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Chapter One

The White Flag
Over the Mosque

9 A.M., September 27, 1996. Someone knocks violently on our door. My whole family has been on edge since dawn, and now we all start in alarm. My father jumps up to see who it is while my mother looks on anxiously, haggard with exhaustion after a sleepless night. None of us got any sleep: The rocket fire around the city didn't let up until two in the morning. My sister Soraya and I kept whispering in the dark; even after things quieted down, we couldn't fall asleep. And yet here in Kabul, we're used to being the target of rocket fire. I'm only sixteen years old, but I feel as though I've been hearing that din all my life. The city has been surrounded and bombarded for so long, the smoke and flames of the murderous fighting have terrified us so often, sometimes even sending us rushing down to the basement, that another night in this racket is just part of our daily routine!

    Until this morning.

    Papa returns to the kitchen, followed by Farad, our young cousin, who is pale and breathless. He seems to be shaking inside, and his face is taut with fear. He can hardly speak, stammering out words in a series of strange gasps.

    "I came ... to find out how you were. Are you all right? You haven't seen anything? You don't know? But they're here! They've taken Kabul! The Taliban are in Kabul. They haven't come to your place yet? They haven't demanded that you hand over any weapons?"

    "No, no one's been here, but we saw the white flag waving over the mosque—Daoud spotted it a fewhours ago. We were afraid the worst had happened...."

    This morning, around five o'clock, my young brother Daoud went downstairs as usual to fetch some water from the tap in the courtyard of our building, but came hurrying back up with the basin still empty.

    "I saw a white flag over the mosque and another one over the school."

    The flag of the Taliban. It had never before flown over Kabul. I had seen it only on television or in newspaper photographs.

    We knew the Taliban were not far away; people in the city kept saying they were five or ten miles from the capital, but no one truly believed they would manage to enter Kabul. When we quickly turn on the radio and the television to hear some news, there is still nothing, the same dreadful nothing—no sound or picture, nothing since six o'clock yesterday afternoon. This morning my father also tried to reach the rest of the family in Kabul, but the telephone is still dead as well.

    I fiddle nervously with the dial of our battery-powered radio, searching through the static. No trace of our local station, Radio Kabul, or the BBC, or the Voice of America, which I try looking for at that unlikely hour, just on the off chance.... If Farad hadn't risked racing over a mile on his bike from his neighborhood to ours, we wouldn't have had any information, nothing but the undeniable presence of those white flags.

    What Farad has seen is so frightening, so appalling, that he blurts it out all at once.

    "They've hanged Najibullah and his brother, on Aryana Square.... It's horrible! Horrible!"

    He turns back and forth from my father to Daoud as he speaks, then gazes at my sister and me in anguish. We've heard terrible things about what the Taliban do to women in the provinces they already occupy. I've never seen Farad in such a panic, never seen such overwhelming fear in his eyes.

    "Can you imagine? Najibullah. They've strung him up with plastic tubing! There's a big crowd, the Taliban are making everyone look at the bodies, they're beating people. I saw them."

    Petrified, the five of us are speechless.

    Even after my brother told us he'd seen the white flags, I didn't want to believe the truth. The government forces must have pulled back to prepare for another attack on the Taliban, or else they've taken refuge more to the north, in a suburb of the city. The mujahideen can't have abandoned Kabul. So many times I've heard, read, and preferred to ignore what the government has been telling us about the Taliban: "They imprison women in their own homes. They prevent them from working, from going to school. Women have no more lives, the Taliban take away their daughters, burn the villagers' houses, force the men to join their army. They want to destroy the country!'

    Just yesterday, despite the civil war, life was "normal" in Kabul, even though the city is in ruins. Yesterday I went to the seamstress with my sister to try on the dresses we were going to wear to a wedding today. There would have been music, we would have danced. Life can't stop like this on the twenty-seventh of September in 1996. I'm only sixteen and still have so many things to do—I have to pass the entrance examination to study journalism at the university.... No, it's impossible that the Taliban could remain in Kabul; it's just a temporary setback.

    I hear my father talking with Daoud, but I'm so upset I catch only scraps of their conversation.

    "Najibullah is a Pashtun, like they are—it's crazy for them to turn on a Pashtun. And they arrested him in the UN compound? They hanged him? That doesn't make any sense."

    My father is also a Pashtun, the dominant ethnic group in the country. Like many others, he had thought that if through some misfortune the Taliban managed to invade the capital, they would certainly seek out Najibullah, not to hang him, but to set him free and invite him to join their new government.

    Kabulis don't much care for Najibullah, a former leader of our government and a man capable of switching sides as easily as arms and drug traffickers move across the borders of Pakistan. My father is very critical of him and thinks he is a traitor to our country. Corrupt and criminal, Najibullah directed the Afghan Communist secret police, the Khad, a sinister clone of the Soviet KGB. During the last coup d'état, in April 1992, when the resistance besieged Kabul, he simply ran away. Army troops caught him at the airport just as he was about to board a plane to escape abroad. When they forced him to stay, he took refuge at the UN compound near Aryana Square, and there he remained until today.

    I was only a child when he made a speech calling for reconciliation among the various factions of the resistance, a speech he gave on the very square where Farad saw him hanging. If the Taliban are capable of hunting down an ex-president even in the UN headquarters in Kabul, then terror and chaos have taken over indeed.

    Still shaken, my cousin Farad doesn't want to stay away from home too long.

    "If you must go out, be very careful, Uncle. I've seen some of them flogging people with big whips! They're scary, they dress like Pakistanis in long, loose pants, they drive around in four-by-fours and stop to beat people for no reason.... Sometimes they attack men who don't wear beards. And you have no beard!"

    Farad doesn't have a beard, either. Do you grow a beard at age sixteen when you wear running shoes and jeans? When you listen to rock music and daydream over sentimental Indian novels, like lots of boys his age?

    The Taliban are all bearded. Their edict specifies that men must wear beards as long as a man's hand. They never wear the pakol, the traditional Afghan cap that has become an emblem of the resistance. Besides, we know they're not all Pashtuns, or even Afghans: They're supported by Pakistan, and they recruit followers abroad. Footage on television and eyewitnesses from the provinces they control prove that their ranks include many Pakistanis, as well as Arabs from Muslim countries, most of whom don't even speak our language.

    My father checks the street from the balcony of our apartment. The neighborhood is rather quiet; the Taliban flag still waves atop the mosque. But our minds are reeling. We look at one another, dumbfounded. Farad gulps down a glass of hot tea. Papa comes in from the balcony, shaking his head: He simply cannot believe the Taliban have hanged Najibullah.

    This morning, my father and I will not be going jogging with Bingo, our dog. This morning, my father is silently wondering about a thousand things he keeps to himself so as not to distress our mother any further. She has already been sorely tried by seventeen years of war. War, fighting—that's all I've ever known since I was born on March 20, 1980, the first day of spring. But even under the Soviets, even under the rocket fire of the feuding military factions, even in the ruins, we were still living in relative freedom in Kabul.

    What kind of life will our father be able to offer his loved ones? What will happen to his children? I was lucky to be born into a united and affectionate family, one both liberal and religious. My oldest brother, Wahid, lives in Russia. My oldest sister, Shakila, is married and lives with her in-laws, following the custom of our people. She's in Pakistan, waiting to join her husband in the United States. Soraya, who is twenty, is unmarried and has been a flight attendant for Aryana Afghan Airlines for three years now. She came home two days ago from a routine trip to Dubai and was to have left again this morning. Daoud is studying economics. I just passed the first part of a university entrance examination to study journalism. That has always been my dream. My father and everyone else in my family hope to see me complete my studies and become a reporter, traveling around the country, earning my living. Will all this come to an end in a single moment?

    I need to see what's going on in Aryana Square, and so does my sister. We want to convince ourselves that the Taliban are really here, that they've really hanged Najibullah and his brother, that the catastrophe I refused to believe in only yesterday has actually happened to us. My brother Wahid, who was a soldier during the Soviet occupation and then a resistance fighter under General Massoud, always used to say about the Taliban, who were moving up from the south, "You can't imagine the kind of foreign support they have. No one in Kabul has the slightest clue: They're powerful, they've got modern equipment—the government will never be able to stand up to those people."

    At the time, we thought he was being too pessimistic. Now we realize that he was right. So to convince myself of this new reality, I want to see these Taliban soldiers with my own eyes.

    My father has the same idea. Daoud will stay with Mama, who is too fragile to see such things, and the rest of us will drive to Aryana Square. Before taking off on his bike, a sturdy Chinese model, Farad warns my father once again:

    "You should stay home! It would be safer."

    But we must see this incredible sight. If I were already a reporter, it would be my duty to go to the square. I've never seen Najibullah, except for a few times on television, and I was so young then. People had been saying lately that he was writing an autobiography, which I was eager to read. Even those who betrayed our country, who supported the Soviets, are part of our recent history. Anyone who wants to be a journalist must learn everything, understand everything, know everything.

    I usually wear sweatpants, a polo shirt or a pullover, and running shoes, but today Soraya and I dress prudently in long dresses and chadors, which we wear at home when we pray. Papa goes to get the car, which is parked near the local mosque. Carrying his bicycle on his shoulder, Farad follows us downstairs, where we wait for Papa, who soon drives up.

    A neighbor calls to us.

    "Have you heard? It seems they've hanged Najibullah on Aryana Square. What do you think of that?"

    My father signals us discreetly to be cautious. In Kabul, and even in our neighborhood of Mikrorayan, you never know with whom you're dealing. The four modern housing complexes that make up this eastern section of the capital were built by the Soviets and form a kind of concrete village, with its big numbered apartment blocks, its business sector, its school. Many important officials in the Afghan Communist Party lived there, in what were considered luxurious quarters that were more comfortable than traditional houses. Most of the residents are acquainted with one another, and we recognize this neighbor, of course, but who knows what side he's on this morning?

    Soraya replies prudently, in her usual calm and pleasant manner.

    "That's what we heard, too. We're going to see what's happening."

    "My daughter would like to go with you."

    Farad whispers to Soraya to refuse: "Better not take anyone else—you can never tell what might happen over there."

    Farad has younger sisters and a sense of responsibility. The girl pleads with us to take her along, but the answer is no.

    We drive off toward Aryana Square. Sitting in the back with Soraya, I think about the wedding we will not be attending. A few minutes ago, when I mentioned the dresses we were supposed to go get from the seamstress today, Mama snapped at me.

    "Don't you understand what's happening, Latifa? And you're talking about picking up dresses!"

    "Don't worry," my father assured me. "I'll get them later."

    I'm well aware that I'm a teenager who is spoiled by her father and coddled by her sisters, and who has grown up in an atmosphere of freedom until now. School, college, Sundays at the swimming pool, expeditions with my girlfriends in search of music tapes, film videos, novels to read avidly in bed in the evening ... How I hope the resistance forces haven't abandoned us to our fate.

    Along the way, Papa stops the car when one of our friends, a pharmacist, waves to him in recognition. The pharmacist's brother holds an important position in the government.

    "Where are you going? To Aryana Square? I'd advise against it."

    "We want to see things for ourselves."

    "Well, then, I'll tell you something later on, when you return. Be careful!"

    The streets are less crowded than usual; we see men, but not many women. The faces I glimpse in passing are strained: People seem to be in shock. Everything seems calm, however. In fifteen minutes we reach the avenue that runs from the airport to Aryana Square, which is already clogged with cars. This great square is the modern center of the city. My father warns us that he's going to make a quick tour of the square and park farther along. We drive past the American Embassy, the television building, the headquarters of Aryana Afghan Airlines. None of their doors are open.

    Soraya has tears in her eyes.

    "Look, that's where I work! Maybe I'll never be able to come here again. Even the television building is closed...."

    The car turns a corner of the square by Peace Avenue, the site of the UN compound. Facing us is the Ministry of Defense, where General Massoud had his office. And there, across from the Hotel Aryana, the most luxurious in Kabul, reserved primarily for tourists and Western journalists, stands a kind of watchtower ordinarily used by the police guards on duty to keep an eye on the ministry. Two corpses are hanging from this improvised gallows. Papa advises us to look quickly because he's not going to drive around the square again.

    "Take a good look at the faces, so we can be sure it really is Najibullah and his brother."

    And it really is: side by side, former president Najibullah, in traditional Afghan clothing, and his brother, wearing a Western suit. The first one hanging from a length of plastic tubing wrapped around his chest under his arms, the other strung up by the neck. Najibullah's...

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from My Forbidden Face by Latifa with Shékéba Hachemi. Copyright © 2001 by Éditions Anne Carrière. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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