Afghanistan’s new rulers: In the capital of the Taliban

Aevenings, when the red sun sinks behind the mighty rocks near Kandahar, the children go out into the streets with their cricket bats. A well-aimed throw, then the wide wooden bat hits the ball and fires it out onto the dusty wasteland. Mohammad Nadir steers his heavy off-road vehicle through the cluster of boys chasing the ball. Now, as temperatures gradually drop below 40 degrees, Nadir wants to take a little tour to show where ruin is palpable in Kandahar.

The car stops at a long line of evenly-walled low-rise buildings. The first three are freshly plastered, a few scrawny cypresses defy the dry heat. Beyond, up the newly built road, nothing but raw walls in the desert dust. Eighty bungalows should have been built here, a neat row house settlement for the new middle class of Kandahar. Nadir goes through the empty door frames into the small inner courtyard, just a hard dirt floor and a few stones. Bitterness hangs in the corners of his mouth at what’s left of the dream.

Like Kabul, Kandahar was largely destroyed

Nadir and his brothers had big plans in southern Afghanistan. Kandahar, once founded by Alexander the Great on the edge of the desert where the trade routes from India met and there was enough water to grow verdant orchards. Here, deep in the heartland of the Pashtuns, the Taliban were founded in the 1990s and began their triumphal march through the entire country. Mullah Omar, the legendary first leader of the Islamists, ruled the Taliban Emirate from Kandahar. It is said that Omar, of whom there are hardly any pictures, almost never visited Kabul. There he was the foreign ruler, of whom one only knew a voice from the radio. In Kandahar he was approachable. In the early years, the emir is said to have sat on the floor in a small room in the governor’s house and had an open ear for everyone.

Nadir’s father once made money importing used cars. He took the family abroad during the civil war in the early 1990s. In the first emirate of Islamists, Nadir and his siblings returned to their homeland. Many legends surround the founding of the Taliban. What they have in common is that the influential families of Kandahar played a crucial role. At that time, the notorious warlords, former mujahideen leaders, ruled all over the country, tearing each other apart after defeating the Soviets and devastating the whole country in their fratricidal war.

Like Kabul, Kandahar was largely destroyed. For years, hardly a woman dared to take to the streets for fear of being kidnapped and raped by the brutalized fighters. For the traders, the countless checkpoints of the individual militias were a particular problem, where people were harassed with arbitrary controls and had to pay horrendous tariffs. The Taliban’s extreme moral strictness can also be seen as a response to that time. In Kandahar, people initially felt it as a liberation. And the traders had what they needed most for their business life: stability and clear rules.