No one in Dilawar’s family was sympathetic to the Taliban. But after the Taliban gained control of Afghanistan in 1996, the violence declined for a while. That respite offered Dilawar’s family an opportunity to return to Khost and claim a plot of land where they could grow corn and grain.
Shapoor, the oldest sibling, used the wages he saved from working in Dubai to start up a business buying and selling goats and cows. Dilawar was responsible for shepherding the goats, taking them out to the mountains for grazing and returning with them at night. Eventually the family built a simple seven-room house with stone walls in Khost’s Yakubi district.
Yet the family regularly encountered problems with the Taliban. In Khost, talibs routinely harassed locals who were caught in the streets instead of attending the mosque during prayer time. One day, a small group of talibs stopped Shapoor’s car, yanked him out, and beat him up for disobeying a law under the Taliban regime: listening to music.
Dilawar was Shapoor’s favorite sibling, and Shapoor worried whether his little brother could survive the tough environment of Afghanistan under the Taliban, where religious laws were enforced with violent severity. As a teenager, Dilawar could grow only wisps of facial hair, and his family urged him to stay home since he couldn’t fulfill the beardlength requirements imposed under the Taliban.
Dilawar didn’t have the frame or stamina for hard labor. After his shepherding work, he would move stones from the mountains with the family tractor, selling them to locals for house construction. But Shapoor noticed how Dilawar struggled with his job, and how it wore out his slight body.
The money Shapoor had saved from working at hotels and driving taxis in Dubai was enough to buy Dilawar a Toyota Corolla. Shapoor hadn’t provided his brother with a wedding gift, but knew that this present would be more meaningful, since he would no longer have to haul heavy rocks with a clumsy tractor. Dilawar was overcome by his brother’s generosity. He finally had the means to pursue work that was less physically taxing.
On the day Dilawar was abducted, Shapoor was about thirty minutes outside of Khost, where he had gone to sell sheep and goats, when a taxi driver edged alongside him and rolled down his window. It was the taxi driver who had been traveling on the same road where Dilawar and his passengers had been pulled over. He told Shapoor that they had all been arrested and that the Toyota’s windows had been smashed. Shapoor feared what had happened to his young brother.
Back in Bagram, the detainees were roused late at night for questioning. Soldiers poured ice-cold water on them and ventilated the prison to allow the freezing night air to gust over their wet bodies.
Then the guards came with chains.
By now the prisoners were accustomed to having their wrists bound. But the soldiers were lifting them by their arms, hoisting them upward by chains attached to the ceiling. The weight of their bodies, pulling downward as their arms were stretched upward, made breathing difficult. The soldiers still wouldn’t permit them to relax, and often made noise to frighten them or keep them awake. Detainees remained hooded, causing further disorientation.
“We did not know if it was day or night,” said Parkhudin. “The lights were always on.”
There were bathroom breaks twice a day for a few short minutes. During interrogations, the men were lowered, unchained, and ushered to small rooms for questioning. Their limbs creaked as their bodies returned to a normal position.
“We could not walk because our feet and hands were hurt,” said Parkhudin.
Then the questions began.
Why did you have the numbers from Dubai? What about the walkietalkies? What were you doing with the electrical stabilizer? Did you use it to launch rockets?
Interrogators occasionally presented photographs and questioned prisoners about the subjects contained in them, such as Osama bin Laden and Taliban leaders. Troops applied various kinds of pressure if prisoners said they couldn’t identify people in the photos, if they didn’t have answers, or if they seemed evasive in any way. Qader Khandan said he was forced to do push-ups while a soldier stood on his back. Other detainees said they were beaten. Some were ordered to hold their bodies in stress positions for hours, their arms and legs trembling from exhaustion, their ankles swelling, pain shooting through their extremities. Then interrogation sessions ended, and they were once again hung from chains.
It became a routine. Some prisoners claimed they were chained ten days and ten nights, their toes just scraping the floor, lowered just for interrogation sessions and short bathroom breaks. Again, no talking was permitted. More infractions meant more beatings on their arms, legs, and feet. While suspended, prisoners were vulnerable and could not shield themselves from the blows.
Parkhudin couldn’t see Dilawar, but could hear him being beaten. He seemed especially distressed, more so perhaps than the others.
“I could hear what he was yelling and that he was crying, asking for his mother, asking, ‘Where are you my God?’ ” Parkhudin recalled.
Soldiers laughed when they heard Dilawar’s anguished cries. Fellow detainees thought soldiers were taunting Dilawar “just to make fun,” said Parkhudin.
When Shapoor relayed news of Dilawar’s capture to his family in Yakubi, they were desperate to help, but uncertain about what to do.
“We were running around trying find ways to release him,” said Dilawar’s younger brother, Mohammad Rafik. “We went to the government officials, the village elders. Everyone.”
As the oldest child, Shapoor was charged with trying to determine where Dilawar was being held. He was granted permission to use all family resources to secure his release.
He went first to the governor’s office and learned that Dilawar had been taken to Forward Operating Base Salerno. The Taliban had recently attacked the base with rockets; local officials may have speculated that Dilawar and his passengers were arrested as suspects. Khost’s detainees were first sent to Salerno, then forwarded to the Bagram Air Base, where they were processed and questioned. Shapoor didn’t understand the process; he just wanted to secure his brother’s release.
He traveled to the outskirts of Khost City and implored the guards at Salerno’s checkpoint to help him locate his brother.
“They said they knew some people in the base that could help me,” said Shapoor. “They were always asking me for money.”
Shapoor remembered that he had seen one of the guards in the governor’s office when he was first searching for a contact for the Americans. But he needed more than anguished pleas to help Dilawar.
“I did not want to lose him,” said Shapoor. “He was the one I loved most in my family.”
Desperate, Shapoor used the family’s savings, adding it to his own money, to dole out bribes: first to local government officials, then to Afghan military guards at Salerno. Each of them promised they’d help locate Dilawar; some assured him they would even go to Kabul to try to gain his release. But they rarely relayed news about him.
Each morning Shapoor set out at seven o’clock to make rounds, bribing guards and officials and pursuing any leads, and then returned home by nightfall. When he arrived back home the family pelted him with questions.
“How many people did you see? How much did you pay them?” they asked. “Is there any hope?”
He tried to assure them that Dilawar would be released the next day, maybe the day after. “Just telling them lies so that they would not be very sad, giving them a hope that he would be released,” said Shapoor.
But it went on for weeks, and the family’s savings eventually dwindled to nothing. All told, Shapoor estimates he spent 800,000 Pakistani rupees (about $13,323) in bribes for Dilawar’s release. In a rash move, Shapoor even offered his daughters to one of the main Afghan guards who promised he would help Dilawar.
“When