KABUL - Zurmat is a district in
Paktia province south of Kabul. In the parched village
of Naik Nam the earth and walls are a blinding white,
the mud baked by an unforgiving sun. Drought and poverty
have led to neglect of the mud structures, which look
like half-destroyed sand castles after the first wave
has hit them. A maze of barely perceptible paths winding
through the desert leads to the dunes and homes that
hide behind them. Described by United Nations workers as
a hotbed, the Taliban are said to be very active in
Zurmat, a former Taliban stronghold, after six or seven
in the evening.
My guides are two doctors from
Zurmat, Dr Omar and Dr Mohammed Qasim. Both men were
very nervous as we made our way from Gardez, the
provincial capital, to their hometown. At first they
took a taxi and then opted for a private car. They
dressed me in a salwar kamis, a long shirt draped
over matching baggy pants, and gave me a cap to complete
the disguise. They would be telling locals I was a
Saudi, they said, because people there liked Saudis.
With an American base nearby, I doubted the wisdom in
spreading rumors of a six-foot Saudi visiting a
pro-Taliban village, but kept my skepticism to myself.
Dr Mohammed tried to reassure me along the way.
"We are Afghans, we are Pashtuns, we will give our heads
instead of your's," he said, slitting his throat with
his finger and not inspiring confidence. As we
approached the village they turned off the music in the
car and became silent.
The last journalist to
visit Zurmat was Pamela Constable of the Washington
Post, for her September 5 article entitled "Afghan Blast
Has Alarming Implications". To visit the village the
police chief escorted her with two trucks full of Afghan
soldiers.
A random sampling of various United
Nations daily internal security reports reveals nearly
daily "security incidents" in Zurmat. According to the
UN, "On August 3, two Maltesier [a German humanitarian
organization] employees, traveling back from Zurmat to
Gardez in a yellow-white rental car were shot by two
unknown gunmen standing on each side of the road, near
Niknaam Village, Zurmat District. CFs [coalition forces]
found the car, and two persons inside it - one dead and
the other, shot six times, severely injured ... The
attackers reportedly escaped in their black vehicle."
On August 15, a bomb exploded at a voter
registration site in Zurmat, that night rocket-propelled
grenades and small arms were fired at the home of a
government employee working on the elections. The
following day, American soldiers were shot at by a group
of men on motorcycles in Zurmat. That same day an
American military base was attacked with grenades. Two
days later a bomb planted under a bridge killed three
and wounded two civilians in Zurmat. Not only are there
terrorist and insurgent attacks, but internal violence
as well. The security reports describe a September 14
incident in which two tribes clashed with small arms
because of an old dispute in Zurmat.
The Post's
Constable had come to investigate an explosion in a
madrassa, or school, that had killed 10 people.
On August 29 three American employees of defense
contractor Dyncorp were killed when a car bomb detonated
outside their offices. This high profile attack obscured
the afternoon explosion in the Mullah Khel school in
Zurmat, 90 miles to the south. In her article Constable
claims the school was targeted by the Taliban,
speculating that the motives were either its relatively
modern curriculum or the involvement of its teachers in
voter registration. The bomb, she said, was hidden in a
motorcycle and caused the deaths of nine students and
one teacher.
The notion that children were
targeted is terrible indeed, but the truth is no less
disturbing in its implications. In reality, according to
Mullah Qari Nazir Mohammed, a teacher in the school, as
well as Drs Mohammed and Omar, who work in the town and
other witnesses, the school was hosting seven young
Taliban, or religious students, aged 18 to 21, who were
being instructed in the construction of remote-controlled
bombs. As often happens elsewhere, including Palestine,
the inexperienced teacher accidentally detonated the
bomb, bringing the lesson to a terrible end. All seven
Taliban were killed and their corpses had no arms and
bore signs of close exposure to the explosion. In the
adjacent pathway between the next classroom a parked
motorcycle was destroyed, though it did not contain the
bomb, as Constable's article claimed. Tragically, the
ceiling collapsed on the classroom across the narrow
pathway, killing three students in teacher Sahar Gul's
class. The seven dead Taliban, whom Constable had
mistakenly included in her count of dead students, were
visiting from different madrassas in the region,
including Logar and Ghazni provinces.
Another
religious student, Qari Daud, described his shock at
witnessing Taliban training openly in bomb construction
in madrassas in the border area of Miran Shah and
elsewhere. The townspeople in Zurmat were reluctant to
admit to Constable that their school was being used for
a dual purpose, educating previously unschooled children
in an "accelerated learning program", including
mathematics, Pashtu, religion and art and providing a
regional seminar in bomb-making techniques. There had
been 25 students officially in the class, and an
additional 13 who were not registered but attended
anyway to receive a basic education. After the blast
people from the neighboring 50 families in the area
rushed to the site to dig the victims out of the rubble.
Twenty-six-year-old Sahar Gul still limps from
wounds he suffered when a wall collapsed on him in his
classroom, pinning him for an hour. It was his students
who were killed, as he was teaching, and in the
remaining wall of the classroom a chalkboard with some
scribbling and a map of the world
still hung unscathed. The slightly cross-eyed Gul was
paid US$50 a month by the Afghan Women's Education
Center, an Afghan organization run by a female doctor
originally from Paktia, Shinkai Zahine, that supports
400 teachers like Gul in Paktia province alone. Gul sat
with the village elders in his guest room, its floors
and walls decorated with colorful traditional carpets
and tapestries. A silent anonymous female hand reached
into the room from behind a door offering a tray with
green tea, and raisins, nuts and toffees were also
served.
Gul and the village elders feigned
ignorance when asked about the presence of Taliban
forces in their area. Bismillah Shah, a weathered elder
who lost two nephews in the explosion, says, "These
people who fight the Americans or Afghan army don't want
to develop our country, but we don't know who they are."
Like many Pashtuns, he was ambivalent about the American
presence in his country. "We have not had any problems
with the Americans, we have not seen anything from them,
good or bad," he said.
Paktia has one of the
highest rates of voter registration in Afghanistan ahead
of the October 9 presidential elections, and Shah proudly pulled out his
registration card from his front pocket. "Elections are
very good," he said, "we need them for the future of our
country." Forty-seven percent of Paktia's women are
registered, as were all the wives of the men present in
the room. Shah added that they aspired only for
"security, to be able to walk, talk and work". The men
agreed that they wanted an Islamic government. Dr Omar
explained to me that "people here think democracy means
boys and girls will be together and women will walk
uncovered".
In the Zurmat bazaar, a dusty
collection of barely standing wooden shacks, 40-year-old
shopkeeper Zainullah sat drinking tea surrounded by
mounds of spices, henna, nuts, soaps and every
imaginable item. He had been waiting excitedly to get
his registration card, he said. "After 25 years it's the
first chance the Afghan people have." He was pleased
with the American presence nearby. "Nowadays our
government cannot stand by itself. Security was good
under the Taliban and now it is not," he said, "With the
help of these forces our government will stand. The
Americans are here temporarily, not permanently. We
don't have a full army." When asked whom he might vote
for, he was unequivocal. "All of Zurmat, no all of
Kabul, no all Afghans want [President Hamid] Karzai. He
has no enemies and doesn't make differences between
Tajiks and Pashtuns."
Dr Mohammed left
Afghanistan when he was seven and lived as a refugee in
Pakistan, returning to Afghanistan to work as a doctor.
He worried about the support Pakistan was giving to
radical elements in his country. "The main enemy of out
country is Pakistan," he said, "They don't want us to
have peace. We are between two fires, Pakistan and
Iran." Though he aspired to specialize in the chest and
receive training abroad, Dr Mohammed was working as a
social worker in Zurmat now. "People here have spent 25
years with guns and it will take time to turn their
attention to knowledge," he said, and worried that "the
madrassas are tools for terrorists pretending to
teach but making students into terrorists."
TOMORROW:
Part 2 Idealism in a hostile
territory
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PART 1: The school of
death
when a car bomb detonated
outside their offices. This high profile attack obscured
the afternoon explosion in the Mullah Khel school in
Zurmat, 90 miles to the south. In her article Constable
claims the school was targeted by the Taliban,
speculating that the motives were either its relatively
modern curriculum or the involvement of its teachers in
voter registration. The bomb, she said, was hidden in a
motorcycle and caused the deaths of nine students and
one teacher. 
construction of remote-controlled
bombs. As often happens elsewhere, including Palestine,
the inexperienced teacher accidentally detonated the
bomb, bringing the lesson to a terrible end. All seven
Taliban were killed and their corpses had no arms and
bore signs of close exposure to the explosion. In the
adjacent pathway between the next classroom a parked
motorcycle was destroyed, though it did not contain the
bomb, as Constable's article claimed. Tragically, the
ceiling collapsed on the classroom across the narrow
pathway, killing three students in teacher Sahar Gul's
class. The seven dead Taliban, whom Constable had
mistakenly included in her count of dead students, were
visiting from different madrassas in the region,
including Logar and Ghazni provinces. 
scribbling and a map of the world
still hung unscathed. The slightly cross-eyed Gul was
paid US$50 a month by the Afghan Women's Education
Center, an Afghan organization run by a female doctor
originally from Paktia, Shinkai Zahine, that supports
400 teachers like Gul in Paktia province alone. Gul sat
with the village elders in his guest room, its floors
and walls decorated with colorful traditional carpets
and tapestries. A silent anonymous female hand reached
into the room from behind a door offering a tray with
green tea, and raisins, nuts and toffees were also
served. 
Shah proudly pulled out his
registration card from his front pocket. "Elections are
very good," he said, "we need them for the future of our
country." Forty-seven percent of Paktia's women are
registered, as were all the wives of the men present in
the room. Shah added that they aspired only for
"security, to be able to walk, talk and work". The men
agreed that they wanted an Islamic government. Dr Omar
explained to me that "people here think democracy means
boys and girls will be together and women will walk
uncovered". 
