The long read: Mazar-i-Sherif was once the most secular, liberal of Afghan cities. But 20 years of corruption and misrule left it ripe for retaking by the Taliban. Will anything be different this time?
Taliban fighters at the Hazrat-e-Ali shrine in Mazar-i-Sharif in December 2021. Photograph: Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty Images
Now the severe economic crisis that followed the Taliban takeover has put half of the population of Afghanistan, according to the UN. When the warlords who controlled the region and their business associates fled to Uzbekistan, the UAE and Turkey, they left behind government employees who had not received their meagre salaries for months, and were forced to sell their possessions to feed their hungry families.
Abu Idrees picked up a radio set and called one of his commanders, asking about the missing young man. After a few more calls, the reply of one commander came crackling through the radio set: the young man had been detained after Taliban fighters searched his car and found he was carrying bottles of alcohol.“Don’t worry, we won’t kill him,” answered Abu Idrees with a mischievous smile. “He will stay in detention while we conduct a criminal investigation, and you will be informed of our decision.
Abu Idrees, centre, the former Taliban police chief of Mazar-i-Sherif, examines documents while one of his aides issues a summon.Atta and his cronies would siphon money from government contracts for building and infrastructure projects, extort a percentage of profits from thriving businesses, and levy unofficial taxes on cross-border trade. “There was not a single business that didn’t pay him a cut,” one businessman in Mazar told me.
By this point, more than a decade since their defeat, the Taliban had changed the way they presented themselves to the wider world. In 2013, they opened ain Doha and made efforts to portray the Taliban as an all-Afghan national liberation movement. In truth, the leadership remained overwhelmingly Pashtun, but the organisation needed to expand the insurgency, drawing into their fold the other ethnic communities that had once formed the backbone of the resistance to the Taliban.
In 2011, Jawhar travelled to Waziristan in Pakistan, where he spent two years fighting against the Pakistani state. After the Taliban had become established in the north of Afghanistan, under Abu Idrees, Jawhar’s commander in Waziristan told him to take up the fight back home. “My target was America and Americans, but before those Americans, the Afghan army was standing in the frontline,” Jawhar told me. “If they did not have the Afghans with them, the Americans were like the blind,” he said.
Babak, a Tajik, had first fought against the Taliban in 1998 when they launched a big offensive to capture the city. He commanded a small unit comprised of his relatives and fellow villagers, many of whom had previously fought against the Soviets. Babak and his men had opposed the Taliban’s hardline religious policies, but they had also viewed them as another hostile Pashtun force, after a century or more of incursions into the north.
For the first time in Mazar’s long history of war, defeat was not followed by massacres. Babak and other commanders credited the Taliban’s new pragmatism for their quick victory. “In the last few days, a new politics of diplomacy was conducted by the Taliban that affected us a lot – they declared amnesty for everyone, releasing captives and prisoners and giving them money, around 5,000 afghani [£40].
One emaciated man with deep wrinkles and sallow skin said last year he fell sick and had to go to Pakistan for medical treatment, so he took a loan from the landowner with a high interest rate. When the harvest failed again, he couldn’t pay back the loan. Pointing at his two young girls, he said he betrothed them to the landowner in return for the debt. “They belong to him now,” said the father. “He can take them now, or if he is kind, he will leave them with us until they are 12.
One 35-year-old man, who had loaded his household belongings into the back of a motor rickshaw, told me he had run a successful car wash before the fall of the city, but now his family were hungry. All his relatives had lost their jobs, he said. He pointed at his possessions: a carpet, an electrical fan, some pots, an aluminium crutch. “These are worth 10,000 afghanis, but no one is willing to pay even 2,000.
Three years later, in 2001, when the US military backed the warlords in their bid to recapture the city, Suhaila had cowered in her apartment, hugging her daughters, as bombs and shells exploded outside. When the Taliban were defeated, she emerged, feeling as if she had been released from prison. She went on to join the country’s nascent civil service.
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