San Diego Union-Tribune

October 1, 2001

A-1

Shiite refugees bear war scars
  'The cruelty of the Taliban is boundless'

By MARCUS STERN 
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE 

QUETTA, Pakistan -- Perhaps nowhere is Afghanistan's ruling Taliban party more reviled than within the Hazara tribe's crumbling, open-air mosque in this remote Pakistani town high on a wind-swept plateau near the Afghan border.

The mosque, a courtyard of brick and stone walls around a dirt floor open to the sky, has become home to a parade of Hazara widows, orphans and others fleeing the Taliban. Almost all bear physical and emotional scars.

Marriam H. Zia, 20, lived in Kabul with her husband and three children until two months ago. It was then, she said, that Taliban soldiers came to their home. The soldiers abducted and killed her husband, who sold cigarettes for a living.

Yesterday she was hunkered down along one of the crumbling interior walls of the mosque after receiving her only food for the day -- a piece of bread.

Asked if she was afraid of U.S. bombs falling in Afghanistan, she answered that she fears only one thing: "the Taliban."

The Taliban regime, which hosts Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, took control of most of the country by capturing the capital city of Kabul in 1996 with a relentless military campaign that began after the Soviet Union abandoned its own occupation in 1989.

After taking over, the Taliban tightened the Islamic code governing the nation. Among other things, the revised code bans sports, prohibits men from shaving facial hair and forbids the education of women. Enforcement has been brutal.

Many of the Hazara refugees in the mosque yesterday were from the Afghan town of Bamiam, where the Taliban destroyed 1,500-year-old Buddhist statues this year despite pleas from around the world to preserve them.

No group has felt the Taliban's brutality more directly than the Hazara, Afghanistan's only Shiite Muslims. The rest of the country, including the Taliban, is of the rival Sunni sect.

The Hazara people are a distinctive minority because of their Asian features, having descended from the forces of Mongolian conqueror Genghis Khan. He invaded the country in 1219; the Mongol conquerors maintained control for a century and a half.

The Hazara also has a Persian influence and ethnic ties to a coalition of minorities fighting the Taliban, staging from the northern border nations of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

All of this makes them targets for the Taliban.

The Hazara mosque was filled with tired and desperate people of all ages who shared gruesome tales of the Taliban's cruelty. Their despair was overwhelming.

None of the stories could be confirmed immediately, and a Taliban spokesman could not be reached for comment yesterday. While it is impossible to know whether the stories were exaggerated, many seemed to be told with genuine agony and were consistent with published reports.

Defenders of the Taliban previously have denied reports of brutality.

Nazir Hussain, 53, said he fled to Pakistan from the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif in 1992, but returned to fight against the Taliban.

When the Taliban took Mazar in 1998, he said, attackers cut the throats of nine in his family, 56 in his neighborhood and 500 across the city.

"The cruelty of the Taliban is boundless," he said. "They kill husbands and then force their widows to cook for them."

He and others in the mosque here accused the Taliban of genocide against the Hazara.

Qhambar Khan, 44, arrived from Bamiam, Afghanistan, with two other men yesterday afternoon. Standing in the doorway of the mosque, he said that two months ago the Taliban had attacked his family at night while they slept. Attackers killed two of his children, took the family's sheep and all their money, he said.

The mosque is in the heart of what is called Hazara Town in Quetta. It has become the largest concentration of Hazaras outside Afghanistan and is bursting at the seams. It is right across the border from the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, Afghanistan. Residents here say there are 125,000 homes, with each housing two to three families.

Mehrab Ali, 17, said he and his family total 18 and live in a one-room house with a veranda. Most of the family sleeps on the veranda. During the day, the sun burns hot. But with fall setting in, the nights are getting cold and the wind is picking up. Quetta is 5,500 feet above sea level.

Mehrab's hands were hard with calluses from weaving carpets all day with a changak, or hook. But when the Pentagon and the World Trade Center 7,000 miles away were hit Sept. 11, the carpet business here came to a halt, he said.

Hazara Town, he added, has a shortage of jobs, housing, water, food and money. He estimated 150 Hazara families arrive every day even though the border is officially closed. Many try to sell things from carts.

"There are more and more carts but no customers," he said.

Some of the women in the mosque are turning lamb's wool into balls of string. A local merchant gives them the raw wool; they convert it to string. The work brings them the equivalent of $6 a month.

Among the orphans in the mosque yesterday were Moshina, Reza and Ahmed Hussain. They traveled about 45 days on foot from Bamiam with relatives.

"My mother died a natural death," said Moshina, who said she didn't know her own age. She appeared to be about 12. "But my father was taken by the Taliban and killed. They just arrested him. I don't know why."

Like most of those in the mosque, she had eaten only a piece of bread all day and didn't know when or what she would eat next. A United Nations relief worker had brought the bread. When he arrived, the Hazara people crouched in orderly fashion along the inner wall of the mosque, adults and children alike, hands outstretched, waiting for the U.N. man to work his way down the line and give them their piece.

"We're just waiting for aid," Moshina said, adding that she and her family had been in the mosque about 20 days. "We sleep under the sky."

And she has nightmares, she said. What does she see in her nightmares?

"Taliban," she said.

Aziz-ullah, 33, also is from Bamiam. He displayed a round scar on his side that he said came from a bullet and scars on his left arm he said were from shrapnel. More shrapnel scars dot his left leg, he said.

After the Taliban captured Bamiam, he said, he and other men were arrested and marched to the airport. There, the Taliban lined them up and started firing at them with assault rifles.

Aziz-ullah said he took one shot in the side but was one of the few to survive. The shrapnel wounds on his left arm and leg were caused by a Taliban rocket that struck near him, he said.

"Our only crime was that we were Hazara," he said.