– They are werry angry with your article, he said, nodding at me. They wanted to know, why did I help the foreigners? They think all foreigners are spies. They said I should not have translated what Ismail Khan said about the Northern Alliance. But I said, why? I am just an interpreter – how can I lie? I said I am a good Muslim and that a good Muslim always tells the truth.
Ewan and I looked at each other. Al had been right after all: it was impossible to detach oneself from the story in this crazy place, and I was already becoming embroiled.
– Don’t worry, Mir went on. These men are idiots – galamjam. You know galamjam? It means carpet-thieves.
His sang-froid was admirable but there was a danger that it was also misplaced. Mir was not streetwise. He could be alarmingly naive at times, and I didn’t like the sound of these galamjam one bit. At the very least he was now a marked man with the authorities. I told him as forcefully as I could that he would need to keep a low profile and to stop working for journalists, at least for the time being. Ewan agreed.
– Don’t worry, Mir replied in a bored voice. I’ll be fine.
We checked he was not too shaken and sent him home to his parents in a taxi.
The following morning I went to the UN office and reported the incident to a savvy Irishman who spoke Dari and knew Mazar and the Uzbeks who controlled it well. He nodded sagely and promised to keep an eye out for Mir. I was due to leave Afghanistan for Uzbekistan in a few days. The Independent had expressed an interest in a story about oil and gas politics and my interviews in Tashkent were already set up. I left for the north full of misgivings, but didn’t see what more I could do.
Mir’s future in Mazar ended a fortnight later. He didn’t keep a low profile, but teamed up with the BBC in the shape of the experienced Afghan correspondent Lionel David. Working for the BBC carried kudos in Mazar and was very lucrative. The temptation was more than he was able to resist.
From a purely professional point of view my decision to quit Mazar at the beginning of May was a disaster. I felt a certain Schadenfreude that Ewan had also left and missed the moment, although Rick had stayed behind. None of us had foreseen Dostum’s betrayal by his Uzbek ally Abdul Malik Pahlawan, or the consequent fall of Mazar to the Taliban who, at Abdul Malik’s invitation, swept with devastating speed across the undefended plains to the west in their Hi-Lux trucks. Lionel, however, had excellent Taliban contacts who had tipped him off to the impending operation, and he turned up to film their arrival in Mazar at the perfect moment. At first the Taliban occupation of the city went unopposed. But then they called a public meeting at the central mosque, where they laid out the rules of the new regime: men to wear beards, women to wear birqas and be confined to their homes; no television, no music, no kite-flying, no partridge-fighting;* everyone to pray five times a day, or else. This was not well received. Many men walked out in the course of the meeting, shaking their heads and muttering darkly. But it was a few days later when the Taliban tried to disarm the populace, as they had successfully done everywhere else in the country, that the real trouble began.
Five years later Lionel was still able to recall the minutest details of the next hellish forty-eight hours. I sat him down with a tape recorder in my London flat where he obligingly relived the trauma for an hour and a half, the narrative bizarrely interrupted by a mobile phone call from his young son, who wanted to know if it was OK to use a tube of Bostik to fix a plastic model from his Warhammer set.
Lionel’s story began on a lovely Tuesday evening in the centre of Mazar. He was out near the shrine with Mir, shooting a piece to camera for Newsnight. All was calm. The setting sun lit up the cobalt of the shrine’s mosaics and his crew was adjusting the camera tripod to get the scene into shot. Until that moment Mazar seemed to have fallen to the Taliban as peacefully as every other city had done. But then they heard shooting coming from the Hazara Shi’ite enclave in the north-west quarter. Being Shi’ites, these people with high cheekbones and narrow eyes, descendants of Genghis Khan’s hordes who had sacked Mazar in the thirteenth century, had already been cruelly persecuted by the strictly Sunni Taliban. They evidently wanted nothing to do with the new regime. Looking half a mile down the main avenue with his BBC binoculars, Lionel spotted two colleagues running for their lives, bullets kicking up the dirt behind them like a scene from a cowboy film. One of them was Al, newly returned from the Live News offices in Islamabad.
The Hazara revolt signalled a general uprising in the town. Within moments the air above Lionel and Mir was fizzing with bullets and even artillery fire. The crew had only expected to be out for half an hour and had left their flak jackets in the hotel, a two-minute taxi ride away. Their taxi, however, had vanished, and it took them several hours to get back to relative safety, creeping through the sidestreets with their backs to the walls. En route they encountered the rebel Uzbek commander Ghafar Pahlawan. Oblivious to the gunfire exploding all around him, he was reclining outside his house in a stripy deckchair recently looted from a Western aid agency compound, comfortably shod in a pair of oriental blue slippers. Mir and the BBC men, crouching and flinching at every burst of gunfire, asked him wildly what was going on.
– You are journalists, Ghafar purred. I think you know what is going on.
Even the hotel wasn’t safe. Mir and the journalists huddled in a corridor in the centre of the building, the frightened staff congregated around them, as the battle outside raged through the night. One of the BBC crew was almost hit by a stray bullet fired more than a mile away. By morning the Taliban guard posted at the hotel’s gates the day before had disappeared, the clearest sign yet that the invaders were in deep trouble. Later, Lionel and Mir watched a Hi-Lux truckload of Talib fighters speed past the hotel gates in the direction of the shrine, shooting as they went. It was suicide – and a hundred yards further on they died the way they wanted, a glorious martyr’s death at the hands of the townspeople, who opened up on them from all sides. Such vignettes were repeated across the city throughout that terrible day.
I heard separately what had happened to Rick during the fighting. He beetled out of the Oxfam compound with his cameras the moment it started. Somewhere in the city he dived into a house to shelter from an outburst of shooting, only to find a platoon of Taliban manning the windows. The house seemed solidly built and he was minded to stay put until the shooting subsided, but a local man who had been similarly trapped insisted that it was not safe. They argued. The local won. The two of them bolted across the street to take cover in another building. Just as they reached it a tank shell sailed into the first house and flattened it.
Some six hundred Taliban were killed as they retreated desperately from house to house. Another thousand were captured out by the airport as they tried to flee. Many were said later to have been herded into truck containers that were sealed and dumped out in the desert, where they were baked to death.* It was the first serious military reverse the Taliban had ever known, as well as a great embarrassment to the three countries – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – that had responded to the capture of Mazar too soon by formally recognising the legitimacy of the new regime.
These were dangerous times for Westerners in Afghanistan. They were also dangerous times for Mir. By now he should have been at home with his family,