A Poet and Bin-Laden

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

To this pool,

to the trees in this pool,

beyond the trees,

the sudden fear of falling

in the bottomless cloud-filled sky,

closing wet eyes.

Within oneself,

in the veins within oneself,

beyond the veins

a groan on which one cannot hang words,

or in non-revelation

that is wider than this, more boundless,

more borderless than this.

I was suddenly afraid of falling.

-Belgi

After the prolonged and ultimately unsuccessful defence of Kunduz, when each of the commanders blamed another for the failure, and all of them secretly blamed Juma, who had been killed or disappeared; when the soldiers who were still alive – Pakistanis, Afghanis, Chechens and Uzbeks – had all thanked the one God in their various tongues for the slushy road back to possible freedom, Yosir knew for certain what lay ahead for him in the torture chambers of General Dostum. I have a photograph in front of me – the bombed-out building of the Sultan Razia Lyceum in Mazar Sharif, where the Uzbek fighters from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan took refuge in October 2001, together with the Taliban and Arabs from Al-Qaeda. A little earlier, in September 2001, the US administration had included the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in its list of terrorist organisations. At the same time the leader, or Amirul-Muminin of this movement, Muhammud Tahir Farruk1 had declared in an interview with the Uzbek service of the BBC that they were prepared to fight on the side of the Taliban.

1 The factual information here and below has been downloaded from the Internet, and the hand of the special services can be clearly felt in it. I am leaving it just as it is – Author’s note.

Tahir Yuldash (Yuldashev) was born on October 2, 1968 in the Namangan region of Uzbekistan. He attended the Muhadillia-Husain regional seminary. In 1991 Yuldashev became the leader of the Namangan Islamist movement “Adolat”. He was involved in the establishment of the Islamic organisations “Ishlom lashkorlari” and “Tovba”. In 1992, after the persecution of Islamists began, Yuldashev moved from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan, where he became leader of the Uzbek Islamic Opposition in exile. In 1996 he became political head of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). Yuldashev established extensive ties with many Islamic organisations and also raised funds for the Islamic Opposition of Uzbekistan. For these purposes he visited Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In February 1999 he was one of the leading organisers of an attempted coup in Uzbekistan. In late 1999-early 2000 he held meetings with the leaders of opposition movements in order to unite all the forces opposing President Islam Karimov. Yuldashev’s primary residence was in Afghanistan, in an area controlled by the Taliban movement. Killed in 2009 in Vaziristan. See h***:://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8287714.stm

After the Americans started bombing Afghanistan and NATO – which had previously occupied no more than a tenth of the country – suddenly came to life and went on the offensive, the Taliban in Kabul had sworn publicly to “stand to the death against the aggression of the infidels”, and the analysts had argued about a protracted guerrilla war, like the previous war against the Soviets, but there had not been any effective resistance. The local commanders, who had all grown beards under the Taliban, began shaving them off and switching their loyalty once again just as soon as they could tell which way the wind was blowing. And the only ones who were left hostage to the situation were the foreigners: Arabs, Uzbeks, Chechens, Kashmiris and Uigurs, each of whom was here for his own particular reason.

The slaughter at Kal’ai Jangi, in the former citadel of General Dostum2, was only one page in the story of those troubled late autumn days, when it was discovered who was really fighting in Afghanistan.

2 Born in the village of Hojadukuh in the Shebergan district of the province of Juzjan. The son of a peasant. His father was an Uzbek (according to some sources, from a family of Uzbeks who emigrated from the USSR during the struggle against the counterrevolutionary basmachestvo movement). Graduated from a three-month officer training course at the Tashkent advanced training school of the KGB of the USSR (early 1980s). Until the April revolution of 1978 was an oilfield worker in Shebergan.

Graduated from a regimental school and soon became a brigade commander. From 1983 commander of a national (Uzbek) battalion and a national brigade at Shebergan.

In 1991 fought with Rabbani, Masud and Hekmatiar on the side of Najibulla. In January 1992 Dostum abandons Najibulla to enter a coalition with A. Sh. Masud, the regime collapses and all factions consolidate the positions they have managed to seize at the time. In April 1992 he airlifts his units (four thousand soldiers) to Kabul, forestalling G. Hekmatyar, who is about to “surrender” Kabul to Najibulla, and soon he is joined by Masud’s forces. After the Taliban take Kabul (September 1996), he opposes them.

In May 1997, after switching to the side of General Malik’s Taliban forces, he was forced to flee to Uzbekistan, and then to Turkey. In 2001 he returned to Afghanistan and in the early autumn of that year he assembled several detachments and led the attack on Mazari Sharif. In October 2001 Rabbani appointed him “Commander in Chief of North Afghanistan” for the “United Front of the National Liberation of Afghanistan” (the “Northern Alliance”). Since December 2001 – deputy minister of defence in the government of Hamid Karzai. Now has no official posts.

The Afghan journalist Daud Qorizade recalls: “After the Americans began bombing the north of Afghanistan, many local commanders changed their allegiance once again and went over to the side of General Dostum, who had appeared in the region. With these forces Dostum first moved against Mazari Sharif and quickly took it; then he moved against Kunduz. That was when two contradictory pieces of news appeared: according to General Dostum himself, when he was speaking to the Uzbek service of the BBC, the military commander of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), Juma Namangani3, had been killed in the fighting at Mazari Sharif.

3 Jumaboi Ahmadjonovich Hodjiev (better known as Juma Namangani) was born on June 12, 1969 in the village of Hodja in the Namangan district of the Namangan region. He graduated from Secondary Technical School 28 in the town of Namangan. In November 1987 he was drafted for military service in the airborne forces. In 1988 he fought in Afghanistan. When demobilised in 1989, he returned to his homeland and contacted Islamic activists. In 1991 he established close contacts with the most radically inclined leaders of the Party of Islamic Revival of Uzbekistan (PIRU), and a year later he moved to Afghanistan. In Afghanistan Namangani found his way into a training camp for the Tajiki opposition, located in the northern province of Kunduz, which borders on Tajikistan. When he returned from Afghanistan in the summer of 1993, Juma Namangani founded his own camp in the Karategin Valley in Tajikistan in order to train fighters for the Islamic opposition of Uzbekistan. He later established an entire network of military and training camps in the north of Tajikistan. A detachment under his command was actively involved in the civil war on the side of the United Tajik Opposition (UTO). Juma Namangani’s central headquarters were located in the locality of Hoit in the Tajikabad region of northern Tajikistan. The fighting units were armed with almost every possible kind of firearm. Their heavy armaments included several infantry combat vehicles and armoured personnel carriers, as well as recoil-free cannons, several “Grad” rocket launchers and anti-aircraft defence systems. In 1997 Juma Namangani became “commander in chief of the armed forces of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan”. In November 1997 his fighters infiltrated the territory of Uzbekistan from Kyrgyzstan and made several attacks on Interior Ministry personnel in the town of Yangiabad in the Tashkent province. In 2000 these incursions were repeated. Juma Namangani is believed to have been killed at the beginning of the American bombing of Afghanistan in autumn 2001, when he had been appointed commander in chief of Taliban forces in the northern region.

According to other accounts, besieged Kunduz was under the control of foreign mercenaries who were commanded by none other than Juma Namangani. In any event, General Dostum did not attack the town; instead he offered the chance of unconditional capitulation, promising freedom to every Afghani who surrendered. “Lay down your arms and go wherever you wish!” That was his appeal to the Afghani commanders in the town. What the fate of the mercenaries would be was not clear. But when the Taliban capitulated and surrendered the town, the foreigners had no choice but to do likewise. However, rumours circulated in the town about a huge military helicopter with no identifying markings that had carried the top leadership of the foreigners away from the besieged town to an unknown destination.

The foreign fighters were loaded into trucks and taken to the citadel of Kal’ai Jangi for further debriefing. They were first locked in the barracks hut and then interrogated. The interrogations were conducted by American instructors, who everyone there knew to be CIA field operatives.

Later the other prisoners said that when one of these operatives was interrogating a group of foreigners, including the American Abdul Hamid, he asked them in very arrogant manner: “Who invited you here? What are you doing here anyway? Why did you suddenly turn up here?” And then one of the Chechens threw himself on him with his bare hands, saying: “Your kind should be killed!”

In the confusion the other foreigners threw themselves on the guards and very quickly not only disarmed them, but killed them all. The guns they now had were used to start the so called uprising at Kal’ai Jangi, which was suppressed in three days with the help of American bombing raids, basements flooded with water and rocket strikes. The number of casualties was huge: more than four hundred foreigners – Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens and Uzbeks – were killed in this uprising.”

And so this was the very time when rumours began circulating that Juma Namangani, an IMU field commander and former paratrooper who had fought in Afghanistan before on the side of the Soviets, had been appointed commander in chief of this entire “foreign legion” in the northern region of Aghanistan. Although, as Daud Qorizade mentions, at the very height of the negotiations at Kunduz, when General Dostum offered the foreigners and the Taliban freedom in exchange for laying down their arms, he also said, in an interview with the Uzbek service of the BBC, that Juma Namangani had been killed in one of the American bombing raids.

How did it happen that Juma Namangani, a former Soviet paratrooper, and Tahir Yuldash, who graduated from a Soviet school with a gold medal, and, most surprisingly of all, Belgi – a poet whose works were being read at that time in French, German and English in the clubs and studios of London, Paris4 and Berlin – were still fighting in a place where even the Taliban had decided it was better to disguise themselves or run? What kept them there in that war-torn land, why and how did they find themselves in this foreign country beyond mountains and rivers, a neighbour to their own homeland in space but far removed from it in time?

4 On October 5, 2001 the journal Missives presented Belgi’s poetry to the public at the Raspaille theatre in Paris.