The yearly general and regional ‘conferences’ of the Tablighi Jamaat are perhaps the most undercovered big events that go on in Afghanistan. Last year I went to the general meeting in Kabul, a 4-day event that over 10,000 people attended. Not a single report was written, be it foreign media or Afghan media.

Now to my mind a meeting of 10,000 explicitly religious men from all over the country (with higher numbers coming from the south, even) would seem a pretty important event, if only just to hear what these guys are saying.
So when I heard they were meeting in Kandahar yesterday, I thought I’d head out and see how they do things down here. The venue was the Id Gah mosque next to the university. It is well known as ‘the mosque that Mullah Omar built,’ and reputedly not a single brick has been added to it since he left in 2001.

[The founder of the Tablighi Jamaat, Mawlana Mohammad Ilyas Kandhalawi] was a prominent member of the Deobandi movement and throughout Tabligh’s history there has been a degree of association between the two groups, although Tablighi Jamat does not see itself as Deobandi. link

I’m sure you’ll all remember of the frequent analyses of the Taliban that tie their religious world view with that of the Deobandis… But in actual fact, especially for Kandahar, the Taliban don’t get on well with the Tablighis at all.
So the Tablighi Jamaat are an association of the ultra-religious. You could certainly say that religion is their life, to the exclusion of almost everything else. In fact, they seem so busy discussing religious matters and praying that they don’t find time to follow some of their own advice.

A couple of my friends down here explained how nobody in Kandahar took them particularly seriously because they were always preaching on the virtues and obligations of jihad, but that they never could find to actually get out and fight themselves. “They’re too busy preaching,” they said.
They are pretty engaged in what’s known as da’wa, which is sort of a call to persuade people to come over to the right side (whether that’s conversion, or just reforming and becoming a ‘proper muslim’ again).

So in Kabul I found myself being introduced to a crowd of a thousand on a loudspeaker system, only to be asked, “since it’s Friday, and since it’s such a holy day, and since it would such a great blessing for us, why don’t you convert to Islam in front of us today. It’d be great!”
One of the other things I found interesting talking to them in Kabul was the extent to which they seemed completely uninterested in politics. And believe me, I spent hours wandering up and down the makeshift tents they’d erected on a barren football field slightly outside town, listening out to any snippets of conversation that might be unrelated to religion.

Nothing.
So, lest anyone in Washington read this and get any ‘smart ideas’, let me just make the point that these hundreds of thousands of tablighi jamaat scattered around the country are not ‘the third force’, or ‘the solution’ for Afghanistan. If they’re not going to be bothered to fight for the Taliban – and, talking to some of them, you’d be hard pressed to distinguish the two – they’re certainly not going to fight for you.
I find it a bit depressing that I have to add these disclaimers to my posts these days.

Tomorrow I’ll dissect an article from the AP on the proposed idea for ‘tribal militias’ and explain why it’s unsuitable for Kandahar. Oh, and you can view some other photos I took on Flickr here. And here’s a photo montage from the murals inside the mosque from when I first visited back in the summer of 2004:

idgahtile.jpg, originally uploaded by alex_strick.

Jason Burke broke the story for the Observer (UK) on Sunday, and since then almost anyone with a say in the matter has denied that anything is happening in terms of these negotiations: from Karzai (in a round about way) to the Taliban themselves…
So what’s in the new message from Mullah Omar? Well it contains much of the usual boilerplate, denouncements of the foreigners in the country, of the government and the ‘puppet’ Afghan government etc. But then:

A few years back no one would have conceived that US and its allies will face such resistance in Afghanistan, which will compel their president to beg other counties [sic] to provide economical, military equipment and soldiers assistance to combat the resistance.

But I think this is the newest thing that gets said in this statement:

If you show your intension of withdrawing your forces, we once again will show our principal [sic] by give you a safe way out, in order to show that we never harm any one.

Also a pretty strong statement relating to civilian casualties and other atrocities that ‘the Taliban’ have often been accused of and have carried out:

Every act which is not in harmony with the teachings of Islam or is not according to the Islamic civilization or does not look good with Muslim Ummah and your enemy convert operations disguised under your identity, like blasts in Masjids and where there are a gathering of the general people, looting of the properties on the highways, cutting noses and ears in the name of differences which Islam forbids and consider permissible and non-permissible or burning of Islamic books must be strongly countered.

I think – especially when you read the original Pashtu – it’s clear that the statement is as much (if not more) targeted at a western media audience than at ordinary Afghans. For a start I doubt the mass of Afghanistan’s rural population will ever know that this statement was made. And some of the references seem pretty ‘off’ in this statement, such as the ones to Palestine, Iraq and other countries.
I know people think they’re strong motivating factors for the things that happen outside in places like Afghanistan, but the reality is that – for Afghans – Palestine just isn’t such a strong issue.

As the cliché goes, Mullah Omar is the ‘reclusive one-eyed leader of the Taliban’. You can see him in the photo above, one of only a handful that exist, his right eye just a socket. But how did he lose his eye?
I’ve been doing some interviews for what I’m calling my idealistic oral history project – a history of Kandahar from 1966-2001 from the mouths of the people who shaped events. Lots of mujahideen commanders form the basis of these interviewees, and two of them happened to be there at the battle of Sangisar, just as the Soviets were leaving Afghanistan, in which Mullah Omar lost his eye.

So shall we begin?
One of my interviewees, let’s call him Rahmat, was on his way to Sangisar from battles elsewhere in Kandahar province. Mullah Omar was living in Hajji Ibrahim Qala at the time, a sort of house/fort, with some of his friends and fellow mujahideen.
Let’s not forget, too, that the Taliban existed as a mujahideen force before 1994. It’s a topic worthy of a separate blog post, but just remember that Mullahs and ‘Taliban’ (as in ‘students’) formed a significant part of the mujahideen fighting force in Kandahar province throughout the 1980s.

So all the mujahideen from Maiwand and Panjwayi districts arrived in Sangisar for a ‘big fight’. It was just as the Russians were leaving the south as part of their ultimate withdrawal from Afghanistan, and so the mujahideen had come to take a final shot at the departing convoys of soldiers and supplies.
Planes started bombing the area in preparation for the convoy’s passing through. Mullah Omar had left Hajji Ibrahim Qala some 10 minutes before the bombing started, and when all the fighters poured out of their houses in the midst of the bombing near Ibrahim Mosque, they encountered Mullah Omar coming back, blood seeping from his eye.

He explained how he’d been crouched by a wall when a number of bombs were falling on the other side of the wall. He had looked round the edge of the wall – just peering round with one eye – when a piece of shrapnel from the blast struck him in his eye.
The mujahideen sent Mullah Omar to doctors in Nelgham (a nearby frontline), but he apparently wouldn’t leave. My second interviewee, let’s call him Takre, told of how Mullah Omar stuck a bandage on his eye socket and pleaded with the other fighters to allow him to continue fighting.

After that day, the mujahideen moved on to the final battles in Pashmol and Arghandab, but Mullah Omar was excluded from the Pashmol fight. Here’s a photo of Mullah Omar from when he was young, when he had both eyes: