‘I Will Kill Him’: Afghan Commander Targets Son, a Taliban Fighter
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Version 0 of 1. KABUL, Afghanistan — Since he first picked up a gun as a 15-year-old, Abdul Basir has killed a lot of people. Yet the operation on Friday night was different: He was out to kill his son. Around midnight on Friday, Mr. Basir, now in his 40s and the commander of a government militia in the northern Afghan province of Faryab, arrived at a compound in an area called Zyaratgah, part of the restive Qaisar District. He had intelligence that his 22-year-old son, Said Muhammad, a hardened member of the Taliban, was there with several of his fighters. In Afghanistan’s long war, Mr. Basir’s determination to kill one of his children was not unique, but rather just another sign of how long the violence has dragged on, and of how it has permeated the deepest levels of society and poisoned the closest of relationships. Framed by grand ideologies and elaborate strategies at the top, the perpetual conflict has divided families for a generation. Guerrillas who took up arms against the Soviet occupation became sworn enemies of their Communist relatives. Now, a government commander was hunting down a son who had denounced him as an infidel and forced him from their family’s ancestral village. “I went with full confidence — I wanted to kill him first,” Mr. Basir said in a telephone interview on Sunday. “It is up to God, but I think his blood is legitimate for me.” Mr. Basir’s men barged into the compound, entering on the second floor, which they found empty. On the first floor, they spotted Mr. Muhammad trying to escape. Mr. Basir aimed his Kalashnikov rifle and opened fire. “He dropped from the window, and I thought I killed him,” Mr. Basir said. Three Taliban fighters were killed in the operation, but not Mr. Muhammad. He was wounded in the head, Mr. Basir said, but somehow made his way back to the family village, which is now under his control. “It doesn’t surprise me at all to see members of the same family fighting in two fronts,” said Faizullah Jalal, a professor of political science at Kabul University. The case in Faryab, Mr. Jalal said, is a continuation of a phenomenon that reached its peak during the 1980s, with clashes between the Communist government in Kabul and guerrillas who received support from the C.I.A. “There were many cases where a son was on one side and the father on the other side, and the differences were so deep that they were willing to kill each other if they could,” he said. “It wasn’t just one or two or even 100 cases, but thousands.” Even as the leadership on both sides of the conflict has eroded, with the fundamentalist Taliban increasingly acting like a drug cartel and the government drowning in corruption, the ideological pull at the lower levels remains strong. As the leaders prosper, the foot soldiers on both sides continue to die in large numbers, sometimes at the hands of their relatives. Mr. Basir is a product of a war with many chapters but no apparent ending. He was the age of a high school freshman when he joined the ranks of a warlord. The Soviets, their empire on the verge of disintegration, were withdrawing from Afghanistan, and the conflict they were leaving behind would soon turn into a bitter civil war. Mr. Basir has not put down his guns since, not even when militiamen like him were supposedly disarmed during a costly campaign financed by international donors after the American invasion. “I have killed at least 150 Taliban, with my own hands, with my own bullets,” Mr. Basir boasted. But the struggle turned personal when his son became an enemy. About five years ago, Mr. Basir said, he realized that Said had come under the influence of a local cleric who had ties to the Taliban. One day, when Mr. Basir’s militia was operating in a different part of Faryab, his son formally joined the militants. Even worse, he took his father’s cache of about 50,000 Kalashnikov bullets, 42 magazines and one Kalashnikov. Mr. Basir was angry but forgiving. After all, it was his own blood. Local elders mediated, and after much effort Mr. Muhammad returned to his family. To prove that he had given up on the insurgency, he joined the Afghan Army, serving for two and half years in eastern Paktia Province. But Mr. Basir, who has seven other children, questioned whether Mr. Muhammad’s beliefs had changed, and feared that he might betray his comrades, perhaps by surrendering army posts to the militants. Last year, Mr. Muhammad bore out Mr. Basir’s suspicions by returning to the Taliban, and he eventually made his father an outcast. “I told him: ‘Come, my son., I want to arrange a wife for you, get you married,’” Mr. Basir said. A second son, Abdul Rahman, 20, has also joined the Taliban, but Mr. Basir said Abdul Rahman was not as “brutal” as Said. (Like many Afghans, the family does not use a common surname.) Mr. Basir said Mr. Muhammad had threatened to “kill me — he will skin me.” The decision to try to kill his son was the last resort, Mr. Basir said, after he realized there was no hope of a return. On Friday, the police chief of Qaisar District, Lt. Nizamuddin, received a call from Mr. Basir, asking for reinforcements. “He told me he had called his son many times to leave the Taliban, but he had refused,” the lieutenant said. “He wanted to go get him.” And Mr. Basir had no plans for an arrest — he went to Zyaratgah to kill. Now that Mr. Muhammad has survived, the plan will not change. “I will kill him,” Mr. Basir said. “He is a Talib. I cannot have mercy.” |