Pulwama attack: How educated fidayeens are making militancy glamorous in Kashmir

Back in the ’90s, those who joined the Kashmir militancy were mostly uneducated, marginalised men. But the rise of educated militants like Adil Ahmad Dar has ushered in a new phase in the militancy, and the stark contrast from the ’90s cannot be overlooked.

On April 2, 2011, a 12-year-old boy from Gundibagh, a sleepy hamlet in south Kashmir’s Pulwama district, found his hero when Mahendra Singh Dhoni won the World Cup final for India by hitting a towering six over long on. For the next seven years, the Indian team’s captain became this village boy’s idol. He cherished every helicopter shot, every rapid stumping, and every triumph. Two years ago, when Dhoni’s team lost to Pakistan in the final of the ICC Champions Trophy, he knew what his Kashmiri friends who cheered for the rival team would have in store for him. He locked himself up in his room, and didn’t step outside for a couple of days.

On February 14, this Team India fan rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into a CRPF convoy at Lethpora, Pulwama, on the Srinagar-Jammu highway, killing more than 40 Indian jawans. This Team India fan was Adil Ahmad Dar, known to the world as the teen who executed the deadliest suicide attack on security forces in Kashmir. Adil spent a year waiting to attack, which has taken the Indo-Pak relationship to a new low. But what changed in six months? Until July 18, 2017, the day of the Champions Trophy final, he was still rooting for India.

Adil’s father, Ghulam Hassan Dar, remembers his son as a diligent student who chipped in to support the family. He packed apples in boxes, worked as a painter, took up manual labour, and occasionally led prayers at the local mosque. Nothing seemed amiss and then, on March 19, 2018, just before his Class 12 exams, Adil went missing along with his cousin.

Ghulam Dar says the drawn-out Kashmir conflict is the only reason Adil could have been motivated to join the Jaish-e-Mohammed. He remembers an incident in 2016 that left his son humiliated. Adil was returning home when at the Kakapora area, he was caught in the middle of a clash between stone-pelting protesters and the police. He was detained even though he was not part of the protest. Adil kept asking his father why he was harassed when he had nothing to do with the stone-pelters. The everyday discrimination against Kashmiri youth pushed Adil’s buttons, which was enough to turn him to militancy. The family pleaded with him to return, to no avail.

Illustration: Shruti Yatam

In a final message, Adil urged Indian Muslims to stand up against “the enemy”. A week after he took his own life and that of several CRPF soldiers, his father calls for putting an end to hatred and initiating a dialogue process between New Delhi and Islamabad. “This is the only way to save human lives on either side,” Ghulam Dar says. “The loss of human lives, whether it is of my militant son or of the Indian soldier, doesn’t benefit anyone.”

In a final message, Adil urged Indian Muslims to stand up against “the enemy”.

It pains him to see so many young, educated men turn to militancy. While Adil was a school dropout, the same cannot be said about the stream of educated youth like the 27-year-old Manaan Bashir Wani, a Ph.D. scholar from Aligarh Muslim University, who joined the militant ranks after 2016’s summer uprising. Wani was killed in a gunfight with the troops in October last year, as were scores of other educated Kashmiri men who choose guns over books. Back in the ’90s, those who joined the militancy were mostly uneducated, marginalised men. Men like Nadeem Khateeb, who were foreign-educated but still returned to Kashmir to join the insurgency, were outliers.

Today, they are the norm. Zakir Moosa, the present chief of the Al-Qaeda affiliate Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind is an engineer. The now-slain Mohammad Rafi Bhat was an assistant professor, and Junaid Ahmad, son of separatist leader Mohammad Ashraf Sehrai is an MBA.

The rise of educated militants has ushered a new phase in the Kashmir militancy, and its stark contrast from the militancy of the ’90s cannot be overlooked. In a way, educated militants have made the idea of taking to arms more aspirational, drawing more young men to it. It has also seen the lives of some brilliant students like Ishaq Ahmad, known to his friends as “Newton”, cut short. In 2015, the 19-year-old from Laribal — famous in school for his brilliant score of 98.4 per cent in his Std X exams — left home to join the Hizbul Mujahideen. A year later, he was killed in an overnight encounter in Tral.

Siddiq Wahid, the former Vice-Chancellor of the Islamic University of Science and Technology, which is based in Awantipora, just a few kilometers from the Pulwama attack site, says the nature of the dispute in the region is why educated youth are joining militancy. “It started off as a territorial dispute and the rights of people. However, the arrogance of the Indian state in the last 70 years has transformed it into a conflict over dignity and, of course, human rights. The educated are more aware of these parameters and are affected by it because they can read its implications for the future. If the dispute were about economics or class, one imagines that the demography would have been somewhat different, whereas today the armed rebels constitute a cross-section of society.”

But are educated militants a bigger threat? Javed Mir, one of the first few youths to have joined the Kashmir militancy in the late ’80s, seems to think so. Mir, who renounced violence after his organisation declared an “indefinite ceasefire”, says when he visits the villages, young people question him about the ceasefire and ask him what it has yielded for Kashmir. “The Kashmiri youth has taken a lesson from that ceasefire and understood that New Delhi and the international community has not fulfilled their promise of resolving Kashmir,” he says.

In a way, educated militants have made the idea of taking to arms more aspirational, drawing more young men to it.

Back in the ’90s, the young in Kashmir were angry, but today, they also have the ability to reason. Today, they question activists and moderate voices over why their overtures of peace are met with an iron fist. In December 2018, national vice-president of the BJP and state-in-charge Avinash Rai Khanna said that Operation All Out would continue in Kashmir until the last terrorist is killed. Since 2017, 496 militants have been killed but more than 150 civilians have also lost their lives in the action by the armed forces. That is a huge number to be brushed under the carpet as collateral damage.

For the young, educated Kashmiri, this is an everyday reality. With access to the internet and social media, young Kashmiris know what unfolds in other parts of the country. Be it the lynchings, the glamorisation of educated militancy, or simply the treatment meted out to fellow Kashmiris in other parts of the country. And in the wake of Pulwama, they are feeling the heat. Away from all conflict, those studying in universities and colleges across the country are subject to discrimination. The government might have dismissed reports of harassment, but two educational institutions in Dehradun declared that they will not admit students from the Valley. Several Kashmiri students and workers in Uttarakhand and Haryana have been forced to leave the state. In Bhopal, six Kashmiri students were expelled from a nursing college after pressure from Bajrang Dal activists and in Ambala, more than 100 students were asked to vacate their rented accommodation, The Indian Express reported.

It is this “otherness” that pushes young, educated Kashmiris to the wall. Adil Ahmad Dar was humiliated by the forces, and now, by asking Kashmiri students to leave another batch of young men is being further humiliated.

In Kashmir, every tragedy is followed by a bigger tragedy. But the cycle of violence has to stop somewhere. Adil Ahmad Dar should not become a phenomenon. The youth of Kashmir earned their degrees in hopes of finding a better life than the violence they live in. They deserve a chance to lead that life.

(Source: Arre)

US designates Indian-origin ISIS militant Siddhartha Dhar as global terrorist

Dhar, a British Hindu who converted to Islam and now goes by the name Abu Rumaysah, had skipped police bail in the UK to travel to Syria with his wife and young children in 2014.

The US today designated Indian-origin Islamic State militant from Britain Siddhartha Dhar along with a Belgian-Moroccan citizen as global terrorists and imposed sanctions on them, the State Department said.

Dhar, a British Hindu who converted to Islam and now goes by the name Abu Rumaysah, had skipped police bail in the UK to travel to Syria with his wife and young children in 2014.

Nihad Barakat, a Yazidi teenager held as a sex slave by ISIS, was quoted as saying by the Independent in May 2016 that she was kidnapped and trafficked by Dhar, who was based in Mosul, the groups former stronghold in Iraq.

Dhar was dubbed as the "New Jihadi John" and became a senior commander of the dreaded outfit, the report had said.

The State Department has designated two ISIS members, Siddhartha Dhar and Abdelatif Gaini, as Specially Designated Global Terrorists under Section 1(b) of Executive Order which also imposes sanctions on foreign persons determined to have committed, or pose a significant risk of committing, acts of terrorism that threaten the security of US nationals or the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the US, a state department spokesperson said in a statement.

These designations seek to deny Dhar and Gaini the resources they need to plan and carry out further terrorist attacks, it said.

Among other consequences, all of Dhars and Gainis property and interests in property subject to US jurisdiction are blocked, and US persons are generally prohibited from engaging in any transactions with them, it said.

Dhar was a leading member of now-defunct terrorist organisation Al-Muhajiroun. In late 2014, Dhar left the United Kingdom to travel to Syria to join ISIS, it said.

He is considered to have replaced ISIS executioner Mohammad Emwazi, also known as "Jihadi John", it said.

Dhar is believed to be the masked leader who appeared in a January 2016 ISIS video of the execution of several prisoners ISIS accused of spying for the UK, the statement said.

Gaini is a Belgian-Moroccan citizen believed to be fighting for ISIS in the Middle East. Gaini is connected to UK-based ISIS sympathizers Mohamad Ali Ahmed and Humza Ali, who were convicted in the UK in 2016 of terrorism offenses, it said.

Todays action notifies the US public and the international community that Dhar and Gaini have committed or pose a significant risk of committing acts of terrorism, it said.

Terrorism designations expose and isolate organizations and individuals, and deny them access to the US financial system. Moreover, designations can assist the law enforcement activities of US agencies and other governments, it said.

Who is Siddhartha Dhar? Why did the US designate him as a terrorist?
The United States has designated an Indian-origin British citizen, Siddhartha Dhar, as a global terrorist after the country identified him as the Islamic State (IS) executioner in Syria who was was seen in videos carrying out beheadings.

According to the US State Department, Dhar "is believed to be the masked leader who appeared in a January 2016 IS video of the execution of several prisoners" who were accused by it of spying for Britain.

HERE ARE 10 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT SIDDHARTHA DHAR:

• Also known as Abu Rumaysah, Dhar is in his early 30s.
• He was born and raised in a Hindu family in the United Kingdom.
• He converted to Islam in his late teens and took the name Saiful Islam (Abu Rumaysah is a "kunya", or nickname, which means "father of Rumaysah").
• Before leaving Syria to join the IS in 2014, was a member of a British terrorist organisation Al Muhajiroun.
• At Al Muhajiroun, he became a leading member and speaker. He was a well-known figure among radical Islamists in London.
• Siddhartha Dhar is considered to have replaced feared IS executioner known as "Jihadi John".
• Siddhartha or Abu Rumaysah disappeared in September 2014, after getting bail bail. He was still under investigation for allegedly encouraging terrorism.
• Police had banned him from travelling and he was to submit his passport; however, instead he boarded a coach for Paris from London's Victoria Station, along with his wife and children.
• Later, he posted an image online of himself holding a rifle and announced his arrival in Syria. "What a shoddy security system Britain must have to allow me to breeze through Europe to [IS]," he tweeted.
• The US' state department has said Dhar posed a terrorist threat to US citizens and interests and any property he may have in the US are frozen and Americans banned in dealing with them.

(Source: India Today)

Boko Haram strapped suicide bombs to them. Somehow these teenage girls survived.

The New York Times interviewed 18 girls who were captured by militants in Nigeria and sent into crowds to blow themselves up. Here are their stories: 

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria
The girls didn’t want to kill anyone. They walked in silence for a while, the weight of the explosives around their waists pulling down on them as they fingered the detonators and tried to think of a way out.

“I don’t know how to get this thing off me,” Hadiza, 16, recalled saying as she headed out on her mission.

“What are you going to do with yours?” she asked the 12-year-old girl next to her, who was also wearing a bomb.

“I’m going to go off by myself and blow myself up,” the girl responded hopelessly.

It was all happening so fast. After being kidnapped by Boko Haram this year, Hadiza was confronted by a fighter in the camp where she was being held hostage. He wanted to “marry” her. She rejected him.

“You’ll regret this,” the fighter told her.

A few days later, she was brought before a Boko Haram leader. He told her she would be going to the happiest place she could imagine. Hadiza thought she was going home. He was talking about heaven.

They came for her at night, she said, grabbing a suicide belt and attaching it to her waist. The fighters then sent her and the 12-year-old girl out on foot, alone, telling them to detonate the bombs at a camp for Nigerian civilians who have fled the violence Boko Haram has inflicted on the region.

“I knew I would die and kill other people, too,” Hadiza recalled. “I didn’t want that.”

Northeastern Nigeria, now in its eighth year of war with Boko Haram, has become a place afraid of its own girls.

So far this year, militants have carried out more than twice as many suicide bombings than they did in all of 2016, and the attacks keep coming.

According to Unicef, more than 110 children have been used as suicide bombers since the start of the year – at least 76 of them girls. Most were under 15 years old. One girl blew herself up along with a baby strapped to her back.

Bombers here at the center of the battle against Boko Haram have struck mosques, marketplaces, checkpoints, camps for displaced civilians and anywhere else people gather, including a single polo field attacked multiple times. Trenches have been dug around the University of Maiduguri, a frequent bombing target, in hopes of slowing down attackers.

“I knew very well that bomb would kill me.”

MAIMUMA, 14
The deployment of children has become so frighteningly common that officials in the areas where Boko Haram operates are warning citizens to be on the lookout for girl bombers. A huge billboard here in Maiduguri – the Nigerian city where Boko Haram was born – proclaims “Stop Terrorism” with the image of a scowling, wild-eyed girl with explosives on her chest, clutching a detonator.

Officials are publicly urging parents not to hand over their children to Boko Haram for use as bombers, while the military is circulating a video telling bombers they can surrender. It features an 11-year-old girl.

“Do not allow them to tie explosives on you,” says the girl in the video. “It is dangerous.”

The public service ad paints bombers and their families as Boko Haram collaborators who either support the militants’ campaign of terror, or were brainwashed or drugged into doing so.

But The New York Times tracked down and interviewed 18 girls in Nigeria who were sent on suicide missions by Boko Haram. Their accounts shatter the narrative often perpetuated by officials.

Far from having been willing participants, the girls described being kidnapped and held hostage, with family members killed during their capture.

All of the girls recounted how armed militants forcibly tied suicide belts to their waists, or thrust bombs into their hands, before pushing them toward crowds of people. Most were told that their religion compelled them to carry out the orders. And all of them resisted, preventing the attacks by begging ordinary citizens or the authorities to help them.

Aisha, 15, fled her home with her father and 10-year-old brother, but Boko Haram caught them. The fighters killed her father and, soon after, she watched them strap a bomb to her brother, squeeze him between two militants on a motorbike and speed away.

The two militants returned without him, cheering. Her little brother had blown up soldiers at a barracks, she learned. The militants told her not to cry for him. “He killed wicked people,” they told her.

Later, they tied a bomb on her, too, instructing her to head toward the same barracks.

Like some of the other girls, Aisha said she had considered walking off to an isolated spot and pressing the detonator, far from other people, to avoid hurting anyone else. Instead, she approached the soldiers and persuaded them to remove the explosives from her body, delicately.

“I told them, ‘My brother was here and killed some of your men,’” she said. “My brother wasn’t sensible enough to know he didn’t have to do it. He was only a small child.”

Other girls, whose full names are also being withheld out of concern for their security, had similar stories of terror and defiance.

Fall on your tummy, face down, the militants told Fatima A., 17. But when she approached soldiers, she put up her hands and yelled at the top of her voice: “Look! I’m innocent! I’m not part of them! They forced me!”

Amina, 16, was told to blow up worshipers at a mosque. But as she drew near the crowd, she spotted her uncle, who helped her to safety.

Wait until you find a big crowd of civilians, fighters told Hajja, 17. But if you spot just one or two soldiers first, press the button, they instructed her. Instead, when she came upon a soldier, she showed him her bomb. He guided her to an open field, where he gently removed it.

Fati, 14, was deployed along with nine other girls, each sent in different directions to hit separate targets. She walked into a police station to ask for help, holding the bag containing the bomb that militants had given her. The officers screamed and ran out, she said. But eventually they returned, telling her to leave the bag in a nearby field and walk away.

Maryam, 16, said she got help from an old man resting under a tree. The two hollered to one another from a safe distance, so that he could question her first and get some assurances that she didn’t plan to blow him up.

For these girls and others, even approaching the authorities to ask for help was exceedingly dangerous. Soldiers and civilians at checkpoints are on high alert for anyone suspicious – and usually that means any woman or girl, most of whom wear long head scarves and garments that could cover an explosive belt. In just the last three months of 2016, the United Nations says, 13 children from 11 to 17 years old were killed after they were wrongly thought to be suicide bombers.

Most of the girls interviewed said, like Hadiza, that they had been deployed as bombers after refusing to be married off to a fighter. For years Boko Haram fighters have forced girls into “marriage,” a euphemism for rape, sometimes impregnating them.

Many of the girls echoed Hadiza’s account, saying the militants had promised them paradise in exchange for pushing a red detonator button. The girls, nearly all involved in planned attacks within the past year, were dropped off along empty roads as gun-toting fighters stayed back at a distance to watch them walk toward their targets.

Maimuma, 14, whom militants told to bomb a group of soldiers, said she didn’t want to become like the dozens of other girls who have blown themselves up, taking bystanders with them. She knows that many people suspect she is a Boko Haram collaborator. But she argues that she and other girls like her should be praised for defying the militants.

“Some people see me as part of Boko Haram,” she said. “Some people see me as a hero.”

“I get afraid when I see women.”

HASSAN, A MEMBER OF A LOCAL CIVILIAN MILITIA
In recent months, Nigeria’s gains in beating back Boko Haram – retaking territory and capturing militant hide-outs – have begun to recede. The group’s fighters have launched not only more suicide bombings but more tactical strikes against security forces as well.

In June, they attacked a convoy of soldiers and police officers, kidnapping several female police officers. The following month, militants fired on a military-escorted convoy of oil workers, killing more than 25 people and kidnapping geologists from the University of Maiduguri.

Western intelligence officials say the militants have been recapturing land that the Nigerian military took from them. The United States is preparing to sell half a billion dollars’ worth of attack planes and other material to Nigeria to aid the fight.

The humanitarian situation in the region is dire, with nearly two million people across four countries displaced by war and some living in famine-like conditions. Maiduguri is overwhelmed by families that have fled rural farms and fisheries with no means of making a living. Many live in decaying buildings and thatched huts, or along the banks of the shallow Ngadda River, where one small group survives on roasted scraps of cow hide discarded by local tanneries.

Now, aid groups are fighting an outbreak of thousands of cases of cholera, according to humanitarian workers.

The relentless string of bombings in recent months, mostly around Maiduguri and across the border in Cameroon, has cast a frightening shadow over life here. On Sunday alone, more than a dozen people were killed when bombers struck.

In the past six years, women have accounted for the majority of suicide bombings by Boko Haram in northeast Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger and Chad, according to a report released in August by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.

In fact, the report said, the group has deployed more female bombers than any other terrorist group in history.

And as Boko Haram increasingly turns to children to carry out its suicide attacks, it is four times more likely to deploy girl bombers than boys, the report found.

“There is an uneasiness – people often mention their fear of women and girls at checkpoints, in crowded areas, at the camps, at the university,” said Harriet Dwyer, a spokeswoman for Unicef in Maiduguri. “As we see these incidences happening with more frequency, the stigma and the suspicion become a very difficult thing to reconcile.”

The bombings are taking a psychological toll on Maiduguri, a city that by some estimates has doubled in population as families flee Boko Haram in the countryside.

Bombers strike repeatedly at busy marketplaces and camps for the displaced. Residents suspect that the university has been a frequent target because of Boko Haram’s hatred of Western education, one of its founding principles. At least eight attacks on the university have occurred since the start of the year.

The suicide bombers usually operate in the early morning hours, predictably enough that many residents start their days later or avoid certain areas altogether. Worried about being shot by mistake, many women and girls squat before approaching checkpoints, hoping to convince nervous soldiers and civilian militia members that they aren’t wearing explosive belts or vests.

To avoid suspicion, some women say that they are careful to bathe and wash their clothes frequently. Most of the girls used in bombings have lived in harsh conditions in the bush and appear dirty and “haggard,” a word many residents use to describe them.

One Maiduguri resident, Fatima Seidu, 45, said that whenever she saw girls on the street, she crossed to avoid them.

“I get afraid of bombs, and afraid someone will see me and get afraid of me,” said Ms. Seidu, whose husband was killed by Boko Haram. “But hopefully they’ll look at my age and they’ll also see I’m wearing clean clothes.”

Hassan, a member of a local civilian militia, said that when women and girls approach his checkpoint, he tells them to drop what they’re carrying. Several months ago, he said, a woman refused to stop when he shouted at her. He watched as she raised her hand and pressed a detonator, setting off a bomb.

“I get afraid when I see women,” he said.

Hassan’s wife, Fatima G., 19, said she had been abducted by Boko Haram, held for about six months, and forced to marry a fighter. One day, militants gathered a group of women hostages and told them to parade before them as they barked orders. It seemed to be some kind of test for obedience, she said.

Not long after, she said, a fighter put her on the back of a motorbike and sped toward Maiduguri. On the way, he told her she was going on a suicide mission. But they came upon a firefight between militants and soldiers instead. In the chaos, she escaped.

Now, in her daily life in Maiduguri, she is fearful of women. “It’s not like anyone is wearing identification,” she said. “There’s no way to know who is who.”

The girls who were sent on suicide missions now try to blend into teenage life in Maiduguri. Most had painted nails, tiny rhinestone studs in their noses and curls of henna on their feet. Their long headscarves covered patterned or sparkly dresses and braided hair.

Nearly all had their schooling interrupted by the war. They are eager to return. They dream of becoming teachers, doctors or lawyers.

They value their religion and say they were unconvinced by Boko Haram’s insistence that Islam supports suicide bombings. Some worry that God would have punished them had they accidentally set off the bombs attached to them.

In most cases, the girls told no one about their missions, other than the security forces who helped them. Some girls did not even tell their parents, frightened of being rejected. Those who did were told not to repeat their stories, for fear they would be labeled Boko Haram sympathizers.

The militants sometimes tried to trick the girls, hoping to convince them they would not be harmed in the attacks. Maimuma was told that the moment she hit the detonator, the bomb would leap from her body and land in the crowd. She didn’t believe it, especially after militants prepared her hair in a traditional burial style.

“I knew very well that bomb would kill me,” she said.

But there was little she could do. They tied an explosive belt around her waist and dropped her along a road. Follow it to where the soldiers are, they told her. Act like a woman, they said. Look attractive. Wait until you’re very close to them. Then press the button.

She tried to keep her composure until she was out of sight. The explosives were heavy and the detonator – a device that looked like a small radio – was hot against her waist, she recalled. She wanted to remove the belt, but was terrified of accidentally setting it off.

She began to cry. Some passers-by spotted her sobbing on the road and approached. She told them Boko Haram had tied a bomb under her gown. They sprinted away. Others approached, but they too fled when she told them her problem.

“They came one after another,” she said, almost laughing at the grim absurdity of the scene. “I tried to run after them and they told me they would kill me if I kept coming.”

After a few minutes, a group of soldiers arrived, telling her to keep her distance and put her hands in the air. A soldier came over to gingerly remove the device. It seemed to take forever. Her arms grew tired as she held them overhead. Finally, the belt was off.

Initially, Maimuma hid the episode from her family and friends, and she worried about being jailed if people found out. “Then I thought to myself, ‘Why should I be arrested for being forced to carry a bomb?’” she said. “I decided I was going tell everyone.”

When Maimuma hears about girls who set off bombs she is frustrated. There’s no question in her mind that they had no loyalty to Boko Haram. She thinks they were naïve, terrified and ultimately foolish for not realizing they had the option of surrendering to security officials, she said.

But that is risky, too. When Hadiza and the 12-year-old girl approached a checkpoint, she was scared of what the soldiers might do. Hadiza told the younger girl to wait by a tree in the distance while she explained their predicament to the soldiers. She knew the girl would raise suspicion because she was too young to be walking in the bush without a parent.

“She was such a small girl,” Hadiza said.

The soldiers believed her and helped the girls take off their explosives belts before splitting them up for questioning. Hadiza was eventually taken to a camp for displaced people. She still doesn’t know where her mother is, or if she is even alive. But her father showed up at the camp a few weeks after she did. When she told him what happened, he cried, both horrified and relieved.

“He would never reject me,” she said. “He was so happy I survived.”

A tale of two hotels, a Buddha behind each

The two hotels are separated by a 400-yard stretch of asphalt road, but they seem worlds apart. What unites them are the remains of a pair of giant Buddha statues, one behind each, and the history of Afghanistan’s Bamian Valley — its fortune fluctuating with that of the Buddhas.

The Gholghola Hotel is a $5 million property with luxury suites and 99 items on the menu, including Ukrainian salad and spaghetti Bolognese.

Down the road is a two-room adobe hut, rented for $50 a month on a yearly contract — or until the municipality of this central Afghan province comes to raze it. It’s called the Fairness Hotel (for men and women), based on the sign to the right side of the property, or the Mohammed Hussain Hotel, according to the sign on the face of the property.

“We have beans, and we have soup,” Mr. Hussain declares as soon as a new guest walks in.

The Fairness Hotel is not really a hotel. It’s more a side-of-the-road joint, with a back room that a friend from Mr. Hussain’s village uses as overnight storage for the cabbage and squash he sells in the bazaar.

Afghan boys playing at the grotto of one of Bamian’s giant Buddha statues, in 2014. The statue was destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. Credit Shefayee/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

More than a dozen wasps are buzzing inside. When Mr. Hussain’s fifth-grade son and apprentice, Paiwand Ali, picks up the broom to sweep the bread crumbs, he pulls his hoody over in case one of the wasps attacks his head.

A Rapping Barber, a Defiant Teenager and a Release for War-Weary Afghans MARCH 6, 2017
“They won’t touch you, as long as you don’t touch them,” Mr. Hussain assures his son — and every new customer who sees the wasps first thing when walking in.

Across the way, Gholghola is a pet project of a construction mogul, Hajji Nabi Khalili, the brother of Afghanistan’s former vice president, Karim Khalili. Mr. Khalili, the hotel owner, personally selected the chandeliers and the wallpaper with subdued motifs reminiscent of old New York hotels.

With a staff of 38, the establishment maintains a high standard, but can barely meet costs. Even at peak tourist season, only half of the 45 rooms are rented. But for the Khalili family, with Bamian long the stronghold of their politics, profit was never the priority.

“There was a need for a good space — for tourists, for officials, for visitors,” said Azghar Yusufi, the hotel manager. “In terms of quality and standard, this is the highest place we have in Bamian.”

Before Karim Khalili became the soft-spoken vice president of Afghanistan, with his brother profiting in his shadow, his unruly faction controlled Bamian during the 1990s civil war among warlords. Now his men are clean-cut for a new democracy, but in those days they inspired fear.

One barber in the bazaar remembers when one of Mr. Khalili’s commanders came for a haircut. He had long disheveled hair, and hanging from each side were several grenades.

Another time, the barber said, another of Mr. Khalili’s fighters walked into the shop in a hurry. In his hand he had a tiny plastic bag containing four head lice. He handed the bag of lice to the barber and, with a smirk on his face, said: “I am going to the front lines, and you take care of these. If they get skinny or fat by the time I come back, you know what will happen.”

The Gholghola Hotel has a portrait of the former vice president woven into a small carpet in the lobby. It also has many paintings of the giant, cliff-side Buddha statues that made this region famous around the world before their destruction at the hands of the Taliban in 2001.

“The Buddhas were the identity of Bamian,” said Ustad Abdullah, 63, a biology teacher cutting greens for his cows in the fields nearby. “I am confident they will rebuild the Buddhas. But maybe they should leave them like that — to show what the Taliban did?”

Mohammed Hussain’s hotel, left. When not at school, his son, Paiwand Ali, helps out.
Credit Mujib Mashal/The New York Times

Mr. Abdullah recalled the week in the spring of 2001, when the Taliban first shelled them with tank artillery. Then they detonated a huge amount of explosives — about 11 truckfuls, according to the researcher Abas Arefi — placed in the statues, leaving only the frames standing

In local oral traditions, the Buddhas used to have jewels in their headgear, even diamonds in their eyes. When the residents woke to see the morning sun reflected off the statues, they would feel as if the giants were protecting them.

From the balcony of the suites ($130 a night) at the hotel, life in the valley unfolds like a painting.

A view from the balcony of the Gholghola Hotel.
Mujib Mashal/The New York Times

One late October afternoon, the outlines of the old Buddhas, still visible in their frames, looked hollow, the small puffs of dust traveling in front of them seeming to fill their stomachs. Narrow paths crisscrossed the fields in front of them, where men and women picked potatoes, or tended to cauliflower and cabbage. Flocks of sheep grazed. Little water channels fade into the distance in the fields, as if created with the gentle tip of a paintbrush.

Most of the houses at the Buddhas’ feet are made of mud resembling the sandstone the statues were carved from some 1,500 years ago. But there are washes of color — in the foliage of the poplar trees, and in the neon orange-and-turquoise sweaters of the children herding two wobbly sheep.

At Mohammed Hussain’s place, a pot of tea, a loaf of bread and cabbage salad is included in an .80-cent lunch of beans, or $1.20 lunch of beef soup.

If you ask nicely, you will even get a fresh pepper.

Mr. Hussain and his son leave home at dawn. They fire up the samovar. For breakfast, they serve tea and eggs.

The Gholghola Hotel is run by one of the most powerful political families in Bamian Provice, but it struggles to make a profit. Credit Fatima Faizi/The New York Times

For lunch, Mr. Hussain cooks about nine pounds of beef and four pounds of beans. Paiwand Ali brings fresh bread from the bakery around the corner.

Mr. Hussain knows how many of his customers like their food.

An old man, hunched over his bowl of soup, felt with his fingers two pieces of meat served on the side in a tiny metal saucer.

“This one is good,” the old man said, feeling one piece. “This other one is too tough.”

The tough meat was replaced. “For you, of course,” Mr. Hussain said.

A man in a green cap, and the worn-out suit of a clerk who has only one, walked in. He bellowed a big hello, and then said, “I will have half an order of soup.”

“I can’t do half an order,” Mr. Hussain said.

“I will take a full order,” the man replied. “Make it greasy!”

After eating, the men pour cup after cup of tea from their individual teapots, hug their knees and stare into the commotion of the bazaar through the window.

“A girl lost her purse in the bazaar, and would not stop crying,” one customer said. His young son, sitting next to him, stared at the wasps buzzing overhead, going in and out of a hole in the ceiling.

“Maybe her phone was in the purse, and her boyfriend’s number in the phone,” said Mr. Hussain, taking a break to sip tea in the red plastic chair next to the samovar. “These school types — they all have boyfriends.”

(Source: NYT)