The Times, UK

Visions of hell BY ANTHONY LOYD

No windows, no electricity, no lavatory - and a bout of dysentery. In these extracts from his extraordinary diary, The Times's award-winning correspondent describes the hidden dangers of war reporting Tuesday October 23, Charikar: Each for their own reason, we all want to get into Kabul with the Northern Alliance as soon as possible. To date the front is all but stagnant though, except for the now daily displays of US airstrikes on the T-men positions. There’s nothing more frustrating than the breathless limbo moments of war which suck out time into a yawning stretch.

I meet an old friend, a western European who has, among other motivations, a very different need to reach the capital.

“I’ve got two dead Russians stored in a cellar in Kabul,” he informs me drily. “They are locked in boxes. The caretaker is very nosy and has the keys. I’m sure he’s looked inside and I wonder what he’ll say when I arrive. Probably nothing. Basically, some friends of mine killed them years ago and I dug them up.”

I laugh about the conversation all day long, and am intrigued by all the unanswered elements to the story. I know the man well enough not to doubt a word of the little he told me.

Most of the day is spent sitting on a balcony in our new abode.

Expelled rudely by our host in Jabal os Siraj, Seamus and I have moved to Charikar, a town some three miles from the front.

In an abandoned second-floor room of a semi-derelict apartment block, we have an outstanding battlefield vista and thoroughly enjoy the displays of jets hitting the front.

There are two drawbacks to our new home, however. First, it has no loo. We are quite used to the absence of electricity and running water but the lack of even a “short horror” rather perplexes us. Secondly, our landlord is a Muj commander whose financial acumen is of the same cut as Notting Hill’s Rachman.

Haji Bari lives in a pink-painted emporium at one end of the filth-ridden corridor. Chauffeured to the front (occasionally) in a grey Volga with tinted windows and a picture of Saddam Hussein mounted on the back windscreen, he’s about 40, wears charcoal mascara, controls a mini-army on a stretch of the line and carries the nickname “Haji Dollar”. After an exhausting battle we are bamboozled by him into paying US$250 a week for a room I wouldn’t expect a dog to squat in. Until shortly before our arrival, Haji Dollar’s men used it as a latrine, and in spite of numerous attempts at cleaning the floor, the room still reeks. We get a carpenter in to tack some polythene across the glassless windows, mend the half-door and try breathing out as much as possible.

At first Haji Dollar includes in the rent one gunman as escort and a daily pass to the front.

Then, realising this tiny loophole of generosity, he instals his own checkpoint on the road outside and demands $30 more a day to allow us to cross it.

His goon squad of Muj perpetually loiter in the corridor. Most of the time they are quiet enough, but on occasions at night they get completely off their heads on some unimaginable narcotic and the place becomes a lunatic asylum as they run, roar and jibber down the dark passageway, leaping in and out of the wrecked rooms like armed chimps. From his pink palace Haji roars back.

And, increasingly, Seamus and I hoot and howl in return.

Our behaviour fast begins a kind of cultural osmosis on other levels too.

By night we pee off the balcony, by day fill a slop bucket and empty it out of the window, where it joins our rubbish in the street below. If there was another choice I’d take it.

Monday, October 29, Charikar: Crapping in the Charikar Cinema is usually a Grand Guignol experience.

Situated about 100 metres from Haji’s gaff, it was wrecked when the T-men first temporarily captured Charikar in 1996. Abandoned, dark and silent, it’s an ideal loo. I like the labyrinthine wander through the empty stalls, up the winding staircase, through the barren cloakroom; more turning stairs, a dust-filled corridor and then, illuminated by a single shell-hole in the roof — the projection room.

Dropping my trousers before the smashed projector I squat happily in this secluded silent place, and run strips of mangled Russian films through my fingers, pondering the cycles of war and civilisation, and more earthy matters such as whether there’ll be any packets of Seven Stars cigarettes in the bazaar today (40,000 afghanis, a dollar, for 20 — they are the best you can smoke).

But today there is no joy in the privacy. A violent fever had left my sleeping bag soaked during the previous night. It continues still. And trousers down, my experience in the projection room seems more dramatic and bloody than any American airstrike I have witnessed. I am too drained by the sickness to worry at first, but as the day progresses and my trips to the cinema accelerate into staggering sprints and increasing bleeding I realise dimly that I have contracted some form of dysentery.

The fever departs that evening, but the stomach cramps remain. Returning from a 3am fall from grace in the cinema stalls, I walk out on to the balcony of our room. In the darkness below an unseen figure shouts hoarsely into the night — Charikar’s watchkeeper, charged with calling out to the town’s watchmen to keep them from sleep. Across the Semali Plain a series of huge US bombs erupts for an instant in red explosions on the T-men lines.

Normally I would appreciate this moment, as lone witness beneath the moon. Now though, weak and ill, I step out of myself and peer un-nerved at my vision, dreading the thought of the many days’ travel I will have to endure if I become so debilitated that I must leave Afghanistan; feeling vulnerable, shaken and very far from home. Money and a British passport have kept me well enough so far, but now the commonplace poverty and disease of the land have penetrated the defences and the sensation is a raw, bleak and small epiphany.

Saturday, November 3, Ghulam Ali, the Semali plain: Back on track. The Iranian antibiotics I bought from a pharmacy in the bazaar fixed my dysentery but made my head feel like it was clamped in a vice, and a listless depression dogged their course. I stopped taking them yesterday though and now feel totally rejuvenated. There is no way out of Afghanistan at present: bad weather has halted Alliance helicopter flights from the distant Panshjir Valley and the only overland route — the 5,000-metre Anjoman Pass through which Seamus and I crossed weeks ago — is closed by snow. The realisation is quite a release. I’m tired and vacuous, and by choice would be hanging out with my girlfriend in London, but I can’t get there so I may as well carry on here while I can. Who knows, maybe one of these days the Alliance might even begin what I’ve been waiting for all this time — their push towards Kabul.

And this morning’s visit to Charikar’s hamam has been as wondrous as ever.

A gloomy subterranean passage of heat and steam, it is the only way to bathe. For 20,000 afghanis (50 cents) you are led to one of about 20 stone cells, each lit by a single small aperture in the ceiling through which filters a thin beam of sunlight. The Afghans have rigged up some unseen water tank, from which pipes travel over a fire into the cells.

Standing naked, I fill a bucket of hot water and tip it over my head, then repeat the process again and again. It’s the best sentient experience I have had since leaving London 45 days ago — and after so long deprived of water it is almost erotic.

Later I take a ride to the front, visiting a Muj unit we know on the west side of Bagram airbase. After shooting and killing a hapless T-man dumb enough to leave his trench, they are all in fine form, in spite of the freezing windstorm. We shelter with them in part of the abandoned hangar complex drinking tea, smoking cigarettes, peering at the T-men, and gossiping away. As ever, most of our conversation concerns Kabul and the likelihood of an Alliance push towards it, already stalled by US diplomatic heel-dragging. The Muj don’t really seem bothered by the idea of a battle for the capital one way or another.

As each day goes by, now I realise that neither am I. I have reached a kind of Zen, laissez-faire equilibrium in my relationship with “the big push” and Afghanistan as a whole. This war, most wars, are, to the people within them, not so much defined by the single events recorded by history anyway, but more by the continuous grind and eventless presence of the conflict in their lives.

At the day’s end we dine in Ghulam Ali with the Muj’s senior commander, an intelligent, educated man of 28 — Fahrid Ahmad Shafaq. We had met him at the circumcision ceremony which seems like years ago. After admiring the three herons which wander through his garden (as well as flowers, the Afghans also appreciate ornamental birds of every variety), we have a lengthy floor-laid feast of chicken, rice and watermelon. Then an ancient black-and-white Russian TV set is pulled out, clipped to a car battery and attached to a home-made sat-dish on the roof. There in the room, before the eyes of Seamus, me, Shafaq and a dozen Mujahidin, appears the face of Osama: they have picked up BBC World and the planet’s most wanted terrorist is having another of his videotapes aired. Bin Laden is warning Muslims against collaboration with America in what he terms “the war against Islam”.

The Muj react neither one way nor another. But later in the night, as our conversation winds down and the room readies itself for sleep, a new question is suddenly put to us by Shafaq.

“Do you believe that America’s war is a war against Islam?” he asks.

I respond with the sentiments I believe, telling him that I think it is a war against an organisation and an element of society that has produced it. The Afghans agree, but there is doubt in their eyes.

And then I see it: they do not doubt the legitimacy of their fight against the Taleban and al-Qaeda, but they are worried that the US may so mishandle the conflict that it will one day become perceived as a Western war against the Muslim faith. If that happens then the Alliance are finished. Dead too, will be their relationship with the West. Victory shall be Osama’s.

I sleep well, which surprises me, because, out of all the questions and conversations in Afghanistan, the doubt in the faces of those men this night towards the future vision of the war troubles me more than anything I have seen or heard here.

-- Anonymous, November 09, 2001