By Jerome Starkey in Lashkar Gah
Pictures by Jeremy Kelly
Their homes have been destroyed, their schools have been closed and all three students know someone who has been killed in the fighting. Helmand, their homeland, has been transformed in the past 60 years from a beacon of international development into a giant narco-farm controlled by the Taliban.
But the three students in Lashkar Gah, about 250km southwest of the Australian base at Tarin Kowt, are strangely optimistic about the future. None of them has pledged jihad. All three are desperate for change.
“Things are getting worse,” says Mohammed Issaq, 18, from Now Zad district. “We can’t remember a single day of peace.”
His town in the north of the province is one of the most remote settlements in Helmand. The soldiers there can barely venture outside their camps before the Taliban attacks. Once garrisoned by the British, it was handed over to the Estonians, then back to the British and finally to the Americans, who call their base the Alamo.
“If the British troops stop surrounding people’s homes and killing innocent people, then the people will sit down; they won’t fight. But if they do not stop, then people are obliged to join the Taliban, take AK47s and defend themselves,” Issaq says.
His classmate Rafiullah, 18, grew up in nearby Sangin. The town has become synonymous with British casualties, which have risen alarmingly in recent days.
Mohammed Sabir, 19, is from Garmsir in the south, where 4000 Americans have just launched the biggest operation in Afghanistan since the Soviet occupation to flush out the Taliban. “The British troops they come, they bomb the area and capture an area, then they give it back and the Taliban comes back,” Sabir says. “The Taliban comes back and security gets worse. The fighting begins again and in between the civilians get killed.”
Today they live together in a room above a shop at one of the city’s bazaars. Lashkar Gah is the only place in Helmand that’s safe enough to go to school. More than 3000 British troops are involved in a bloody operation a few kilometres to the north, while 4000 US marines are fighting a similar distance to the south.
For three years British troops have battled to convince local people they are better off shunning the Taliban and supporting the government in Kabul. With the extra troops, British and US commanders have promised to stay in the areas they clear until the Afghan army is ready to take over. But the mood in Lashkar Gah suggests efforts so far have been hamstrung by a string of civilian casualties and a corrupt and ineffective government.
Niamat, 13, from Garmsir, lost his father in a crossfire when foreign troops came to his village. His chest is still bandaged from where he was struck by shrapnel. He and his father had been sleeping in their fields, as is customary in rural Afghanistan, so they could water their crops at night. But the Taliban had laid an ambush and the soldiers fought back.
“The bullets were full of fire,” Niamat says, remembering the moment his father died. He blames the infidels. He accuses the foreigners of waging war on Islam, but he has not volunteered to fight. Instead, he wants to be a doctor. It’s a reminder that these are ordinary people, with normal ambitions, who can still be won over.
His uncle, Abdul Ghani, is more circumspect. “How can I like the Americans?” he asks. “They martyred my cousin. He was an innocent man. He went to water his farm, just to earn a living. He was doing his work and they shot him. We are suffering from one side and the other. When the Americans come, they are very cruel, and when the Taliban come they are also very cruel. All over our homeland we are sick of them both.”
