The Georgians had a combat outpost -- a COP -- in Gulistan, a rough and Taliban-filled district in eastern Farah. They had two COPs, actually -- COP Snow in the district capital, and COP Ice on a desolate stretch of highway deemed strategically important enough to keep soldiers there, though just barely. In late summer of 2010, two weeks after I arrived in Farah, the Georgians on COP Snow called in a report that a civil disturbance of some kind had rippled through the local police, undermining law and order. The Governor of the province had heard similar things, and we flew to Gulistan to figure out what was going on.
The PRT didn’t have helicopters or other air assets, but the military could request them from other bases. For this trip, one of the Marine units south of us sent up a pair of Ospreys, a helicopter-airplane hybrid. They start with the rotors up, like a helicopter, and then once they’re high enough and moving fast enough, the rotors swing down to face forward, turning the aircraft into a propeller plane. In helicopter mode, the two rotors work independent of one another, so the plane jerks perceptibly from left to right; when the rotors swing down and the Osprey turns into an airplane, the whole thing plunges from the sky for a few seconds during the transition.
It’s pretty nauseating. They’re known for crashing.
We flew on Ospreys and didn’t crash, and landed slightly greener but otherwise no worse for the wear despite the somewhat terrifying dip that happens when the rotors shift. The Georgian commander in Gulistan sat us down, and told is (in Georgian, through a junior soldier acting as his interpreter), what they understood to have happened.
Listen, he said: in August of 2010, a man named Mohammad Gul was assassinated in the Gulistan marketplace. He was a local powerbroker who held the official position of district census taker, tasked with recording births and deaths and little else. His records, which the police in Gulistan later showed us, were all handwritten. Power broker or not, he was the definition of a minor official.
The PRT didn’t have helicopters or other air assets, but the military could request them from other bases. For this trip, one of the Marine units south of us sent up a pair of Ospreys, a helicopter-airplane hybrid. They start with the rotors up, like a helicopter, and then once they’re high enough and moving fast enough, the rotors swing down to face forward, turning the aircraft into a propeller plane. In helicopter mode, the two rotors work independent of one another, so the plane jerks perceptibly from left to right; when the rotors swing down and the Osprey turns into an airplane, the whole thing plunges from the sky for a few seconds during the transition.
It’s pretty nauseating. They’re known for crashing.
We flew on Ospreys and didn’t crash, and landed slightly greener but otherwise no worse for the wear despite the somewhat terrifying dip that happens when the rotors shift. The Georgian commander in Gulistan sat us down, and told is (in Georgian, through a junior soldier acting as his interpreter), what they understood to have happened.
Listen, he said: in August of 2010, a man named Mohammad Gul was assassinated in the Gulistan marketplace. He was a local powerbroker who held the official position of district census taker, tasked with recording births and deaths and little else. His records, which the police in Gulistan later showed us, were all handwritten. Power broker or not, he was the definition of a minor official.
The man who killed Mohammad Gul did so in broad daylight, shooting him four times in the presence of multiple witnesses. He rode pillion on a motorcycle, and when the driver sped off, the shooter acidentally dropped his AK-47 and left it at the murder site. The Georgians assumed him to be either a member of the Taliban or in their employ, and since then, they told us, things had deteriorated further and the entire police squad was threatening to quit.
In Afghanistan, official business requires holding a shura, a meeting of elders who sit on the ground in a circle, drink tea from collective cups, and discuss the matter at hand. The Governor called a shura and the elders there told us what they knew. Mohammad Gul, they said, was killed as the result of some personal grievance, probably involving money. Or it was possible that another power broker, who lived two hours north of Farah in Herat province, had ordered the killing because the power broker’s son was running for Parliament, and Mohammad Gul had backed another candidate, hurting his chances. Either way, the Taliban likely had a hand in the plan’s execution.
The gun the assailant left behind at the murder site was a Hungarian-made AK-47, and the only people who carry that particularly weapon are members of the Afghan National Police, or ANP. Mohammad Gul’s son was also a member of the ANP, and he connected the dots to a fellow policeman named Yahya, who was the grandson of the Herat-based power broker. Two days after his father’s assassination, Mohammad Gul’s son walked into the Gulistan police station and shot Yahya in revenge for his father’s death.
Mohammad Gul and his son were from the Jalalzai tribe. Yahya and his powerbroker grandfather in Herat were from the Hilalzai tribe. Once Yahya was shot, all the Hilalzais and all the Jalalzais in the Gulistan police force put down their weapons and refused to come to work, for fear of being asked to take sides in the dispute and by extension courting retribution. With all the Hilalzais and Jalalzais gone, a scant 15 officers were left to police the entirety of Gulistan, the second largest district in Farah and home to some 50,000 residents.
The ANP in Gulistan were already in dire straits before the revenge killing caused most of them to quit. The district chief of police lamented their supply issues: every officer had an AK-47, but there was only enough ammunition for each to have a single magazine, and there were no additional bullets once they ran out. The police lacked radios and all four of their vehicles were inoperable, with missing or destroyed tires and engines that wouldn’t run. “We don’t have enough bullets to shoot at the Taliban,” the police chief told us, “and with no radios and no cars, we can neither call for help nor get away when they attack us.”
The chief of police had 135 police officers on his official roster, but 80 of those were stationed in Farah City; the 15 left after the departure of the Jalalzai and Hilalzai tribesmen were under-supplied, under-armed and generally outnumbered -- certainly neither manned nor equipped to deal with a mounting insurgency where the Taliban murdered local officials in broad daylight. Those 15 officers, seeing their meeting with the Governor as their only hope for change in Gulistan, threatened to quit on the spot unless additional supplies and reinforcements were immediately sent their way.
The gun the assailant left behind at the murder site was a Hungarian-made AK-47, and the only people who carry that particularly weapon are members of the Afghan National Police, or ANP. Mohammad Gul’s son was also a member of the ANP, and he connected the dots to a fellow policeman named Yahya, who was the grandson of the Herat-based power broker. Two days after his father’s assassination, Mohammad Gul’s son walked into the Gulistan police station and shot Yahya in revenge for his father’s death.
Mohammad Gul and his son were from the Jalalzai tribe. Yahya and his powerbroker grandfather in Herat were from the Hilalzai tribe. Once Yahya was shot, all the Hilalzais and all the Jalalzais in the Gulistan police force put down their weapons and refused to come to work, for fear of being asked to take sides in the dispute and by extension courting retribution. With all the Hilalzais and Jalalzais gone, a scant 15 officers were left to police the entirety of Gulistan, the second largest district in Farah and home to some 50,000 residents.
The ANP in Gulistan were already in dire straits before the revenge killing caused most of them to quit. The district chief of police lamented their supply issues: every officer had an AK-47, but there was only enough ammunition for each to have a single magazine, and there were no additional bullets once they ran out. The police lacked radios and all four of their vehicles were inoperable, with missing or destroyed tires and engines that wouldn’t run. “We don’t have enough bullets to shoot at the Taliban,” the police chief told us, “and with no radios and no cars, we can neither call for help nor get away when they attack us.”
The chief of police had 135 police officers on his official roster, but 80 of those were stationed in Farah City; the 15 left after the departure of the Jalalzai and Hilalzai tribesmen were under-supplied, under-armed and generally outnumbered -- certainly neither manned nor equipped to deal with a mounting insurgency where the Taliban murdered local officials in broad daylight. Those 15 officers, seeing their meeting with the Governor as their only hope for change in Gulistan, threatened to quit on the spot unless additional supplies and reinforcements were immediately sent their way.
The Governor was a rational man and immediately gave in to their demands, promising that additional soldiers would be sent from Farah city, and that additional equipment would be sent as well. He gave them each of the poliemen 1,000 Afghani in cash so they could hold an Iftar dinner for their families during the at the end of Ramadan. Cash disbursement notwithstanding, the meeting was tense. The men took the money -- 1,000 Afghani is 20 bucks, almost half a month’s wages, and far too much to walk away from on principal -- but some of them were literally shaking with rage at Kabul’s lack of attention up to this point. “Send reinforcements!” they shouted in fury as the Governor walked away. “Send reinforcements IMMEDIATELY, or you’ll have NO POLICE in Gulistan ever again!”
For a brief moment, I honestly thought we were going to get shot by the police, despite their ostensibly being on our side.
The problems in Gulistan ran deeper than just a scant and ill-prepared police force threatening to quit. For one, multiple witnesses told the Georgians that ANP officers were actually present at the time of the killing, but that they had run away as soon as the shooting started. Those same witnesses were unwilling to give statements to the police or prosecutors, for fear of then becoming the target of revenge killing or tribal retribution. Tribe is everything in Afghanistan, and when the chief of police and district governor (both Khwajazais and thus uninvolved in the Hilalzai-Jalalzai beef) indicated that Gul Mohammad’s son should be jailed for his role in all of this, the chief prosecutor (like Gul Mohammad, a Jalalzai) said: “you’ll have to kill me and 100 people from my village first.” It wasn’t really hyperbole. And regardless, since the chief prosecutor would have to be involved with the jailing process, an equitable solution through the normal judicial process wasn’t exactly on the horizon.
“There was nothing we could do at that point except let them all cool off a bit,” the Governor told us later. “Any sudden actions or snap judgments would’ve just made the whole thing worse.” And so he asked for written statements, to be taken from all parties involved and sent to Kabul, who would review them and concatenate them into a whole for later action. I later wondered who actually wrote their stories down; very few people in Gulistan can read.
We flew back to Kabul. The Governor would later ask our help with air transport for the reinforcement police officers, so that much, at least, did get accomplished, though their arrival did little to stem Gulistan’s steady descent, over the course of the next year, into lawlessness and Taliban control. That descent was hastened by the departure of the Georgians, who had a reputation as ferocious soldiers, and who were ordered to other provinces in the south to join the effort with the British forces and the U.S. Marines. They were replaced by Italian soldiers who rarely left base and mostly just held down the fort -- that was the expression that they would use -- and later the death of several Italian soldiers in Farah from errant IEDs would bolster that disinclination to leave base. Gulistan, whose name means “the place of flowers,” would be thought of as a problem district for the rest of my time in Farah. I never went back.
Mohammad Gul’s son remained free. To the best of my knowledge, there was no further investigation beyond the written statements taken from the district elders, no trial or judicial process. Despite killing a fellow police officer in cold blood in the district police station, he never served a day in jail.
The problems in Gulistan ran deeper than just a scant and ill-prepared police force threatening to quit. For one, multiple witnesses told the Georgians that ANP officers were actually present at the time of the killing, but that they had run away as soon as the shooting started. Those same witnesses were unwilling to give statements to the police or prosecutors, for fear of then becoming the target of revenge killing or tribal retribution. Tribe is everything in Afghanistan, and when the chief of police and district governor (both Khwajazais and thus uninvolved in the Hilalzai-Jalalzai beef) indicated that Gul Mohammad’s son should be jailed for his role in all of this, the chief prosecutor (like Gul Mohammad, a Jalalzai) said: “you’ll have to kill me and 100 people from my village first.” It wasn’t really hyperbole. And regardless, since the chief prosecutor would have to be involved with the jailing process, an equitable solution through the normal judicial process wasn’t exactly on the horizon.
“There was nothing we could do at that point except let them all cool off a bit,” the Governor told us later. “Any sudden actions or snap judgments would’ve just made the whole thing worse.” And so he asked for written statements, to be taken from all parties involved and sent to Kabul, who would review them and concatenate them into a whole for later action. I later wondered who actually wrote their stories down; very few people in Gulistan can read.
We flew back to Kabul. The Governor would later ask our help with air transport for the reinforcement police officers, so that much, at least, did get accomplished, though their arrival did little to stem Gulistan’s steady descent, over the course of the next year, into lawlessness and Taliban control. That descent was hastened by the departure of the Georgians, who had a reputation as ferocious soldiers, and who were ordered to other provinces in the south to join the effort with the British forces and the U.S. Marines. They were replaced by Italian soldiers who rarely left base and mostly just held down the fort -- that was the expression that they would use -- and later the death of several Italian soldiers in Farah from errant IEDs would bolster that disinclination to leave base. Gulistan, whose name means “the place of flowers,” would be thought of as a problem district for the rest of my time in Farah. I never went back.
Mohammad Gul’s son remained free. To the best of my knowledge, there was no further investigation beyond the written statements taken from the district elders, no trial or judicial process. Despite killing a fellow police officer in cold blood in the district police station, he never served a day in jail.
1 comment:
This is now like 90 percent of where I want it to be. The last paragraph isn't right, though. #RevisitLater.
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