Afghans caught in war's rising tide
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Nearby, the corpulent figure of Neda Mohammad stands amid the crowd, his hands folded regally, his large frame cloaked in many folds of fine brown fabric. He is from the neighboring province of Oruzgan, but he says that he fled here because Western jets bombed his village. "If there is less persecution on us, then we would prefer the Taliban," he says matter-of-factly.
Alima, however, would not.
She ghosts through the muddy back-alleys of Kandahar, the fringes of her silvery-blue burqa fluttering behind. To some, her job of walking door-to-door to give children a free polio vaccination would be seen as humane. But even now, it is enough to get her killed here.
Not only is she a woman doing work – something forbidden in the most conservative interpretations of Islam – but zealous mullahs have also claimed that the immunization program is part of a covert campaign by foreign powers to sterilize Muslims.
If the Taliban were to come back, things would only get worse. "Of course I am scared of the work I am doing during the day – I have nightmares," she says, offering only her first name. "I am afraid that someone will come and shoot me in the head."
But she attempts to steady herself. She needs work to feed her family and buy them clothes, and she wants to serve her people. "If I don't do it, who will?"
To be sure, the potential return of the Taliban offers a far different prospect for the women of Kandahar than it does for the men. "See, I am working!" says Zahra Suliemani, another volunteer in the vaccination campaign, whose bony hands sway beneath her back veil, gripping her medicine box tightly. "I can go out and work as much as a man can work."
"No one wants the Taliban to come back," she says firmly.
But here, amid the ebb and flow of war, lives are already changing. Among the crumbling earthen houses and green spinach fields of her neighborhood, 9-year-old Nazeka chases her friends down dirt paths, shrieking with delight. But when she walks to school, her shoulders cautiously brush the walls by the side of the road. She tries to stay as far from the road – and the car bombs – as possible.
Sometimes, when she has to cross the road, she will ask a Canadian soldier to help her. Sometimes, she says, they do.
"I am afraid of the Taliban, because they are the ones making explosives," says Nazeka. "And I am afraid of the foreign soldiers because wherever they go, there are explosions."
At 9, Nazeka has already seen enough suffering. Unconsciously, she grasps a friend's hand as she explains, in an unwavering voice, how one night in the past "some people took my grandfather and tore him in pieces and then brought him back."
She does not know who did it or why they did it. Nor does she seem to care. "People should be so happy in this country," she says, smiling. "I do not like this war."
Along the city's main thoroughfare, however, those old enough to have seen many such wars merely shrug.
Abdul Bashir, for one, does not seem to be an overly worried sort of person. With a roguish grin, he somewhat curiously attributes his good business this month to the successful lettuce crop.
This from a man who sells used boom-boxes, stacked to the ceiling of his small stall. He polishes one, attempting to make it look presentable amid the dust, while recounting 30 years of violence – from the "holy war" against the Soviets to four years of civil war to the rise and fall of the Taliban.
"The security situation is a concern," he says, the sparkle in his eyes undimmed. "But we're used to it."
