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It was a disposable line in a cruel report by Human Rights Watch that sent me on my search: “The Taliban manages dozens of unrecognized prisons.” Here, for me, was a new and sinister aspect of the kind of parallel government that this insurgent group built in Afghanistan.
Bombings and shootings have been described extensively. These arrests were a forgotten element in the Taliban’s terror campaign: a network of incarceration under the radar that is waiting to swallow and arbitrarily punish citizens who are considered enemies of the group.
As head of The New York Times’ office in Kabul, I concluded that this network must have affected a significant number of Afghans. My aim was to describe the physical characteristics of these prisons as accurately as possible, the conditions in which Taliban prisoners are held and the psychological consequences. What followed was a trip north, to Badakhshan province, and a series of painful reports of beatings, deprivations, despair, and persistent trauma, culminating in an interview that I will remember for a long time.
A worthy man in his 60s, 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 his makeshift prisons.
The father, Malik Mohammadi, was allowed to visit Nasrullah three times over the course of nine days, during which his son was deprived of food and medicine for his epilepsy and was systematically beaten. It all happened in an abandoned house.
“They chained him to a column. He was on a wooden bed. The chain was tight on his hands and legs. He was dying, ”said Mohammadi.
Nasrullah was unconscious and died on the tenth day of detention.
This painful story, about which I wrote in an article in late February, was told with great calm. Mr. Mohammadi was not trying to win my sympathy. He simply wanted to witness what had happened to his son.
A resigned half smile appeared on his lips as he spoke, as if recognizing the futility of speaking – his son would still be dead, no matter what he said.
In the end, I did something I rarely do, as a journalist who, over almost 40 years of reporting, heard many terrible stories and witnessed more than a few: I put my arms around Mr. Mohammadi and gave him a hug .
The rule is always: don’t get involved in other people’s tragedies. It is not part of the job. Sometimes, however, not often, the rule is distorted. Mr. Mohammadi seemed very alone in his pain. He accepted my gesture without embarrassment and said goodbye.
The interview with Mr. Mohammadi took place on the balcony of a hotel in the capital of the northern province of Faizabad. A buzkashi match – a tough polo game in which the headless corpse of a calf or goat is chased by horsemen around an immense field – was unfurling noisily below us.
Before the interview, I had toured the mountains of Badakhshan in search of ex-Taliban prisoners, with my excellent little team of colleagues: photographer Kiana Hayeri; a reporter from the Kabul office, Najim Rahim; and a great freelance journalist and driver from Faizabad (who asked not to be identified).
One of our destinations was an abandoned rural outpost of an ineffective pro-government militia in the Jorm district. As soon as we arrived, we were told that we would have to do the interviews quickly, as the Taliban had learned of our arrival. So we hurried on, and then the colleague from Faizabad accelerated our little car over the hills to get us out of there.
When we were coming back, we could see the white Taliban flag flying in the river. When we got back to the city, our colleague told us with somber humor that the last stretch of the road was known locally as “the valley of death” because Taliban kidnappings were not uncommon.
The week before, he told us, a judge in Faizabad was kidnapped because of this.
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