The rumbling of engines echoed across the valley at dusk, as scores of men with mismatched camouflage and mud-caked Kalashnikovs descended into the town in northern Afghanistan.
Many had driven hours down the snow-capped mountains to reach the town and join forces with Mawlawi Mahdi Mujahid, a former Shiite commander within the mostly Sunni Taliban who had recently renounced the new Taliban government and seized control of this district.
For months, the Taliban had tried to bring him back into their fold, wary of his growing clout among some Afghan Shiites eager to rebel against a movement that persecuted them for decades. Now, Taliban forces were massing around the district he controlled — and Mahdi and his men were readying to fight.
The New York Times details how the Taliban crushed a Shiite uprising against it in northern Afghanistan.
“If the Taliban do not want an inclusive government, if they do not give rights to Shiites and to women, then we will never be able to have peace in Afghanistan,” said one fighter, Sayed Qasim, 70. “As long as we have blood in our body we will fight.”
The clashes in Sar-i-Pul Province in June were the latest in a conflict brewing across northern Afghanistan in which a smattering of armed factions have been challenging the heavy hand of the Taliban government — a harsh reminder that Afghanistan has not yet escaped the cycles of violence and bloodshed that defined the country for the past 40 years.
Taliban officials have sought to play down any uprising in order to maintain an image of popular support and of providing peace and security to the country. And it is unlikely that any of the eight or so resistance groups that have emerged so far can pose a legitimate threat to the Taliban’s control of the country. The ragtag militias are ill-equipped and underfunded and have been unable to attract backing from any major foreign power.
Still, the Taliban, intent on stamping out any vestige of dissent, have been consistently brutal.
The embers of an uprising
Early one morning in June, Mahdi gathered a handful of advisers in his home in the center of Balkh Aab and peered out the dirtied window. Outside, the town seemed to buzz with nervous anticipation. Dozens of armed men milled along the muddied main drag, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes as they waited on their marching orders.
Two weeks earlier, Mahdi had seized control of this untamed slice of northern Afghanistan — prompting Taliban forces to mass along its borders. Now a Taliban offensive seemed imminent and the brisk mountain air carried a palpable sense of unease. Most of the district’s 40,000 residents were Hazaras, an ethnic minority of predominantly Shiites whom the Taliban consider heretics and massacred by the thousands during their first rule.
The 33-year-old rebel leader had grown up in a village not far from here and joined the Taliban after a stint in prison where he found brotherhood among the Talib prisoners who railed against the corruption of the former government. A rare Hazara member of the southern Pashtun movement, the Taliban showcased Mahdi in propaganda videos as proof of the movement’s inclusivity — a move most saw as little more than a publicity stunt.
But after the Taliban seized power, Mahdi fell out with the new rulers. Most locals say he defected because of a dispute with the Taliban over revenue from Balkh Aab’s lucrative coal mines. By his own telling, Mahdi left the movement in protest, disillusioned with how the insurgents-turned-rulers treated Hazaras.
“After the Taliban came to power, the Hazaras have suffered the most,” he said in an interview in Balkh Aab. Hazaras “cannot spend their entire lives like this, whether or not they want to now, one day the people will stand against” the Taliban, he added.
For many residents, Mahdi’s motives didn’t seem to matter. Hundreds of Shiite men eager to take up arms against the Taliban flocked to his new resistance militia in the spring. They were a mix of former policemen, soldiers and veterans of the Fatemiyoun forces, an Iranian-backed militia that fought in Iraq and Syria. To them, his defection offered a rallying cry — proof that no Hazara, even one who had fought on the Taliban’s behalf, would ever be accepted in a country under their control.
The battle for Balkh Aab
For all of his impassioned talk of Shiite rights and an enduring stronghold of resistance, Mahdi’s opponent was a weathered insurgent group that would soon apply the full brunt of their decades fighting a global superpower on Mahdi’s ragtag team of men — with gruesome results.
The Taliban launched their offensive in late June, sending thousands of troops through the knee-high snow and jagged peaks to Mahdi’s stronghold on the Qom Kotal mountain. As they opened fire on their positions across the escarpment, helicopters repurposed from the Western-backed government and packed with armed Taliban soldiers orbited overhead. Their tan and green camouflage cut across the pale gray sky as the bone-rattling sound of their rotor blades mixed with the crescendo of automatic fire.
The high-pitched shrieks and heavy thuds of rockets echoed across the mountain and into the valleys below throughout the night, striking terror into the nearby villages. Thousands of residents — once more trapped in a conflict they wanted no part in — loaded the few loaves of bread, water and blankets they had onto the backs of donkeys and began the hourslong walk to safety into nearby mountains, where they listened to the depressingly familiar soundtrack of war.
Despite being outgunned and outmanned, the rebels thought their knowledge of their district’s terrain would give them the upper hand. The area is a labyrinth of mountains and canyons that rise out of the earth as if to swallow any invading force. Entering the district center requires navigating a maze of roads often made impassable by boulders, flash floods and snowstorms that pound the mountains with ice year-round.
But the Taliban found two residents to help them navigate the little-known footpaths into the center of the district, outflanking Mahdi’s forces as he concentrated his ragtag group of fighters at Qom Kotal, according to rebel fighters, residents and a Taliban official.
As dawn broke the following morning, Mahdi’s men found the farms and riverbeds surrounding the district center crawling with Taliban soldiers. They opened fire on the unsuspecting rebels who had destroyed the main roads into the town days earlier — a futile attempt to keep the Taliban forces at bay.
For two days, the town was engulfed in running gun battles between the Taliban and Mahid’s men. Shops that lined its main thoroughfare burned. Mud brick homes and at least one Shiite shrine were transformed into defensive positions. As the fighting raged, the Taliban repaired the destroyed roads and sent a convoy of armored vehicles to hold the territory they seized.
The last of Mahdi’s men were surrounded by Taliban soldiers. No rebel reinforcements were on the way. Their only options were to surrender, and face what felt like certain death, or retreat. Either way, the uprising was over.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/18/world/asia/afghanistan-uprising-taliban-mahdi.html
The New York Times
