The tea was sizzling. The room, oppressive and dusty. And the Taliban commander I sat throughout from in a bullet-scarred constructing in southern Afghanistan had tried to kill me a bit of over a decade in the past.
As I had tried to kill him.
We each keep in mind that morning nicely: Feb. 13, 2010, Marjah district, Helmand province. We had been about the identical age: 22. It was very chilly.
Mullah Abdul Rahim Gulab was a part of a gaggle of Taliban fighters attempting to defend the district from the 1000’s of U.S., coalition and Afghan troops despatched to grab what on the time was an necessary Taliban stronghold. He didn’t comprehend it after we just lately met, however I used to be a corporal in an organization of Marines that his fighters attacked that winter morning so a few years in the past.
With the insurgents’ victory in that 20-year warfare secured this summer time, Gulab, now a high-level commander, was sitting with me in Marjah’s authorities headquarters, a multitude of a constructing the Americans had refurbished years in the past. I used to be his visitor, together with two of my colleagues from The New York Times. I advised him that the struggle for Marjah had been necessary within the eyes of the United States however that most individuals had heard just one model of the story of the battle. Not the Taliban perspective.
It was 2010, and the Taliban had been as soon as once more turning into a potent navy power, threatening almost each a part of Afghanistan. In Marjah, the insurgents had been taxing native residents, administering merciless and fast justice, and taking in a big quantity of revenue from the poppy harvest.
Operation Moshtarak, because the U.S. navy referred to as the 2010 mission to grab the district, was the primary set-piece battle of President Barack Obama’s counterinsurgency troop surge, which failed.
Eleven years later, Gulab and I nonetheless bear in mind the decision to prayer that February morning within the village of Koru Chareh, a hamlet set amid half-flooded poppy fields, not removed from the middle of Marjah. The surrounding timber, leafless, seemed like useless outstretched palms.
Schoolchildren on Nov. 8, 2021, stroll alongside a street in Marjah, Afghanistan, beside a dry irrigation canal system constructed by the United States within the late Nineteen Fifties to rework Marja into an agricultural district. (Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times)
“The skies over Marjah were full of helicopters and dropped American soldiers in different areas,” Gulab stated.
I had simply moved with my staff of seven different Marines to a small mud brick pump home, having landed with greater than 250 different troops a couple of hours earlier. As the solar rose, Gulab gathered his band of Taliban fighters from a close-by village.
Soon after, the mullah, loud and offended, came visiting the mosque loudspeaker. Gulab and his Taliban fighters prayed.
Then the capturing began.
“It was a very tough fight,” Gulab stated.
He wasn’t incorrect. By the top of the day, a Marine engineer was useless and several other others wounded. The insurgents suffered their very own casualties.
With the warfare ending this August, the locations the place I had as soon as fought as a Marine are actually reachable once more — stretches of land the place my mates died and I watched my nation’s navy failures unfold. Now, as a journalist for the Times, I wished to return to report on what had modified — and what had not — on and round these former battlefields.
In November, my drive again to the district, now managed by the Taliban, was simple sufficient. The roads had been busy with motorbikes and vans full of cotton. The pavement was pockmarked with craters from the roadside bombs the insurgents had as soon as positioned beneath them. Abandoned navy and police outposts dotted the freeway like sporadic Stonehenges.
Marjah was as I remembered, however some issues had modified. There was a paved street. The canals had been dry.
And the warfare was over.
The fall’s cotton harvest was underway, the sound of tractor engines and chattering area palms now audible within the absence of the background noise of gunfire, although a withering drought is threatening many farmers’ monetary lifelines, and the nation’s financial downturn has affected everybody.
New York Times reporter Thomas Gibbons-Neff, left in purple hat, interviews villagers in Marjah, Afghanistan, on Nov. 8, 2021. Gibbons-Neff, who as soon as served within the U.S. Marine Corps, returned to Marjah, the location of a serious battle, to see whatÕs modified for the reason that Taliban took over Ñ and to satisfy a commander he as soon as fought. (Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times)(Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times)
The two-story constructing we had as soon as occupied as a command heart, the place my mates Matt Tooker and Matt Bostrom had been shot that day in February, was now a midwives clinic.
On this journey again to Marjah, males weren’t allowed inside. But by the cracked door, I may see the steps the place my wounded mates had sat, bandaged, on painkillers and smiling, earlier than the evacuation helicopter swooped in.
Around the identical time {that a} Taliban marksman put a burst of gunfire into my teammates, Gulab misplaced one in all his fighters — as if the pendulum of violence that performed out that day was attempting to stability itself.
“My friends were shooting at the foreigners from a garden, and one was killed,” Gulab stated, earlier than explaining how his males planted explosives meant for advancing Marines like me.
“For each IED, one Talib was there to detonate it,” he stated.
Gulab joined the Taliban in 2005, a 12 months earlier than I enlisted within the Marines. He had simply misplaced two brothers within the combating, each Talibs.
I grew up within the Connecticut suburbs. Gulab grew up in an remoted and mountainous a part of Helmand province.
“When I was child, I was going to the madrassa, and our mullah was telling us, ‘The foreigners want to occupy our country, and you guys, you should be ready to defeat them,’” Gulab defined. “I hoped to join the mujahedeen.”
By the time I landed in Marjah, Gulab was a seasoned fighter who had survived U.S. airstrikes because the regular churn of U.S. and NATO troops flooded into southern Afghanistan. He was in command of about 60 fighters and understood learn how to navigate the principles of engagement that saved overseas troops from killing unarmed Taliban fighters who tossed their weapons into the closest ditch.
Whenever U.S. forces obtained shut, Gulab stated, “we would drop our weapons and then come out on the streets and say hi to them, and they’d ask us, ‘Where are the Taliban?’ and we’d reply, ‘We don’t know.’”
“After that, kids and villagers would collect our weapons and keep them in their homes until we got them back.”
New York Times reporter Thomas Gibbons-Neff on Nov. 8, 2021, appears over the sphere wherein he landed at first of the battle for Marjah, Afghanistan, as a U.S. Marine years earlier. Gibbons-Neff returned to Marjah to see whatÕs modified for the reason that Taliban took over Ñ and to satisfy a commander he as soon as fought. (Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times)
Gulab stated his fighters would use kids to identify patrols and name his males as quickly because the Americans left their posts. He talked about it as an informal apart, however a decade in the past, as we began to be taught that 8-year-olds had been placing our mates’ lives in danger, we questioned — and argued about — how far we might be prepared go to ensure none of us died in a warfare we had already realized we had been shedding.
As Gulab recounted his recollections of all of the methods his mates killed my mates and vice versa, I checked out his rifle subsequent to my proper arm. He had propped it within the chair subsequent to me earlier than I sat down. It was an American M4 carbine, very like the one I carried in 2010.
For a quick second, I used to be in between time, between the start of my warfare and its finish.
The rifle was a well-recognized software, as soon as an extension of myself and all the time inside arm’s attain. But now that it was not wanted, it was little greater than a mass of plastic and metal, and it had no bearing on how I interacted with Marjah and Gulab. He was not an enemy however a person sitting on the ground, pondering his subsequent sentence. He was not combating in a warfare that appeared like it will by no means finish. And neither was I.
He had gained his warfare. I had misplaced mine.
I went dwelling from Afghanistan in July 2010. Five years later, the Marjah district collapsed to the Taliban, apart from a couple of outposts. Then this summer time, roughly two weeks earlier than Kabul fell, the Taliban seized it utterly.
“I am very happy that foreigners left the country and it is over,” Gulab stated. “We don’t need to kill them, and they are not killing my friends.”
Throughout the interview, I wished to inform him I had been a Marine. That I had been in Marjah on Feb. 13, 2010, and that I had fought towards him. I wished to say I used to be sorry for all of it: the useless dying, the loss. His mates. My mates.
But I stated nothing. I stood up, shook his hand, smiled.
And I left Marjah.
