Days of Fear Read Online Free Page B

small twin-engine plane connecting Kabul to Kandahar leaves at eleven, but it’s best to get to the international airfield two hours early. Ajmal’s younger brother takes us there. Aimal has the same wide face as Ajmal and their older brother, Lehmar, the only two members of the family I have met. They seem to have been cast with the same mold, nearly clones. I leave my bags full of clothes in Ajmal’s care and I take charge of the equipment: the GPS, the BGAN antenna—a device that opens like a book and allows you to make a broadband internet connection anywhere—my PC, the small video camera that my colleagues at
La Repubblica
entrusted to me. My report on the Taliban is a big opportunity for everyone. Even the images I’ve started to collect while in Kabul might be useful as fresh material for stories on Afghanistan.
    It has snowed overnight, and this morning the flakes are still coming down, getting heavier all the time. I am starting to fear that the flight may be cancelled. This kind of thing happens all the time in Kabul, particularly during the winter, when it can sometimes snow for five days straight. We take cover in a small bar located outside the airport: a large room with a sheet-metal roof where travelers, crowding together to keep warm, wait for their flights while sipping tea and eating scrambled eggs and meat and tomato croquettes.
    We wait for three hours. The snow is still falling at noon, when an airline employee responsible for ingress into the airport bursts into the room and announces that the flight for Kandahar has been cancelled. We go back to the hotel. I’m disap­pointed. There will be more difficulties, I think, further obstacles. Ajmal reassures me. He says that the flight will leave to­morrow, that it’s only a short delay. I’m worried about our appointment and afraid that the interview is about to evaporate into thin air. “The Taliban sure aren’t going to wait until it stops snowing,” I remark. “Perhaps we should give up.” My interpreter doesn’t reply. His gaze, however, is troubled. I shut myself away in the hotel and ask him if we can meet later in the afternoon.
    Ajmal arrives on time, like always, and we drink tea. We talk about his latest jobs and he tells me about a voyage he made to Kunar, in the east. “Al-Qaeda’s men,” he says, “the famous Arab-Afghans, are dug in over there. They’re hiding in a part of the country that I had no idea even existed: an exceptional area, both for the strategic advantages it offers and for its natural beauty: an impenetrable forest that covers the entire side of a mountain. To get there you have to walk for eight hours—serious trekking, you have to be fit. I did it, but it was tough. My companion was forced to give up.” I ask him who his companion was and he utters the same name I have heard many times during our telephone conversations over the past few months. “Claudio Franco, my friend the freelance re­porter. He’s Italian but he lives in London. We went together to Kunar,” he explains, his eyes shining with pride and satisfaction. “They even shot at us,” he adds. “A rocket. Lucky for us it missed. It hit a rocky outcrop behind us, right as we were heading into a curve.”
    I am dumbstruck. The Mujahedeen’s reaction was over the top, to say the least, and I can’t understand why. But Ajmal, still smiling, says that Afghanistan is precisely this: one giant civil war that drags on forever. He adds that it was a mistake on their part. The rebels—that’s what they call them—are always suspicious. He tells me that he stayed in the area after finding someone to take his friend back to Kabul. “I wandered around on foot for seven days straight,” he recalls. “But in the end I made contact with them again. I explained exactly who I was and what I was doing there. At that point they