb up onto the roof to wait for the sound of American planes. Out of nowhere, they would roar through the sky; you would hear a big explosion, then another one, in quick succession. The sound of Taliban gunfire from the ground would follow, but the Taliban’s weapons were small, and they could not reach the planes. For the first two nights, we saw the big B-52 bombers swoop down over the town, and then smaller planes would hit precision targets throughout the night. This pattern continued for about a week, and every night people would gather on their rooftops to watch. It was fun, almost like a neighbourhood party, with people sneaking up to their roofs in the evening waiting for the American planes to destroy the Taliban.
Finally, one night we heard rumours that the Taliban were about to flee the city within a couple of days.
I fell asleep early that night, but one of my friends who happened to live next door came down from the roof and started shaking me, “Noor, Noor, Noor, wake up!” I woke up to him right in my face, and he beckoned me to follow him outside. I asked him, groggily, “What’s going on?”
“The Taliban are gone.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” he nodded.
I rushed back to the rooftop to see for myself. Right away, I knew the Taliban were actually gone; I could hear the sounds of horses walking through the streets and alleyways. “They must be Northern Alliance soldiers,” I thought to myself. “They could only be the Northern Alliance coming from the mountains because they don’t have any cars or trucks or heavy equipment, just horses.”
Once our eyes adjusted to the darkness, I was able to see the outlines of horses and hear people talking in the streets. It felt like a miracle.
Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan. Northern Alliance General Dustum along with US and Northern Alliance soldiers ride into Mazar-i-Sharif on horseback following the aerial bombing campaign against the Taliban in 2001. Public release from the U.S. Military.
I could not sleep for the rest of the night. My friend and I were eagerly waiting for daybreak; we wanted to go outside and see what things were like now that the bombing had stopped and the Taliban had left. I was so happy and excited that I just sat there waiting for the first light to arrive.
In the early morning, we left our homes. We had been held up there for the past week, and today nobody told us not to go outside. So we left.
The first thing I noticed was the sound of music coming from the streets. During Taliban rule, music was forbidden, and the roads were always quiet, but now music was pouring out from every corner of the city. Northern Alliance soldiers on horseback were patrolling the streets, and this strange feeling overcame me like it was from a dream. People were coming out from their homes and celebrating together, with music! Restaurants, shops and hotels opened, all playing music. We walked for forty minutes to the center of the city, along the way listening to music.
When we arrived, I saw the dead bodies of the Taliban on the ground, everywhere. I must have seen hundreds of corpses that day. In front of the municipal government building in the southeast part of the city, Taliban bodies were being piled one on top of another into a big heap. Locals were trying to clean the streets of all the bodies. There were so many of them it was impossible to respectfully collect all the dead. Instead, they were simply carted off to the municipal building and thrown onto the pile.
On my way back home, a man stopped me on the street and pointed to a school building. I had never heard of the Sultan Razia Girls School before, but he said that there was a school by this name down the road and it was full of Taliban fighters. They were shooting at anybody who passed by, so I should find a different street to walk.
As the Taliban were leaving the city, a different group of Taliban fighters from Pakistan had entered, and many of them were teenaged jihadists full of zeal. They locked themselves inside the school and refused to surrender. I crossed the street to get a better look at the building, and I was able to see the fighters inside. They had been held up in that school for days and were running out of food and water. They were thirsty and hungry, but still, they refused to surrender, even though Northern Alliance soldiers surrounded the building with loudspeakers telling them to come out.
For two days, the Pakistani Taliban fought against the Northern Alliance soldiers, with bullets flying back and forth. The school became a focal point for local people in Mazar-e-Sharif. Every day people would wake up early and gather near the school to see the drama go down, waiting for the Taliban to surrender.
I was doing the same thing, waking up early and walking over to the high school to watch what would happen next. Some of the Taliban tried to escape by rushing out with their guns firing, but they were shot by the soldiers and would fall lifelessly to the ground. It went on like this for a couple of days until one afternoon, around four o’clock, one of those American planes showed up and released what looked like a fireball in the sky.
One local guy standing by me cracked a joke about how their bombs must have stopped working, and a bunch of people erupted into laughter. The plane came back around and shot more fireballs into the air, the same as before. They were trying to get people to evacuate the area, but nobody understood what was going on, so people just stood there watching the scene unfold. Finally, about thirty minutes later, the plane came back for the third time, but this time it flew very fast and felt like it was coming right towards us. The ground started to shake, and everyone got scared and started running away.
As I was running, I heard an explosion behind me. I looked back and saw a cloud of dust and debris; bodies had been launched into the air, spinning like lifeless dolls and falling to the ground. It looked like the whole building was in the sky. I thought the plane might bomb me too, so I kept running for about half a kilometre before I stopped to look back again. There was silence. The plane was gone. The windows of the shops near the school were blown out and glass shards littered the sidewalks. People stared at each other, and after realizing they were safe and nothing happened to them, they walked back towards the school.
Thirty minutes later, the airplane showed up again, and just as it did before, it launched another rocket into the school. This time people did not run away. They just stood nearby watching. When the dust settled, all that remained was a big pile of rubble. Dead bodies were strewn everywhere-- body parts were even hanging from the trees in the schoolyard. I can never forget everything I saw that evening.
That was the end of the Taliban in Mazar-e-Sharif. My life started to return to normal after then. The schools reopened, and there was a massive rush for places. I had missed four years of my education, and I was supposed to be going to seventh grade, but I was already kind of old by this time-- almost 16 years old-- but it didn’t matter much. There were two-hundred people in my class, and many were adults. People just wanted to go to school and receive an education.
People had a lot of hope after the schools reopened. Everyone was happy to see the Taliban gone. The Taliban had destroyed so many of the girls’ schools that girls had to enroll at the boys’ schools for a while. This was a very new experience for us-- boys and girls studying together. But eventually, the girls’ schools were rebuilt, and after about six months, we were segregated again.
When I got back into my classes, I realized I had forgotten nearly all of my English. I had a lot of catching up to do.
