Letters to My Daughters by Fawzia Koofi

to your country. Without loyalty to our country, we have nothing as a nation. We must work hard to improve our country for your children and their children.
    Loyalty can be a hard lesson to learn sometimes, but there are few lessons more valuable.
    With love,
Your mother

· · SEVEN · ·

The War Within
    { 1992–1993 }
    I WAS GLAD to be back in Kabul and was eager to resume my old life—or what little of it remained in what was now becoming a full-blown civil war.
    We were still living in my brother’s apartment in Makrorian, a word that roughly translates as “living space.” The apartments had been built by the Russians using the latest technology, such as a communal hot water system that served over ten apartment blocks, each block housing fifty apartments. It is a testament to the quality of Soviet-era construction that many of the Makrorian blocks have survived even today despite being shelled countless times; even the hot water system still works. Today it remains a sought-after neighbourhood.
    I was able to resume my English language lessons in Kabul. They were too important to me to give up, even though they meant regular journeys through the streets, which had become the battleground where the Mujahideen commanders and their men played out their deadly power struggles.
    Kabul was divided into different sectors. The central parts, Khair Khana, Makrorian and around the King’s Palace, were controlled by the Mujahideen government, which was by then headed by President Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former general from Badakhshan and a man my family knew well—hence my brother’s senior position at the Interior Ministry. The famous “lion of the Panjshir,” Ahmad Shah Massoud, was his minister of defence.
    The west of Kabul was controlled by a man named Mazary, the leader of an ethnic group called the Hazaras. (Said to be the direct descendants of Genghis Khan, the Hazaras are identifiable by their classic Mongol looks, round faces and large almond-shaped eyes. They are unusual in being Shia Muslims; the majority of Muslim ethnic groups in the country are Sunni.) An area on the outskirts of Kabul, Paghman, was controlled by a man named Sayyaf and his people. Yet another area was controlled by the fearsome Abdul Rashid Dostum, the leader of the ethnic Uzbeks. Just outside the city walls, towards the south, was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of a group called Hizbi Islami; a second Hizbi Islami leader, Abdul Sabur Farid Kohistani, was the prime minister.
    Essentially, despite having a shared government and having been allies when fighting the Russians—when they were given the name of the Northern Alliance, as most of them originated from the north of Afghanistan—these commanders were now fighting each other for power. As the civil war grew more brutal, short-term allegiances shifted and changed with the weather.
    The fiercest opponent of the Mujahideen government was Hekmatyar, who was unhappy with his role in the government and wanted more power and seniority. Every day, his men fired scores of rockets into Kabul from their base in the higher ground at the edge of the city. The rockets exploded in marketplaces, schools, hospitals and gardens, and scores of people were being killed or injured. Sometimes the situation changed overnight. A group that had previously supported the government might suddenly turn against it and start fighting. A few days later, with hundreds of civilians dead, the group might use the national TV station to announce it had all been a misunderstanding and it was now supporting the shared government again. The public had no idea what would happen from one day to the next. Probably our leaders didn’t either.
    The journey from home to my English class was once a simple short taxi ride, but the route took me through some of the areas of fiercest fighting. Some neighbourhoods and streets could be avoided, but others I had no choice but to cross,