The last nomads of Iran employ Afghan exiles

I leave the four thousand-year-old city of Shiraz --southwestern Iran-- with a driver and translator to a stony desert in search of a nomadic family, near the ruins of Persepolis, capital of the empire Persian built by Darius I. Upon reaching the camp area, they have already left. But Najmehadis has a plan B to find some of the province's 3,000 migrants: we change course onto a dirt road winding through a valley to four tents with two corrals.

We park and the hosts are waiting for us: Najmehadis had phoned them and they agreed to receive a foreigner, something they had done only once. He comes out to greet us Mr. Zamat: he is 62 years old, copper-colored skin, white mustache and has almost lost his teeth. He invites us to his maroon burlap tent, held up with logs nailed to the ground, ropes and stones. It measures 5 meters long by 3 meters wide and lacks a door: on one side and on the other a large piece of cloth is missing, as if part of the wall had been knocked down to enter a house. The tent is open to let in some dry air. And with it flies and dust enter, which they do not perceive as dirt.

Inside I meet Vané, the wife with braided hair up to her tailbone and a blue dress with layers of tulle and golden sequins like gypsies: she heats water squatting next to a small wood-burning stove. We sit on Persian rugs to talk, and she raises her voice to her husband, who ducks his head and goes to fetch something from an outdoor lumberyard. They tell me that they are from the Turkish Qashqa'i ethnic group, one of many in this country with a million nomads. In theory they are Muslims but they do not pray or have a Koran.

The lady gets up to do things inside and outside the store, walking with her torso bent at a right angle as if she were very hunchbacked (her back is an L-shaped table with her legs). She goes back and forth like this, agile, until she straightens up as if nothing had happened and I see her as a tall woman with good posture. In the nomadic world there are no tables or chairs. This is a culture of rugs--the best in the world for artistry and durability--and every ethnic group has its designs. Everything happens at ground level: sleeping, talking, cooking, eating, washing, knitting. If any activity requires time and minimal mobility -- peeling onions -- Vané does it squatting. But if you have to move, it does it bent to be close to the ground.

Time begins to flow slowly like in ethnographic documentaries. I estimate Vané is 65 years old, but the translator says that she is close to 50. The exact number is not known: as a child she had an older sister who died and her parents transferred her documents to her, a usual bureaucratic saving when they were still moving from place to place to another (now they have settled). I ask Don Zamat about his dress clothes and he goes to a closet without a door: he takes out a dusty sport coat with black linen pants. He insists I wear it for the photo with friendly emphasis: I end up posing barefoot in the store in a baggy Western suit I don't even wear in my own world.

I go to rest in the smallest tent assigned to us and I am awakened by a chorus of bleatings from 150 goats: the Afghan shepherd hired by the couple –the one in the photo in this text-- has come down from the mountain with the flock , to keep it in the corral (the owners of the house are grown up and their children emigrated to the city).

#MannKiBaat begins shortly. Do join. https://t.co/NcD020RiMM

— Narendra Modi Sun Aug 25 04:59:30 +0000 2019

We have dinner at 4 in the afternoon, rice with yogurt sauce that we eat by hand and when the sun goes down we go to sleep. At dawn I am awakened by engine noises: they have turned on a pump to extract water from a 40-meter well. Those in charge of the laborious process are two Afghan refugees and I ask to meet them. They accept and we sit on rugs. The speaker is Shalil, 25, from Foriop, northern Afghanistan. He lives with his friend in a white tent next to the pump: they rest all day, except in the morning (the day before I never saw them leave). He says that he lived six years in Iran, returned to his country and a year ago he returned here. Afghans and Iranians speak almost the same language: “When I was 7 years old --in 1996-- the Taliban seized power. They came to my town and killed several. In 2001 the Americans expelled them, but they were always lurking. One hundred Taliban and fifty government fighters were killed in a confrontation (we had helicopter support)”.

From that day he shows me photos of corpses with turbans and beards taken by him with his old cell phone. “Once they seized the town and my aunt's husband – he worked for the government – ​​they put him on trial”. Shalil searches and I see a photo of a court with defendant. In the next one I see him shot.

A childhood friend of Shalil's was co-opted by the Taliban and left the village. One night he returned with the mission to assassinate his own uncle: he gunned him down in cold blood. “I fought many times; they came almost every night for three years and we repelled them. I don't know if I killed anyone. If they enter the village, the officials must flee or they will have their heads cut off. Even our children and women were shooting weapons. Since they recruit local people – a cousin of mine for example – they know us and know who to kill”.

They tried to convince Shalil and he did not accept. Until they arrested him and they were going to slit his throat: "they knew that my family was with the government and dozens of mine had died." There was negotiation and they exchanged him for another Taliban prisoner: "I decided to emigrate and lead a hard life here in the desert."

Shalil's story has been repeated in hundreds of villages since the United States. it expelled the Taliban from the big cities and central power. It became clear that the complex microphysics of Afghan tribal power was incomprehensible to them, even if there was a “national government”: they did not discover the surreptitious threads or the political logics and alliances -cultural. They lacked more anthropological science than military science.

They were building a huge sandcastle that the Taliban conquered almost without a fight. Just as a village leader fled for his head, so did the Afghan president. Two decades the most powerful armed forces in history were there with their drones and intelligent missiles. But the Taliban endured. They had simply withdrawn to the mountains, to the fields, to their caves and villages: they remained crouched and active at night, waiting for their enemy to go away from their fill. After the death of 7,439 Westerners and 66,000 local allies, everything was as it began. Except for the fact that they left the winners brand new tanks, missiles, helicopters and planes, as well as amusement parks where those bloodthirsty men in sandals play like children in bumper cars with the machine gun between their legs. If Shalil already had a difficult time returning to his country, perhaps that will never happen again.