In Deh Naw — my parents’ home village in Logar Province of Afghanistan — makeshift graves and markers for the dead lay scattered amid orchards, in between fields, or atop hills, a testament to the decades of war. Sometimes, the graves are marked by small slabs of stone with a name or a prayer carved onto it, but just as often, the names of the dead went unrecorded, their lives only traded in whispers. Open secrets permeate these graveyards. Buried atrocities from the Soviet occupation, the Afghan civil wars, and the seemingly unending American occupation.
In the past nine months, Afghan and American-led international forces have killed more civilians than all antigovernment forces combined. These murders have largely gone underreported; their perpetrators unpunished. For the families of the slain Afghans, their graves and markers not only act as a site of remembrance, but of historical testimony.
My parents escaped the Soviet and Afghan Communist massacres in Logar in the early ’80s. A decade later, in 1992, I was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar in Pakistan, and shortly thereafter my family and I immigrated to the United States.
Every few years, we would return to Afghanistan for the summer. These trips often centered around visiting the graves of our dead. Merza Gul, my father’s cousin, was buried on a hill near the village. A farmer by trade, he fought alongside the mujahedeen during the Soviet war. Communist soldiers shot him just yards away from our home.
The grave of my father’s older sister, Gulapa, rests inside the main cemetery in Deh Naw. She was killed in Soviet bombing in 1982, four miles away from Deh Naw. My father and his two half brothers carried her coffin across hostile terrain, dodging Russian patrols and tanks, to bring her body home.
Watak, my father’s younger brother, was buried right beside Gulapa. And yet, it was Watak’s marker, and not his grave, that seemed to carry the most weight for my father. The marker — just two branches, a few pieces of cloth and a pile of stones — stood upon the exact spot where Communist Afghans murdered Watak in 1982. Unarmed at the time, Watak was only 16.
Watak was just one of thousands killed in the massacres in Logar. All across the province, flags and graves still mark the places where war crimes were committed by the Soviet forces. Borge Almqvist, a Swedish journalist, once described Logar as an archaeological site, stating, “Everywhere in the Logar Province the most common sight except for ruins are graves …” When villagers hid in underground irrigation canals, Soviet soldiers used petroleum products to burn them to death.
In Deh Naw, my mother recalled, the bombings were so devastating that graves would be buried underneath rubble or turned into craters. Thus, a proper grave became a luxury. A sign of fortune. In the waning years of the Soviet occupation, as mujahedeen commanders were already preparing to destroy one another, the entire Mohammad Agha District was so devoid of human life that thousands upon thousands of rats swept in and took over the villages. “You could travel miles”, my father said, “without seeing a single human being”.
Two years after her execution by the Taliban in November 1999, Zarmina — a mother of five accused of killing her husband after years of abuse — became the faceless, nameless symbol of Taliban barbarity in Afghanistan. A video of her execution was smuggled out of Kabul and eventually shared across the globe. Her death became one of many used by American politicians and activists in order to justify foreign intervention.
Of course, in the process of toppling the Taliban, American forces aligned themselves with the commanders of the Northern Alliance, including Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, well known for his brutalization of women throughout the Afghan civil wars. About 20 years and 39,000 civilian deaths later, Zarmina still lies in an unmarked grave in a country subsumed by war and violence.
When I first heard a poem recited about the mass graves in Dasht-i-Leili, a desert in northern Afghanistan, I assumed that it referenced some atrocity from the Soviet occupation or the civil wars. Years later, I learned that during the early stages of the American invasion of Afghanistan, as many as 1,500 Taliban fighters, who had surrendered to the American-backed forces of General Dostum, were “stacked like corkwood” into metal shipping containers and went without food or water over three days. The prisoners subsequently suffocated or were later shot and dumped into a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili. Satellite photos have shown that the mass grave may have been completely relocated.
After his death, Marshal Mohammed Fahim, a former military commander for the Northern Alliance, was buried in a massive mausoleum at the top of a hill in Kabul. Though Marshall Fahim carried out horrific atrocities during his tenure as a warlord, thousands attended his funeral. While slain farmers lay in obscured graves of stones and branches, warlords like Fahim were given massive funerals and grand tombs.
According to Kabul folklore — I heard the tale on several occasions from friends, relatives and strangers — shortly after his funeral, terrifying moans began to echo out from his grave. Local residents couldn’t sleep at night, so they gathered together and complained to the government. With time, the moaning became so loud, and the complaints so constant, that the government secretly relocated Marshal Fahim’s reportedly tortured corpse. His mausoleum now stands empty at the top of its hill. Utterly silent.
When I returned to Logar in 2017, there were more graves to visit. By then, the Taliban had all but conquered Deh Naw, and my mother’s family had fled to Kabul. Five years earlier, in the winter of 2012, my uncles Farhad, Ahmad Zia, and Raiz were driving home to Deh Naw for a graduation party. Farhad, at 24, had recently graduated from a university in Kabul. Ahmad Zia, his eldest brother, was a farmer in Logar with training as a pharmacist. He used to ride around Deh Naw on a motorcycle, inoculating bedridden villagers. That night, he drove.
My uncle Raiz Ahmad, an administrator with the United States military’s interpreter program, sat in the back seat. He had let his younger brother Farhad sit in the front because of his recent graduation. According to Raiz, when two insurgents stepped in front of their vehicle in a narrow alley and opened fire, the bullets had been meant for him. Raiz survived, but Farhad and Ahmad Zia died under the cover of snowfall, just yards away from their home. Now, two markers stand at the mouth of the alley where Farhad and Ahmad Zia were ambushed.
About seven miles away from Deh Naw, in a cemetery near the city of Puli Alam, Taliban and members of the Afghan security forces are buried side by side. Between their graves, the flags of the Afghan government and the Taliban hang on the same pole. In Logar, this practice of using grave markers to signify the political allegiance of the dead is a relatively new phenomenon. During the Soviet war, the markers of the slain mujahedeen were never made to represent one particular political faction. In death, at least, the dead were free to rest in the obscurity of the countryside, in the oblivion of memory.
On July 22, 2019, President Trump suggested he could have Afghanistan “wiped off the face of the Earth”. His comments were quickly criticized by Afghans, some of whom even made reference to Afghanistan’s unofficial title as the “Graveyard of Empires”. There was even a political cartoon — with tombstones for the U.S.S.R., the British, the Persians — that had been making the rounds in social media.
For many years, I took great pride in this mythology, which seemed to depict Afghanistan as fiercely anticolonial. Almost unconquerable. It was only after I saw the graves in Logar firsthand, after I knew, intimately, who was buried within them, that I wondered why — even in our most fantastic national fantasies — Afghanistan was still trapped inside of a cemetery.
Somewhere in Logar, between the graves of a Talib and a soldier, there stands a pole with two flags, two warring markers, that still lingers in my mind.
As the continuing peace process has come to another halt, the flags could be a reminder that the families of the dead are still praying for peace.
But, perhaps, that’s too optimistic.
I suppose the flags could also imply that Afghans are doomed to warfare, that the bonds of kinship and Islam will never be enough to end the war, and that we will only come together in our graves. Maybe it’s both. An omen of our doom. A prayer for peace.
Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of the novel, 99 Nights in Logar.