Afghanistan 2001: Whistling Sounds

A close call in northern Afghanistan

Note: This dispatch was originally published in the New Times in 2001 when Kevin was covering the war in

NORTHERN AFGHANISTAN -- I am walking through an Afghan graveyard with my translator Shafiq, past little pregnant clay mounds covered with sticks and stones. My skin feels flush and, because I am wearing earplugs, I can feel my breathing resonate through my skull.

We are moving across the ridgeline now, toward a Northern Alliance tank on a hilltop called Puze Pulekhomri. This tank, a Russian T-55, has been firing into the Taliban controlled valley. It is part of a Northern Alliance ground offensive following yesterday's capture of the strategic city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

Heavy artillery

But the Taliban on this front line are firing back. They have tanks of their own. And mortars. And in the parlance of the military, they are currently "walking one in," firing and adjusting their 120mm mortar to nail the Northern Alliance tank.

We are doing everything you are taught not to do in hostile environment survival school. We are joining a firefight already in progress. We are advancing to a targeted position, just to get a better look.

According to a local Northern Alliance commander, the Taliban in the valley are some of the fiercest fighters in this war — made up mostly of Saudis, Chechens and Pakistanis. Team Bin Laden.

But Northern Alliance commanders, I have learned, always say that. Their enemies are rarely just Afghanis, but always the most highly trained al-Qaida terrorists this side of the Amu Dari.

Regardless of their actual skill set, they are dropping some in our vicinity. From a bunker in the rear, we've timed their incoming mortar rounds. We've got between five and seven minutes to cross 500 yards.

We hear the concussion of outgoing 81mm mortars and machine gun fire all around. We feel a bit of fear in every step, but the magic light of dusk has painted the mountain ridges burnt sienna and the trees below are awash in reds and yellows and strangely, very strangely, I find myself thinking, "what an absolutely beautiful fall day."

That thought will soon be erased by a Taliban mortar that lands just 20 feet away from where we are standing.

* * *

Suffadin was 16 when he left his father's farm to become a soldier. He's been fighting in Afghanistan's civil wars for ten years now, so long, he says, he can barely remember what his life was like before.

He has been shot three times by the Taliban. Twice in the leg and once in the foot. He shows me the purple ganglion at the knee where one bullet entered. A white crescent moon at the calf where it exited.

I ask him if he feels lucky a bullet has not killed him yet. He says he feels unlucky to be such a good target.

He lives in the dirt maze trenches of a Northern Alliance front line position near Dasht-e-kala. He can see his enemy on an opposing hilltop less than a mile away. The turf in between is thick with land mines.

The Kalashnikov he carries has been with him roughly since the beginning. He has fired it thousands of times. He and it both show the wear of a battle that never ends.

He has not seen his wife or two young sons in a year. He misses them beyond words. Perhaps he will see them, he tells me, at Ramadan. "Enshallah." God willing.

"I'd like to have an easy life," he says, "to live with all of my family again. But what can we do? We should fight until the Taliban are gone."

* * *

On the satellite phone I pitch NBC's foreign editor, Danny Noa. I pitch that he let me take just my mini DV camcorder and a videophone engineer and camp out with the Northern Alliance on their front lines for three days.

Rumors had been building that Mazar-e-Sharif was about to be captured and that the Northern Alliance was going to begin a series of coordinated ground attacks.

I wanted to be an early warning listening post — light and mobile, able to file reports from the front lines as soon as anything happens.

Covering the ground war in Afghanistan has been nearly impossible so far.

A rare paved road

First, the terrain alone is so rocky, rutted and harsh that a 150-mile trip from Khodja Bahaudin in the north to the Panjshir Valley can take a week — if you can clear the snow in the mountain passes.

A colleague who recently made the journey, returned and was seen shaking his head and muttering, "never again, never again — for any amount of money."

Second, most journalists covering the war in Afghanistan are working from Northern Alliance-held territory, which comes in very small slices.

Finally, until recently, there had not been much fighting happening on the ground anyway. Northern Alliance leaders said they were waiting for American B-52s to soften up Taliban positions before attacking.

Most of what television news has had to offer so far is cockpit video of the air war and bomb damage assessment satellite photos handed out by the

Danny buys my pitch. We head off to the front in a bruised and battered 4x4 pickup with a maniac local driver named Wade whom keeps pointing to himself and saying in English, "Wade good. Machine good. Wade Good. Machine Good."

We will find out later that he also mocks us in his native Dari any chance he gets.

* * *

The face of war

Afghan soldiers, however, are everywhere; their faces are the heavily creased maps of unending conflict. Like a machine gunner named Shah Morad. He fought against the Soviets when they invaded. Now he wants to take his country back from the Taliban, whom he says are all foreigners, acolytes of Bin Laden who have taken over Afghanistan. He has been at war for seven years.

"I have been doing this so long," he says, reassembling his Russian PK bandoliers of 7.62 rounds at his feet, "that I'm not sure I can do anything else."

On a ridge not far away, another Northern Alliance fighter, Enayatullah, is talking on the radio. He is talking to his Taliban counterpart in the valley. They are both laughing.

"That was your last shell," the Taliban voice says, after the Northern Alliance test fires several 20mm machine gun rounds into their position.

"Not yet," says Enayatullah, who signals his crew to fire a few more.

This is the game that is played in the always dirty and drawn out days of trench warfare between these two sides. It is a game of radio psych-out, where each tries to coax the other to defect to their side. Even in the language of Dari, which I do not understand, they sound like teasing children. More friends than enemies.

A Northern Alliance fighter

I wonder if it will make it harder for them to kill each other when the order comes. To a man, the Northern Alliance soldiers say no.

"When we speak, says Enayatullah, "we try to speak well. With politeness. But when we fight, we will also fight well."

Neckmohamed tells me he will have no problem when it is time to attack the Taliban. The Pakistani Air Force killed his entire family of 15, including his wife and three children, last year. At the time the government of Pakistan was supporting the Taliban. The bomb they dropped, he says, exploded on his house.

* * *

Our timing is good. Shafiq and I make it across the 500 yards to the Northern Alliance tank position. We chat with the crew, shoot some video. It grows quiet again. Almost peaceful. Maybe, I think, this tank-and-mortar tennis match is over.

In the meantime,

Through my camera's viewfinder I can see the tank commander and his crew diving for the trenches. Before I can take cover, the round strikes the back end of hilltop so close to us that the concussion knocks me over and into the tank tread.

Somehow I am still rolling. I turn and get the cloud of black smoke now drifting over us. Neil Barrett is standing intact, next to his tripod.

Then I hear, "I'm hit, I'm hit and it's not in a good place."

I swing the camera around to see National Geographic producer Gary Scurka bleeding from his upper thigh.

At that moment I faced a moral and logistical dilemma. I had to help him, but I also had to shoot the incident. He was, after all, only an arms length away. This was the human face of the war. Part of what had been missing in the news coverage so far. The aftermath of a weapons release.

But if his femoral artery was severed, Scurka would be dead in less than a minute. I would try to do both, and quickly.

I roll on the gushing wound on his thigh, his hand covered in red trying to staunch the flow. I tilt up to the look of pain and disbelief on his face. But even in that moment, even in his shock, Scurka knew the value of what was happening to him.

"Shoot this," he groaned, "I'm bleeding."

So I do. For another ten seconds. Then I grab him with my left arm and while still rolling with my right, we run to a trench 50 feet away.

In the cover of the trench, I pull the Afghan scarf from his neck, wrap it around his thigh twice, pull tight and tie it off in a square knot.

I set my camera down, but leave it rolling. I want every frame. This is what it looks like when bombs hit their targets, or just miss them. I was here with a camera now, not yesterday when ten Northern Alliance soldiers were killed near the same position. Not in a similar trench a mile away, a few hours later when three other journalists would be killed by Taliban fire as they advance with Northern Alliance troops.

Scurka would fully recover, the first American wounded in Afghanistan by Taliban fire and a human face to help tell the story of the conflict.

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