PHILLIP ROBERTSON. Selected Stories.

November 2001, Taloqan, Afghanistan. Photographer Sion Touhig takes a picture of Northern Alliance fighters in a Soviet era tank.
Photo: Phillip Robertson

I see Elio across the courtyard talking in a doorway with fighters wearing woolen shawls and caps. They have Kalashnikovs and they are laughing and trying to stroke Elio's beard. Elio has made friends with the mujehadeen and they follow him around like love- struck girls. He has some secret technique, and when ask I him, he takes out a lump of black hash and tobacco and wants to know if I smoke. We walk out in the back, a few feet from the place Ahmed Shah Masoud was assassinated and get high. Stars wheel silently and there is the smell of wood smoke in the clean air. Colavolpe is talking about the mountains of the Panjshir like he has completely forgotten about the war.

We hear the Afghans start shouting in the next building, running with fists in the air. Someone tears past us, yelling "Allahu Akhbar!" Fighters are streaming out of the surrounding buildings, headed for the Foreign Ministry office, shouting. Mazar-I-Sharif has just fallen to the Northern Alliance after waves of U.S. bombing. The Taliban lines have collapsed and they are retreating east toward Kunduz and further south to Kabul. The other escape routes for the Taliban are blocked. The sudden fall of Mazar comes as a complete surprise to everyone. Back at the table, Kevin Donovan has a map spread out. Hunched over it we look at the distance to Mazar, and conclude that there isn't a good way to get there before the western reporters waiting on the Uzbek border. Heading east is Mazar along the old Soviet highway (it is no longer a highway, rutted track, the asphalt was long gone), the next major city is Kunduz, then forty miles east down the same road is Taloqan. Donovan has organized a Toyota pickup, and a translator, and with Sion Touhig, a photographer for Getty Images, we decide to drive south for the Taloqan front early the next morning. There are Northern Alliance forces entrenched just to the east of the city, and our guess is that they will attack Taloqan on the heels of their victory at Mazar-I-Sharif. If Taloqan falls to the Northern Alliance, we think the Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan will be surrounded, trapped between Mazar-I-Sharif and Kunduz. Donovan talks the Foreign Ministry officials into issuing a letter authorizing us to travel to the front, which we are supposed to hand over to General Daoud Khan when we find him at his headquarters in Farkhar.

4. The Long Way to Farkhar

Khojja, the garrison town, sits in the center of a giant mud plain, a city of walls and sick children. We leave at nine in the morning, and Kandahar, Donovan's driver, takes his Toyota off the main road onto the flat pottery clay expanse surrounding the city, and heads to the mountains in the south. The truck leaves a comet tail of dust which stays and marks our passage for miles. There are no other vehicles in sight and in a few minutes Khojja is reduced to a variation in texture on the horizon. Then, at the base of the foothills, Kandahar changes into low gear and we start a steady climb, following gullies and hollows to the top of the first ridge, gaining a thousand feet in a matter of hours. On a switchback we pass a Russian truck full of fighters that eases past us on their way back to Khojja. They wave. We wave.

Once we come down the opposite side of the ridge, Kandahar drives through the Mashhad river, floating the Toyota over rocks and rapids, bearing south and using the river as a road, gunning the engine and using the current to keep the truck pointed in the right direction. We drifted over the pebbles and pulled over to the riverbank. Kandahar is filling a plastic can can with river water and filling the radiator with it when Sion gets out of the car.

"Right mate, this man has to get a new tape for his truck, there's only one and we listen to it over and over."

"Jesus, just tell him to turn it down."

"It's his truck and I am not fucking telling him anything."

"Good point."

"I'll switch places with you."

"No way. I am staying back here. The air's good." I perched on a wheel well in the truck bed shivering.

Kandahar takes us downriver, then over another set of ridges and through the small villages which divert the snowmelt for rice fields. People come out to watch us when we take pictures of the trails the U.S. aircraft make on their bombing runs. Spirograph circles and epicycles. "Thank you, thank you," some of the men say but they have it confused with "Hello." The children's faces aren't scarred and their clothes are clean. The stars come out while we ride down the center of one of the high valleys toward Farkhar. We have been on the road for thirteen hours, finally coming down out of the mountains thirty miles east of Taloqan and the front lines.

Farkhar is a small smuggling town populated by soldiers and bazaar men and we arrive late. The main street has two stories of wooden shops without street facing walls. They are open to the air, and lit by fires in barrels and kerosene lanterns, like a set for a play at the end of the world. At the far end of the street, through a narrow door is general Daoud Khan's house, which has the same plan as the other Afghan houses, only grander, with fifteen-foot walls and a generator. Kandahar brings his truck through the gates of the compound to keep it safe and Khan's men show us to our rooms on the first floor, then bring dinner. Dinner is lamb kabobs and rice. Sion sends his pictures up to the satellite while Donovan calls his wife. It's agreed that we will set out for the drives through the Mashhad river front in the morning. Tomorrow is Sunday, November 11.

5. Taloqan

In the morning the generator is making bad sounds and we drink green tea before throwing the gear in the truck. The sky is clear and the air isn't as cold but it still has an edge to it. In the courtyard, Kandahar has the hood up and he's looking for the radiator leak which keeps us from going five miles without having to stop and add water from a stream. He gives up looking for the leak and fills cans and stows them in the truck bed. While Sion is loading his equipment he notices a flat tire but Kandahar has already seen it and has it fixed in ten minutes. We climb in and sit on piles of gear.

Just outside of town, at a green concrete building Khan is using for his headquarters, we try talking to some of the senior staff but they don't tell us anything. Someone important is speaking rapid Dari on a satellite phone, and it could be Khan but we're not sure because they won't let us inside to talk to him. The antennas are on a concrete veranda, facing in the direction of the Indian Ocean, their wires tangled. We get back in the truck and head down the road town to where the front is supposed to be. The letter is meaningless and the Afghan soldiers don't ask to see it because it is the foreign ministry's job to handle communications like this and they haven't made it here yet. "Go ahead," said one man in the green house, "you can go down there if you want, it's OK." He means we can go to the front, but we don't know what he is talking about.

The Fall of Taloqan, was commissioned and edited by Ian Morris at the Triquarterly and appeared in issue 115. Ian is one of the great literary editors working today and without him there wouldn't have been a published piece at all. This was the cover story and was published with photographs.

LEAD IMAGE: 26 November 2001. Kunduz, Afghanistan. Northern Alliance fighters on the road to Kunduz.
Photo: Phillip Robertson