Fear and explosions in Kabul

Sat, 04 Jun 2005 17:33:00 +0000

The American honeymoon in Afghanistan may be over. Until last month the Bush administration could take comfort that Afghanistan was everything Iraq was not. Its population was generally pro-American and grateful for the U.S. intervention. Afghan President Hamid Karzai was happily beholden to the advice of the U.S. ambassador. Even Afghan prisoners released from the U.S. prison in Guantánamo seemed for the most part to have no hard feelings and simply went home. Now a wave of violence, much of it aimed at foreigners, has changed the mood in the country.

Anti-American riots swept Afghanistan in May for the first time since the U.S. invasion in 2001 after Newsweek printed allegations that a Quran had been flushed down a toilet at Guantánamo. But before the riots, Kabul, the capital, had already become a less friendly place for foreigners. My own calm was shattered when I checked into the Park Residence hotel on May 7. I had just unpacked my bags when a single thunderclap sounded from across the courtyard. It wasn't a big explosion, and I almost believed the hotel clerk who said he thought the boiler had blown. It turned out that a suicide bomber had hit the hotel's Internet cafe, where foreign workers for nongovernmental organizations often go to check their e-mail.

The Kurds take Kirkuk

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 16:15:00 +0000

Hoshyar Darbandi made a quick trip to his hometown of Kirkuk this week to cast his vote. Leaving his wife and kids behind in Stockholm, Sweden, he may have the honor of being the Kurd who came the farthest to make it to the polls. Darbandi could have voted for the new Iraqi parliament from a safe distance in any number of European cities that allowed Iraqi exiles to vote, but he wanted to come home to vote in Sunday's local elections. To Kurds, who wins the local race in Kirkuk is as important as who eventually becomes prime minister in Baghdad. Maybe more: Most Kurds don't care if Baghdad continues slipping into an anarchic black hole. Kirkuk, they'd like to keep.

"We've never written our own history," said Darbandi, as he walked from a polling station at the end of Election Day. "It's always been forced on us." Darbandi walks comfortably through the crowd here, though his haircut, his boots and his new ski jacket give him away as a returned exile. Like hundreds of thousands of Kurds, he was driven out of this part of Iraq during Saddam Hussein's Arabization campaign in the 1980 and '90s. Darbandi fled to Iran in 1984 at age 22 and then was granted asylum in Sweden. Now he'd like to move his young children back to Iraq. But he doesn't call it Iraq. To him this is Kurdistan, and Kirkuk is the jewel in the crown.

Salon.com > Quil Lawrence

Fear and explosions in Kabul

The Kurds take Kirkuk