“Allah Akbar,” mumbled Mullah Mohammed, and cracked a smile.
As we stood surveying the building, Sadhar Khan’s son Waris walked up and explained that during the peak of the riots, a faction of the mob that was attacking the bazaar had stormed down the road in the direction of the school. Before reaching the boundary wall, however, they had been met by a group of elders who had donated the land for the school, organized the laborers who had built it, and participated in the laying of the corner-stone. These elders, or pirs, informed the rioters that the Central Asia Institute school belonged not to a foreign aid organization but to the community itself. It was their school, they were proud of it, and they demanded that it be left alone. And with that, the rioters dispersed.
Not a stone had been hurled, Waris told me.
Later, after all the damage had finally been tabulated, the cost of the Baharak riots was assessed at more than two million dollars. The CAI school was one of the few buildings associated with an international aid organization that was left standing, and the reason for this, I am convinced, was that our school wasn’t really “international” at all. It was—and remains—“local” in every way that counts.
The outcome seemed to vindicate our three-cups-of-tea approach while simultaneously filling me with a sense of tremendous relief and pride—emotions that might well have gotten the best of me, had the journey home not served up a rude reminder of how much work remained to be done in this part of the world.
Waris was kind enough to offer Mullah Mohammed and me a ride back to Faizabad, where we were scheduled to catch a UN flight to Kabul. We were about an hour west of Baharak just outside the village of Simdara when I looked to my right and saw an old earthen hut twenty yards from the side of the road that appeared to be filled with children. At least that’s what I thought I saw, but I couldn’t be sure.
“Would you mind stopping?” I asked Waris. “I think there was a school back there.”
Waris and Mullah Mohammed both laughed. “No, Greg, that’s actually a public toilet,” explained Waris. “It was left over from the Russian occupation, when it was used by the construction crews who widened the road to accommodate the Soviet tanks.”
He kept driving.
“That might be true, Waris, but it seemed to be full of kids. What were they doing there? We need to go back and find out.”
Waris refused to believe me, and the debate continued until I finally became adamant and basically ordered him to turn around. When we got back to the hut, I got out, walked over to the open door, and peered in. Sure enough, it was a toilet—or at least it had been at one time. The roof was now gone and the four toilet pits had been covered by old boards. There were twenty-five children between four and five years old, plus one teacher, and a slate board leaning against the wall.
The students were quite happy to chat with Waris, Mullah Mohammed, and me about their class and their curriculum. After about ten minutes the teacher, a polite young woman who looked to be about twenty years old, asked if we might like to see “the rest of the school.” Curious to discover what sort of other classrooms might have been paired with an erstwhile public toilet, we nodded and followed her up the hill.
Just over the crest, at a spot that was invisible from the road, were a pair of tattered UN refugee tents, each of which featured a single chalkboard and at least thirty children, all of whom were sitting on the ground. These students were a little older, second and third graders, and they were terribly excited because, unlike their colleagues down at the toilet school, no one ever visited their tent class. After a few minutes of chatting, one of the two teachers turned to me and asked, “Do you want to see our upper school?”
“By all means—please lead the way.”
Down the other side of the hill was a structure that appeared to be an old toolshed. This building had a roof, a small window, and a piece of tarpaulin over the doorway. It was slightly larger than the toilet—perhaps ten feet wide by eighteen feet long—and very dark inside. It was also quite noisy because nearly one hundred students were packed in like sardines. These were the fourth, fifth, and sixth graders, and according to the two women who were teaching them, they were doing extremely well—although it might have been helpful to have some books, some paper, and some pencils.
This was my introduction to the education system serving the region of Simdara, an area with a population of roughly 4,000 people. For more than two decades, the district had been attempting to keep its schools running without any assistance whatsoever. The students had neither books nor school supplies nor uniforms, and the teachers had not been paid in more than two years—although they had been receiving weekly rations of flour in compensation for their services.
We were forced to get back on the road and catch our plane, but later I telephoned Sarfraz and asked him to look into this situation with the education office in Faizabad. The officials in Faizabad, which is less than forty miles down the road, said they had never even heard of the Simdara school district—but they would be delighted if we would consider putting in a proper school for the valley.
By this point we had committed most of our current funding in Afghanistan to the new schools inside the Wakhan, but we did manage to scrape together enough cash to begin paying the salaries of the Simdara teachers. Our hope was that within a few months, we might be able to figure out a way to get the students out of the toilet and the tents and into a structure that at least vaguely resembled an actual school.
By the time autumn arrived, however, the world had shifted on its axis, and the lives of Sarfraz, me, and the other members of the Dirty Dozen had been swept up in—and consumed by—the disaster that took place on the morning of October 8, 2005.
PART II
Qayamat (“The Apocalypse”)
CHAPTER 7
A Dark and Distant Roar
On October 7, I was Prime Minister of Azad Jammu & Kashmir. On October 8, I was Prime Minister of a graveyard.
—SARDAR SIKANDAR HAYAT KHAN
Widow in refugee camp after Pakistan earthquake
One hundred and fifty million years ago, the landmass of India belonged to a supercontinent known as Gondwana that splayed across much of the southern hemipshere and was bounded by a primordial ocean called the Tethys Sea. Sometime between the Jurassic and the Late Cretaceous periods, Gondwana started breaking apart, and this geologic partition cast loose India’s moorings and sent it plowing northward through the sea like an immense terrestrial barge until it rammed into the southern edge of Eurasia. The impact generated plate-tectonic forces powerful enough to crush and contort the bottom of the Tethys Sea, then thrust the entire ocean bed high into the sky. The result was a soaring arc of snow-draped peaks that now stretches for more than 1,500 miles, from the lunar-looking escarpments of eastern Afghanistan to the dripping, flower-draped forests of Bhutan.
Today, the fossilized skeletons of the trilobites, crinoids, and other marine creatures that were once suspended in the warm currents of the Tethys Sea can be found littering the summits of the Himalayas, which continue to rise at a rate of ten meters each century as the Indian subcontinent sustains its slow-motion crash into central Asia. At irregular intervals, the stresses and pressures generated by this concussion cause earthquakes to ripple across the axis of the Himalayas, one of the most active fault zones in the world. Most of these temblors are minor events that scarcely draw notice. Every few decades, however, the earth’s crust is seized by a cataclysmic convulsion that sets the greatest peaks on the planet to shaking like the branches of an apple tree in a strong wind.
This is what took place in northeastern Pakistan around 8:50 A.M. on the morning of Saturday, October 8, 2005.
Because it was still Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, when devout Muslims are forbidden to eat or drink between sunrise and sunset, many adults were inside their homes that morning, doing chores or napping after their predawn meal. Saturday is also a school day in Pakistan, however, so most schoolchil
dren had already gathered inside their classrooms by the time the quake struck.
The seismic shock wave originated more than sixteen miles beneath the surface, deep under Kashmir’s Neelum Valley at a point whose surface coordinates corresponded almost exactly with the Government Boys’ Degree High School in the village of Patika, about twelve miles northeast of the city of Muzaffarabad. The school was a two-story brick structure, and at 8:30 A.M., eighty-one tenth-grade boys had assembled at their desks in room number six. Their first class was an English lesson conducted by a twenty-four-year-old teacher named Shaukat Ali Chaudry, a former Kashmiri guerrilla fighter and an ex-member of the Taliban whose past was as convoluted as the geography of Kashmir.
Shaukat Ali was born in Patika in 1981, and at the age of twelve, when his father died, he was forced to complete his own studies while simultaneously working as a private tutor to support his mother and his eight younger siblings. His home lay just beyond the twenty-mile range of India’s Swedish-manufactured Bofors artillery cannons, but throughout his teenage years he could hear periodic Indian bombardments of nearby villages in the Neelum Valley. It was during this period, in the late 1990s, that he found himself drawn into Kashmir’s burgeoning independence movement—a campaign that drew inspiration from the Afghan mujahadeen’s victory over the Soviets in 1989. Not long after his sixteenth birthday, Shaukat Ali joined the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), where he received guerrilla training before being assigned to quick forays to raid Indian army convoys inside the portion of Kashmir that was controlled by the Indian government.
Around this time he also made the first of several trips to Kabul to observe the Taliban’s efforts to impose strict Islamic law in Afghanistan, and from there he was able to roam across portions of central Asia and Chechnya. He initially found himself impressed by the Taliban’s ideological fervor and decided to join the movement, but later grew deeply troubled by the Taliban’s many atrocities against civilians, and especially by their attitude toward women. Thanks to his command of Arabic—a skill that many of his illiterate fellow militants did not possess—Shaukat Ali understood that they were violating the teachings of the Koran and did not hesitate to tell them so. “If that woman was your mother or your sister,” he would demand, pointing to a woman who was being persecuted by one of his colleagues, “would you dare to beat or kill her in the name of Islam?”
Torn between his relationship with a group of men who were committing crimes in the name of Islam and his longing to return to his duties as a teacher, he eventually sided with the latter. “One of the happiest days of my life,” he once told me, “was when I finally put down my gun forever and took up the pen. This is the jihad that is Allah’s calling for me.”
He took a job at the Government Boys’ Degree High School in Patika, where he also joined the faculty of the Gundi Piran Higher Secondary School for Girls, an eighth of a mile down the road, tutoring three hundred female students in English, economics, and mathematics—the first man in the history of the district permitted to teach girls. Sporting round, gold-rimmed glasses and a long black beard, he looked like a cross between an Afghan mujahadeen and a Berkeley philosophy professor. And by the fall of 2005, this young, earnest, and talented Islamic rebel was passionately devoted to empowering Kashmir’s first generation of science-educated girls to enter college and eventually move into the workforce.
On the morning of October 8, Shaukat Ali’s lesson plan called for him to read a passage to his English class that began with the sentence, “Sports and games are very important for physical health.” Before he started reading, he looked up and spotted a student named Tarik, who had been absent the previous day.
“Tarik,” he demanded, “where were you yesterday?”
Tarik shot to his feet.
“Sir, I was sick and unable to come,” he explained. “Would you please repeat yesterday’s lesson?”
Before Shaukat Ali could respond, a dark roar engulfed the entire Neelum Valley and the walls of the school building began to shake violently.
“Run!” cried Shaukat Ali.
He held the door tightly as the boys threaded through one by one, then followed after them while reciting the words of the First Kalima, one of the five pillars of the Islamic declaration of faith—La ilaha illal-Lah, Muhammadun rasulula-Lah. “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammed is his Prophet.”
Teacher and students raced along the hall and down the stairs to join the rest of the school in the courtyard, where everyone watched in disbelief as the walls supporting the second story crumbled and the top floor of the building fell apart. Shaukat Ali and his colleagues immediately started counting heads to determine if anyone had been left behind and quickly realized that the headmaster, Akbar Ahwan, and the history teacher, Professor Khalid Husmani, were nowhere to be seen. The two men were later found dead in the rubble, along with the body of Khoshnood Ali Khan, the school clerk, who apparently had been checking the classrooms to make sure the students had all evacuated before attempting to flee himself.
It was during the brief interlude required to complete this initial roll call that several things happened. Roughly 450 miles to the southeast, tremors caused panic in the streets of the Indian cities of Amritsar and Delhi, while in the district of Poonch, the two-hundred-year-old Moti Mahal fort abruptly collapsed. Far off to the northwest, a wall in the Afghan city of Jalalabad tumbled onto a young girl, who became one of the quake’s only two casualties inside Afghanistan. Meanwhile, fifty-five miles southwest in Islamabad’s Blue Area, the Margalla Towers residential apartment building disintegrated, killing seventy-four people according to the Associated Press. None of those events, however, could compete with the carnage and destruction that greeted the teachers of Shaukat Ali’s school when, upon completing their head count, they looked up to survey their surroundings.
Along the hills beyond the town, landslides had severed every road and buried entire villages. The bridge across the Neelum River had twisted sideways. In Patika itself, there was barely a house, dukan (shop), or office left standing, and people were running through the streets, many of them screaming and covered with blood.
Shaukat Ali started to rush across to the town bazaar but was brought up short when his gaze turned toward the Gundi Piran Higher Secondary School for Girls, where all that was left was pile of gray and white rubble. The entire structure had failed, trapping three hundred girls inside. Many were already dead, but some were still alive, and when the parents of these students beganing running into the schoolyard, they were greeted by the muffled cries of their daughters coming from under the wreckage.
Shaukat Ali’s own home in the village of Batangi was eight miles away, and as the head of his household, he knew that his family would be looking to him for leadership in this moment. His responsibilities as the oldest son demanded that he leave immediately, but there was another set of obligations that required him to do the opposite. “I knew every girl inside that building,” he later told me. “These were my students—they were like sisters and daughters to me, and I could not leave them.”
The streets were impassable, foreclosing any possibility of getting heavy equipment to the school, and the aftershocks were already triggering new spasms of vibration. Amid the dust and debris, the parents and the teachers could spy arms and legs and bits of clothing, so they went at the rubble with their bare hands. Muffled voices and screams helped guide the frantic rescuers to those who were still alive. Although the students who were pulled out were in shock, many of these survivors set to work separating the dead from injured, laying the corpses of their classmates out in the courtyard while caring for the stricken and the broken as best they could.
During that first morning and afternoon there was no drinking water, no medical supplies, and no blankets. At one point, Shaukat Ali helped remove the mangled body of a girl named Sabina, who had treated him like an older brother and had promised to help find him a wife. He could not bring himself to look at Sabina’s face—and ye
ars later, he would still find it impossible to recall the moment he covered her body with a shawl without weeping. By evening, they had barely made a dent in the remains of the building.
The darkness that descended over the southwestern rim of the Vale of Kashmir that night was absolute, unbroken by a single lightbulb or streetlamp in the entire Neelum Valley. Then it started to rain.
This was not a soft patter or an intermittent drizzle, but a full-on deluge. The torrent rendered what was left of Patika cold and drenched. It fell so hard and so relentlessly that the ruins were swiftly filled with small rivers. They sluiced through the wreckage of the town’s buildings, and they threaded around the bodies of its dead.
Shaukat Ali spent that night caring for a girl named Sura. Although she had been horribly injured and was in terrible pain, the only comfort he could offer was to hold her head in his lap and try to keep the rain from her face with his jacket. Long after midnight, when the rain had finally stopped, the aftershocks continued. He tried to keep track of the number, but stopped counting when he got to one hundred. The most haunting thing he remembered from that first night, however, he told me later, was the stillness between the convulsions.
Packs of gidhad (jackals) and wild dogs roam throughout the foothills of those mountains after sunset, and on any given night—especially during the azan (the muezzin’s call to evening prayer), their howls tend to create a mournful racket that resounds across the ridgetops and through the valleys.
That night, not a single animal made a sound.