Afghanistan When Allah Beckons

By Alessandra Stanley

Mohammad Anwar, 13, has fought in seven battles, and during the last one, an assault on a government garrison outside the village of Dara Noor, he killed at close range for the first time. He had followed the fighters through mined fields, running like crazy, and was in the first wave that captured the enemy post. He and a friend came upon three soldiers scrambling down a hill. His friend shot one. Mohammad Anwar shot the other two, thumping the bodies with his rifle butt to make sure they were dead, then calmly removing a revolver from the first corpse.

Asked what he thinks about killing, Mohammad Anwar looks puzzled. "I was happy because I killed them," he says. During the attack, Mohammad Anwar's older brother and some other mujahedin seized four soldiers. They bound the prisoners' hands, blindfolded them and marched them to Dara Noor. After the mullah arrived, they lined up the captives and shot them. Mohammad Anwar and his friend watched. How did he feel about that? He lifts an eyebrow and this time answers deliberately, as if talking to a slow-witted child. "I was happy," he says.

A goatherd's son, Mohammad Anwar has been fighting since he was ten. He has never been to school and insists that he is glad not to have to go. With his olive-brown eyes and brown curls peeping out from under his wool cap, he looks like any of the thousands of Afghan boys who loiter, energetic and restless, in Pakistani refugee camps. But there is something different about him. It is not in his face, which is babyish, or his hands, callused and blackened. It is the look behind his eyes, the dulled expression of a seasoned grunt.

In a jihad, or holy war, there are no age guidelines for combat. If a commander decides a boy is ready, then he fights. Fathers take their sons with them to the front. Orphaned boys go with their brothers or uncles. Mothers who demur are ignored. Forcing boys into battle is rare, since nearly all of them volunteer. It is what their ancestors have done for centuries, it is expected of them, and it is not to be questioned. "I was happy."

Islam Dara is a small mujahedin supply base nestled in jagged rocks beneath a circle of mountains, a desert oasis fed by a cold thin stream. Except for the sound of aerial bombing that burns red rings of brush fire above the enclave, Islam Dara seems sheltered. A few canvas tents are pitched amid boulders and mounds of ammunition: RPG-7s, launchers, bazookas. With its cool caves and grassy marshes harboring frogs, Islam Dara is a boy's paradise out of Kipling. But the dozen or so boys who stay there are living an idyll of war.

At the slightest sound, the sentries -- rifle-carrying boys in gray or brown robes -- emerge from behind rocks. Under the direction of a handful of older soldiers, they work in the camp, fetching water, cleaning guns, tending the pack mules. Each night two or three of them slip into the desert alongside mules laden with water, food and ammunition and cross past the enemy to the forward posts three hours away. Each boy has his own AK-47, the only valuable object any of them has ever owned.

Sahin Shah, 10, a mujahedin with a pretty face and mountain flowers tucked into the brim of his cap, is offended by the notion that life in Islam Dara could be fun. His back stiffens, and he retorts with a frown, "We came here to fight. We don't want to play." As if to prove his point, he yanks the flowers from his cap and strips apart his Kalashnikov. When he cleans it, his - motions are slow, loving. Like most of the others, he comes from a small mountain village. His father was killed in combat two years earlier. He says he has been in a battle twice but isn't afraid of dying. He is fighting the jihad, and in jihad, there are no unhappy endings. "Either we kill them," he says, as if reciting a proverb, "or they martyr us."

His best friend, Akbar, also 10, watches Sahin Shah take his rifle apart, then decides to race him and quickly strips his own. Sahin Shah wins. Akbar has a smart-aleck face, a raspy voice, and wears a dirty plaid waistcoat over his robes, a good-luck gift from his father. Unlike many of the boys' fathers, Akbar's is still alive, but he is based at a nearby camp. A week earlier Akbar's father went to visit his wife and five younger children in a refugee camp in Pakistan. He wanted Akbar to go with him, but the son refused. "If I went there," he explains, "then my friends would be alone."

Akbar has been shot at and has returned fire at the enemy, but he is not sure if he has killed. Hesitantly, he explains what battle is like. Mostly it is noisy and inconclusive. "I fired," he says. "But I don't know if I hit anybody."

The gaunt officer in charge, Mohammad Wali, 30, keeps an eye on which boys show promise for battle. Seven of the dozen are, to his eyes, ready for combat. The youngest is nine, the oldest 13, but Mohammad Wali is content with their abilities. "They are the same as the mujahedin -- better, because they are not afraid." Boys also have more energy than older fighters, but they still have to be watched. "Sometimes they behave like children," Mohammad Wali says, his eyes narrowing accusingly at Sahin Shah, "shooting at stones or teasing the mules." He too shrugs off questions about fear or death. In jihad, he says, "either we kill them, or they martyr us."

Jihad is learned at an early age, absorbed by children at home, in the mosque and, for those who can go, in school. There are not many schools in mujahedin-held Afghanistan, but the remaining few, called madrasas and run by mullahs, have a curriculum molded by war. "The madrasa used to be 80% ordinary subjects and 20% Islam," says a former Kabul schoolteacher now doing refugee work in Peshawar. "Today it is 80% about Islam." In the refugee camps in Pakistan, Afghan teachers instruct Afghan children, and the course material is almost entirely about jihad.

In a dark, windowless classroom in the Nasserbagh refugee camp in Peshawar, / 25 eighth-graders, heads shaven and obediently bowed, listen to their teacher. An algebra problem on a blackboard shows that Allah is one. History class is about Mohammad and Islam. So is geography. The teacher asks who is ready to fight. Every hand shoots up. Six-year-old Ahmad Zia, tiny but fierce in a black jacket and cap, rises from the floor and, with a pet student's earnest intensity, leads his classmates in a well-practiced chant: "I will not let the foreigner's foot into my country/ Either I will be martyred or I will kill him."

Afterward, he marches up to the teacher, salutes and marches back to his place. Ahmad Zia says he wants to go to the front in June, and the teacher doesn't smile. The child is not being cute. "I want to fight the jihad." Asked to define jihad, he replies, "Jihad is to fight Russians."

Never mind that Soviet troops left Afghanistan long ago. The mujahedin are now fighting other Afghans and even one another, but the curriculum has not kept up. To schoolboys, "Russians" remains an indelible synonym for enemy.

It is recess, and the boys head to the courtyard to perform a drill. Three of them, carrying Kalashnikovs carved of wood, step across imaginary mines, break into an enemy post and surround two "Russian" prisoners. The boys act out the taking and holding of the prisoners, the blindfolding and the stiff parade back to the base. What happens next to the prisoners is not acted out.

On the second floor of Kuwait Red Crescent hospital in Peshawar, in the farthest bed next to a window, the sprawled body takes up only a fragment of the cot. Rahmat Hussain, 10, is not the only child on the floor, but he is the most seriously injured. Most of the time, the bandaged wound is covered by a thin, dirty green blanket. With a tentative smile, as if offering a guest a cup of tea, his older brother, Tor Kham, volunteers to pull back the blanket.

Tor Kham has been sleeping on the floor next to his brother's bed, waiting, watching and helping the nurses clean the wound twice a day. It is a task he dreads. Tor Kham and the nurse have to tie Rahmat Hussain's wrists to the bedpost with strips of gauze to keep him from reaching down while they remove the bandages. All the skin has been torn from Rahmat Hussain's inner thighs and groin to his stomach, and the pink, raw flesh forms a vast inverted horseshoe two inches deep -- as if he had mounted a burning saddle that seared deep into his body. He was injured during an attack in a village called , Allishir, in the Khost province. The mujahedin were advancing, and the man next to Rahmat Hussain stepped on a mine. The man was blown to bits; when the doctors first treated Rahmat Hussain, they found a piece of the man's flesh lodged inside his wound. His father had died in battle a month before Rahmat Hussain was injured.

A cousin, seated on the windowsill, waves a straw whisk broom to keep flies away. As they work, the nurse, the brother and the cousin remain silent, as do the rest of the men lying in nearby beds. Rahmat Hussain moans, "Pain, pain, I feel pain." Once or twice, he calls for his mother, but it is a muted, passive lament.

It takes more than half an hour to peel off the gauze, dab antiseptic on the livid flesh, and replace the bandages. Tor Kham, who never says a word, grows paler. When the procedure is over, he takes a moment, really no more than a deep breath, then places a hand on the boy's lips to silence him. His hand falls to the boy's chest and lingers there, an offer of consolation. After another nurse arrives and administers morphine, the boy drifts to sleep. His brother pulls the blanket back over his bandages.

Tor Kham explains that he will go back to jihad once his brother recovers. And Rahmat Hussain? He too will want to return to the fight, Tor Kham says. Asked how he knows that, Tor Kham shakes his head. After a long silence, he looks away and says, "There is no jihad for him now. He is in the world of pain."