Back to militias, the chaotic Afghan way of war
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan—Omid Wahidi was born after the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001. His childhood, for the most part, was peaceful. His family farmed eggplant, tomato and okra in the country’s north. He remembers foreign troops throwing books to him as he walked out of school.
Wahidi, with his slight frame and mop of brown hair, carries an assault rifle now — the metal and wood Kalashnikov that over the past two generations of conflict in Afghanistan has become a grim fixture. The weapon is likely twice his age, but he carries it as if he knows it, even though the first time he pulled the trigger in battle was only weeks ago.
“I didn’t think I’d have to fight,” he said, his weight shifting under the morning’s rising temperature this month.
The rifle that erased the last vestiges of Wahidi’s childhood is a byproduct of the past two months of alarm as a Taliban offensive swept across the country. Wahidi is one of the many Afghans who have been swept up in a militia recruitment drive as government forces have struggled to keep the Taliban at bay.
Hundreds of volunteers have taken up arms around Mazar-i-Sharif, the northern economic hub near where Wahidi lives, to protect their homes — and, knowingly or not, the business interests of the warlords and power brokers who are organizing the militia movement.
These militias are not new and have carried many names in the past two decades, often under the auspices of government ownership: local police, territorial army, popular uprising forces, pro-government militias and so on. But what has happened across the country in these recent weeks — championed by Afghan leaders — is a new
mutation that many fear is an alltoo-close echo of the way Afghanistan fell into civil war in the 1990s.
None of what has been happening bodes well for the continuation of the empowered and centralized national government that the United States and its allies tried to install here.
“I hope peace will come to Afghanistan,” Wahidi said, quietly and as an afterthought, before slinging his rifle and mounting his motorbike, decorated with an Afghan flag.
He sped off into the city to meet up with the rest of his militia, his whiteand blue-laced sneakers a strange contrast to his camouflage uniform.
The militias that have formed around Mazar-i-Sharif and other places across the north over the past two months are arrayed in a kind of loose, defensive belt, supplementing the government forces that have not retreated or surrendered.
In Mazar’s northeast, Uzbek militia members, loyalists of an infamous warlord — Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum — are equipped with new machine guns from who knows where (the weapons’ markings seem to point to Chinese construction). They have fortified their front lines by digging foxholes and slit trenches. The dust-covered fortifications look like they are waiting for a frontal assault by a mechanized army. And they may well be: The Taliban have seized hundreds of armored vehicles, including tanks, in places where the security forces crumbled.
A quarter-mile from the Uzbek front line is a half-built house defended by a family of Hazaras, an ethnic and predominantly Shiite minority that has been persecuted throughout Afghanistan’s recent history.
Around Mazar-i-Sharif, especially,
local forces have preyed on the Hazara community by recruiting young men for militias that operate without government approval. Sometimes they are tricked into defending outposts with little hope of payment.
Musa Khan Shujayee, 34, is the commander of this little outpost, and it is manned by a dozen or so of his relatives — none with significant military training. One fighter there looked to be around 15 years old.
Had the Taliban not attacked the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif late last month, Shujayee would be tending his small shop in the city.
“How can I be a shopkeeper with no security?” Shujayee asked, explaining why he was now carrying a rifle and his store was shuttered.
He gestured to a few ditches in the sand, dug with a rusted shovel, as a stand-in for a defensive trench.
Many of these residents, like Shujayee and Wahidi, have been wrapped up in the ferocity of the war, finding themselves on the front with noble ambitions: to defend their home and their families — and maybe, one day, their neighbors — from the Taliban.
But while many of these militia members are new to war, others are not. In Nahr-e Shahi, a district that borders Mazar’s northern reaches, the militia front line there includes Afghan Hazara militia members who had fought with Iran’s Fatemiyoun brigades in Iraq and Syria. Other fighters and commanders had fought the Soviets in the 1980s or the Taliban in the 1990s. Some militia members joined the government security forces following the U.S. invasion in 2001 and had mustered out, only to later find themselves with guns in their hands once again, a seemingly unstoppable cycle in Afghanistan.