Ruined Kandahar broods in the rubble

15 Nov, 2001 06:28 PM3 mins to read

By ROBERT FISK

Kandahar looks much as it did when the Taleban turned Alexander the Great's timeworn city into their political capital seven years ago: ruined, mined and deserted, most of its inhabitants already in the refugee middens of Pakistan.

It cost the Taleban around £1.04 million ($3.5 million) in 1996 to take Kandahar without firing a shot - those were the days when you could buy cities as well as warlords with hard cash - and most of the money came from Saudi Arabia, along with taxes on roads and drugs.

The city's spiritual role in the Taleban's life was consecrated on April 4, 1996, when the Pashtun Kandaharis entered the marble-walled Shrine of the Cloak of the Prophet and brought out the robe worn by Mohammed. They took it to the rooftop where Taleban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar was speaking and laid it across his shoulders.

The crowd proclaimed him Amir al-Momineen, Leader of All Pious Muslims. Omar used this moment to declare a holy war against the regime of President Burhanuddin Rabbani and his mujahideen Government - the very forces now at the gates of Kandahar.

It was ever a place of righteousness and courage. I visited the city in 1980, days after the first Soviet troops had occupied Kandahar province.

Afghan communists patrolled the city by night, Soviet soldiers by day. Yet they vanished each evening when the people of Kandahar emerged on to their rooftops to scream Allahu Akbar - God is great - to the skies. It was a cry of defiance.

Kandahar was beloved of the Taleban and loathed by the people of Kabul, whose pulverised streets no longer merited the status of a decision-making city.

To Kandahar came diplomats, statesmen, bootleggers, arms dealers and drug runners. Oil company chiefs from Argentina and the United States turned up to pay court to Omar's odd, bearded Government.

Under the Taleban's rule, the outward manifestations of crime and pillage finished - often at the end of a rope. The most ferocious of Islamic punishments, for which the Taleban were to become notorious, were first practised in Kandahar.

The city famous for its gardens and mosques became synonymous with the amputation of feet and hands, the wearing of the burqa and the prohibition of television and women's education.

That Omar, untutored and of peasant stock, should have worn the cloak of the Prophet was an affront to many Afghans and his declaration to be Leader of All Pious Muslims was unprecedented.

Under his rule, Kandahar prospered. His modest offices and home lay alongside the palace of Osama bin Laden - all destroyed in United States air and special forces raids.

But the beauty of Kandahar had been torn out during the Soviet occupation, when the mujahideen attacked Russian troops in the city.

Nor was Kandahar the haven of peace and legitimacy that the Taleban would later claim. Within a year of their takeover, gun battles took place in surrounding villages as Afghan Pashtuns objected to conscription. The Taleban later executed 18 Army deserters in Kandahar jail.

The city's Ulema - the religious leaders who surrounded Omar - became the theological power in a land whose internationally recognised capital was only once visited by the man who claimed to be the Prophet's successor.

- INDEPENDENT

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