The Afghan village at peace now US soldiers have left
Lal Mohammad says there is scarcely a family in his village which has not been bereaved by the past 20 years of war in Afghanistan. The Taliban heartland of rural Kandahar has seen years of fighting and loss, but even amid this, the farming community around Zangabad seems to have been marked out for particular tragedy.
Surrounded by fields of grapes and pomegranate orchards, the village in Panjwayi district came to international attention on March 11 2012, when a US soldier crept out of his base, broke into houses and murdered 16 people.
But that atrocity was not the first or the last to strike the area. Scores of civilians have died in and around Zangabad as the village and its surrounding fields found themselves caught between the Taliban on one hand and the Afghan forces and their international backers on the other.
With the Taliban achieving a total victory and the government of Ashraf Ghani swept away in a matter of days, the guns and bombs have fallen silent for now at least, and peace has returned to the village, he said.
“We are so happy that the American forces left. Now we feel safe, we can go everywhere, our children, our family members are safe,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
While many Afghans have worries about how the movement will govern, and fear it will quickly return to its repression of the 1990s, the Taliban victory has also brought villages like Zangabad a respite from what has seemed like endless war.
Mr Mohammad’s own personal tragedy came six years ago, when children from his family were running around playing outside his compound. A shell fell among them leaving five dead, aged from six to 12. Soon after he was scooped up in one of the endless counter-terrorism night raids which have struck villages like Zangabad and spent six years locked in the Bagram military prison north of Kabul.
He says he was innocent, but it was killings, abuses and miscarriages like this which drove people to the Taliban.
“I was not with the Taliban, my family members were not with the Taliban, we were typical people, just normal families. They were all ordinary people, but since these things happened, most of them joined the Taliban. We didn’t have any other option,” he said.
Haji Mohammad Wasiq is still haunted by the night Staff Sgt Robert Bales killed 11 members of his family during his night-time killing spree.
Many of the dead were children, shot in the head or face, before he tried to burn their bodies. Bales pleaded guilty to the 16 murders to avoid the death penalty and was jailed for life without parole.
Mr Wasiq said: “It’s really hard and life was really difficult and I still feel like it’s happening now. I can’t forget that moment when I lost 11 members of my family.”
He said that from the moment of the killings he had begun to support the Taliban. “I started supporting the Islamic emirate by financial and other means, but I didn’t join because I had a family to look after.”
The end of the war and the departure of the Americans had come as a relief, he said. “I am very happy and I am very grateful to God for making all this happen. I am very happy and I am feeling safe. Everyone in Panjwayi feels safe.”
Hasti Mohammad lost 18 members of his family in one of the other catastrophes to befall Zangabad. His relatives and others had moved into the desert to take refuge from heavy fighting near their homes in the first flush of the insurgency in Oct 2006. But soon airstrikes began and the bombs fell among the tents.
The civilian death toll was close to 100, according to Afghan officials, though Nato forces said a large number of the dead were Taliban members.
Year by year, the death toll has risen. More than 5,000 civilians were killed or wounded in the first six months of 2021, according to United Nations figures. Nearly two thirds of these were killed by the Taliban or other militant groups. A tally of casualties compiled by one US newspaper regularly recorded several members of the security forces being killed each month. The numbers of Taliban killed are unknown, but thought to be just as high.
Faizani Maulawi, the Taliban’s military commander in Panjwayi, claims that he was one of a band of only 10 fighters who began the insurgency in the province in 2003. Few of them are left alive.
“If you go to Panjwayi’s villages, there are houses and properties that are totally destroyed and were destroyed by the Americans and the Afghan government.
“But since the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has come in power the security is good, people are safe and their property is safe.”
He claims the public anger at the bombardments and airstrikes drove people to the Taliban. “The nation was totally fed up with the previous government with their bombardments and everything that they were doing against the people,” he said.
Haji Abdul Manan said he had lost three nephews in the final stages of the Taliban’s conquest only three months ago, when a rocket hit a family house.
He, his neighbours and family members had been arrested and spent years in Bagram.
“The life has changed for the positive,” he said. “I am very happy, I am safe and my family is safe. I am happy that the Americans have left and there is no fighting.”