Bombs over Kandahar & The Riots in Kabul

These are the sort of choppers you see in Afghanistan. Sometimes they hover low over buildings and sometimes they hover in the middle of an open plain for no reason whatsoever. What was most disturbing was seeing them fly low over our courtyard and having the kids say: "If they were to bomb they'd go lower." They must have gone lower nearby because having dinner on the roof we started hearing bombs going off. It's not the sort of dinner time entertainment you expect sitting cross-legged on a roof on a nice summer evening. It's strange to have no one react. The bombs sounded like they were going off quite close-by but we were assured that it was happening in the mountains. Not very comforting, the mountains are not so far away from Kandahar. They are essentially all around the city. This experience was warm up for a much bigger experience in Kabul though.

We took a bus out of Kandahar. They don't seem to know how to work the air-con on the nice German buses where the windows didn't open and everyone felt compelled to chain smoke. According to the sign over the driver's seat our driver for this trip was "Herr Frank" but he looked more like and Abdul to me. Our escort for this journey was our 20-something year old male cousin. A very nice young man. The trip was almost uneventful until the bus was going to get searched near Kabul. A routine operation. The female member of the search-party stepped on board to notify everyone of the imminent nosing through of private items when a man got up from the back of the bus. He walked right up to her and told her he had a bullet in the back of his head and was heading to Kabul for a medical appointment he would miss if they searched the bus. He took off his cap and turned around and there it was: a bullet in the base of his head. The guy was on a five hour bus ride to get a bullet removed! Traveling for medical treatment is nothing new in this country. People routinely leave to go to Pakistan and India for more serious operations and illnesses. However, seeing that man blew me away.

Kabul. A breath of fresh air. Women on the streets, faces uncovered, western clothing, no kidnapping stories. Phew. We did the usual tourist things: visited the bombed out zoo, an art gallery, the university, the Babur Garden, shopped on legendary Chicken Street, saw the fancy mall called Kabul Centre (where you have to check in your handgun before entering the mall) and walked a lot.

Then one morning we didn't leave the house right at 9am as we usually did. This was a Monday but the days of the week didn't really mean much to us at this point. Our cousin came home at 10am and asked if we were out. Then he got in his car and went to pick up his sister from her high school. Apparently the girls in the schools were panicking. Those that weren't being picked up by family members were not allowed to leave the school to go home. One of the teacher's husband was killed by a stray American bullet. By 11am the entire city was shut down and angry crowds were rioting their way through the streets. Rock through window seemed to be the theme of these riots. "Death to Karzai" was the slogan but that clip didn't play on the BBC or CNN.

Don't believe a word you hear on the news. The Kabul riots were the result of a fuck-up by the American military. Reports on the BBC claimed the trigger for the riots was a traffic accident invovling a military convoy that plowed down twelve cars during rush hour. That doesn't even sound like a plausible event. A traffic accident involving a military convoy that plows over twelve cars?! Don't those things come with breaks? Plus, how many cars do you have to crush before noticing that you have just driven over something? The images on Kabul TV were quite graphic. The cars were completely crushed. Also, there was the random firing into the crowd by the soldiers that seemed a little suspicious and unreported in the Western media. Most Afghans say that those in the convoy were drunk and/or high because the attack was completely unprovoked and came out of the blue. The numbers of crushed cars and injured/dead civilians is also higher than the reported figures according to locals.

There was a city-wide curfew that night. Something that had not happened in Kabul since the Soviets. Driving through the city on Tuesday the burnt out cars, broken windows and burnt down offices marked the route of the crowd that had maneuvered its way through Kabul. Broken window after broken window. It was like following arrows pointing down the road to show you the way the rioters had gone. Tanks were stationed everywhere and police presence on the streets was higher than usual. It was back to business for the residents of the city. People were going about their business as usual.

In my opinion, the riots are just the beginning of civil unrest in Afghanistan. People are fed up with the puppet government and a foreign military that claims to be there for them when it is doing nothing but furthering its own political agenda in the region. Six years and billions of international dollars later and proper medical care is still non-existent, the main international airport for the country is the size of a thumb without any proper devices to scan baggage, electricity is unreliable, most major roads are still unpaved, the poor are still very poor without any aid coming their way, there is no garbage disposal system in the city of Kandahar, bombed out buildings are everywhere downtown and at risk of collapsing any minute.