November 25, 2001	Sunday	Ramazan 9, 1422

TARAKHEL: There are no mourners to remember the Taliban, Arab and Pakistani fighters buried at the graveyard in the forgotten, dusty plains of Tarakhel. Anonymous slabs of cold slate numbered with strokes of red paint rise up from the mounds of 56 newly dug graves. For days Juma Gul, the toothless, wiry gravedigger, has been burying the bodies of Taliban troops killed in the American military strikes and the battle for Kabul.

“Two were old men, the rest were young. They came here to fight a jihad and it was good to come. The policies of their leaders are not our concern,” said Gul as he walked down the lines of graves.

Most of the men buried here in the past week were Pakistanis, their bodies collected from the battlefield north of Kabul by the Red Cross. Under Afghan tradition the bodies lie in the parched soil in a state of temporary burial, waiting to be collected and taken home by relatives. But only one father, a man from Qalat, has come to collect his son. For most others the battlefields of Afghanistan were far from their homes.

Nearby more than 200 other graves, whose stony soil has dried and cracked, hold the bodies of men killed in the past five years of fighting as the Taliban’s military machine swept through Afghanistan.

Among them are the graves of two young men from Britain, members of the feared Pakistani militants, Harakat ul-Ansar, who fought alongside the Taliban and their Arab allies.

At the head of the gravestone of Afraisab Ilyas is carved the word ‘shaheed’, or martyr, painted in a brilliant red with three tears beneath, three drops of blood. His father, Mian Mohammad Ilyas, came from Gujarat. The young man himself was from London, the gravestone says. He died on the frontline in Kunduz on July 8, 1998. “The body has gone, his eyes are closed but he lives on,” says the Urdu verse at the foot of the stone.

A few rows away lies Arshad Mahmood, who took the name ‘Sama’ for his holy war in Afghanistan. Another fighter with Harakat ul-Ansar, Arshad’s father was from Jhelum in the Punjab but the youngster travelled from ‘Britannia’ to fight. He died on the Shomali plains on, July 15, 1998.

“No one from their families has come to claim the bodies,” said Gul. Small, sharp pebbles cover the graves. Above them, short scraps of coloured rags hang in green, red and purple from long, wooden poles.

Five years ago when the Taliban seized Kabul they commandeered this patch of land on the eastern outskirts of the city for a graveyard. Gul, who had been a customs officer and then a farmer, was chosen to be the gravedigger. Since then he has buried nearly 300 bodies of Taliban, Arab and Pakistani fighters.

Last week when the Northern Alliance swept into Kabul unchallenged an alliance soldier came to him and ordered him to destroy the grave stones and bulldoze the site. “Aren’t these Afghans too? Why should we take out the bodies,” he said. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.