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It was a throwaway line in a gloomy Human Rights Watch report that sent me on my quest: “The Taliban run dozens of unrecognized prisons.” Here was for me a new and sinister aspect of the kind of parallel government that this rebellious group set up in Afghanistan.
Bomb attacks and shootings have been extensively written about. These prisons were overlooked in the Taliban’s terror campaign: a network of incarceration under the radar waiting to arbitrarily swallow and punish civilians considered enemies of the group.
As Kabul’s chief of staff at The New York Times, I believed that this network should have affected a significant number of Afghans. My aim was to describe as closely as possible the physical characteristics of these prisons, the conditions under which the Taliban’s prisoners are being held, and their psychological aftermath. What followed was a journey north, to Badakhshan province, and a series of disturbing reports of beatings, remorse, despair, and persistent trauma, culminating in one interview that I will long remember.
A worthy man of about 60, who was already old by Afghan standards, told me how he saw the Taliban slowly kill his 32-year-old son, Nasrullah, an army officer, in one of their temporary prisons.
The father, Malik Mohammadi, was allowed to visit Nasrullah three times over nine days, during which his son was deprived of food and medicine due to his epilepsy, and systematically beaten. It all happened in an abandoned house.
“They chained him to a column. He was bedridden on a tree. The chain was tight to his hands and legs. He was dying, ‘said Mr. Mohammadi said.
Nasrullah falls into unconsciousness and dies on his 10th day of detention.
This painful story, about which I wrote in an article at the end of February, was told with great calm. Mr. Mohammadi is not trying to get my sympathy. He simply wanted to testify about what happened to his son.
A reluctant half-smile plays on his lips as he speaks, as if recognizing the futility of speaking – his son will still be dead no matter what he says.
In the end, I did something I rarely do, as a journalist who, over almost 40 years of reporting, has heard many horrific stories and has been to more than a few witnesses: I put my arms around Mr. Mohammadi sat down and gave him a hug.
The rule is always: do not get involved in the tragedies of others. It’s not part of the job. Sometimes, however, the rule is not often bent. Mr. Mohammadi seemed very alone in his sadness. He accepts my gesture without embarrassment and takes his leave.
The interview with mr. Mohammadi took place on a hotel balcony in the northern provincial capital of Faizabad. ‘N Buzkashi match – a rough game of mounted polo in which the headless corpse of a calf or goat is chased around by hunters in a huge field – unfolds loudly below us.
Before the interview, I wandered far and wide in the mountains of Badakhshan in search of ex-prisoners of the Taliban, with my small and excellent team of colleagues: the photographer Kiana Hayeri; a reporter at the Kabul office, Najim Rahim; and a large freelance journalist and manager from Faizabad (who asked not to be named).
One of our destinations was an abandoned outpost of an inefficient government militia in the district of Jorm. We said on arrival that we would have to do the interviews quickly because the Taliban got the wind of our arrival. So we hurried, and then the Faizabad colleague hurried our little car through the hills to get us out of there.
When we were on our way, we could see the white flag of the Taliban waving across the river. When we arrived in the city again, our colleague told us with grim humor that the last road was known locally as ‘the valley of death’ because kidnappings from the Taliban were not uncommon.
Just the week before, he told us, a judge from Faizabad was abducted on it.
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