For Taliban Fighters, a Fading Memorial
TARAKHEL, Afghanistan — The locals call the place “The Taliban Cemetery,” a weed-clotted memorial to the men who died for the movement during its fiercest campaigns in the years before 9/11.
The graveyard, next to this tiny village north of Kabul, sits a few miles from what was once the front line against the rebels who fought the Taliban after the group captured Kabul in 1996. Those rebels, then known as the Northern Alliance, finally overran the Taliban and captured Kabul — with American help — in November 2001.
Eight years after the last fighter was buried here, the cemetery has fallen into decrepitude. Many of the gravestones are broken and smashed — the vandalism, the villagers say, of a marauding anti-Taliban militia. Weeds and rocks and tattered prayer flags obscure much of what is left. The villagers of Tarakhel, though Taliban enthusiasts, have given up trying to care for the place.
But with a little digging and scraping, the Taliban cemetery reveals itself, and the time that it preserved. Together, the surviving graves offer a history of the Taliban’s early years, and of the tumultuous era when young jihadists from around the world traveled to Afghanistan to train and fight.
There are perhaps two hundred men buried here, not just Afghans but Arabs, Chechens, Indians and Pakistanis. There is even the body of a young man from Great Britain.
“The Arabs are buried over there,” said Mohammed Zahir, sweeping his finger toward a swath of broken earth at the rear of the cemetery. Mr. Zahir, who lives in Tarakhel, wandered over when he spotted a foreigner walking among the tombs.
The Arab fighters, Mr. Zahir said, were killed in the first American bombardment in October 2001. A United Nations truck brought their bodies here and dumped them. The villagers of Tarakhel gave the dead hurried burials, in unmarked graves; they feared the gunmen of the Northern Alliance would dig up and desecrate the corpses if they discovered them. As it was, they came and smashed many of the tombstones.
“They were animals that day,” Mr. Zahir said.
Yet many of the gravestones are intact, preserving the stories of the men underground: their names, the places they were born, the days when they died. Each of the dead here, over the years, got his own granite tombstone, a gift from the Taliban warlords who ran the country then...
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The graveyard, next to this tiny village north of Kabul, sits a few miles from what was once the front line against the rebels who fought the Taliban after the group captured Kabul in 1996. Those rebels, then known as the Northern Alliance, finally overran the Taliban and captured Kabul — with American help — in November 2001.
Eight years after the last fighter was buried here, the cemetery has fallen into decrepitude. Many of the gravestones are broken and smashed — the vandalism, the villagers say, of a marauding anti-Taliban militia. Weeds and rocks and tattered prayer flags obscure much of what is left. The villagers of Tarakhel, though Taliban enthusiasts, have given up trying to care for the place.
But with a little digging and scraping, the Taliban cemetery reveals itself, and the time that it preserved. Together, the surviving graves offer a history of the Taliban’s early years, and of the tumultuous era when young jihadists from around the world traveled to Afghanistan to train and fight.
There are perhaps two hundred men buried here, not just Afghans but Arabs, Chechens, Indians and Pakistanis. There is even the body of a young man from Great Britain.
“The Arabs are buried over there,” said Mohammed Zahir, sweeping his finger toward a swath of broken earth at the rear of the cemetery. Mr. Zahir, who lives in Tarakhel, wandered over when he spotted a foreigner walking among the tombs.
The Arab fighters, Mr. Zahir said, were killed in the first American bombardment in October 2001. A United Nations truck brought their bodies here and dumped them. The villagers of Tarakhel gave the dead hurried burials, in unmarked graves; they feared the gunmen of the Northern Alliance would dig up and desecrate the corpses if they discovered them. As it was, they came and smashed many of the tombstones.
“They were animals that day,” Mr. Zahir said.
Yet many of the gravestones are intact, preserving the stories of the men underground: their names, the places they were born, the days when they died. Each of the dead here, over the years, got his own granite tombstone, a gift from the Taliban warlords who ran the country then...