The New Yorker feature-length "Other Afghan Women"

Author: Anand Gopal

Original: The Other Afghan Women

The original text is 20,000 words, and this is the first part.

One afternoon in August, Shakira heard knocking on her door. In the Sangkin Valley in southern Afghanistan's Helmand province, women cannot be seen by strangers. So her 19-year-old son Ahmed came to answer the door. Outside the door were two men in bandages and black hoods, armed with rifles. They are members of the Taliban. The Taliban are launching an offensive to retake the countryside from the Afghan National Army. One of them warned: "If you don't leave immediately, everyone will die."

Shakira, in her early 40s, gathered her family: her husband, an opium dealer who fell asleep quickly after succumbing to the temptation of his product, and her eight children, including her oldest, 20-year-old Nilofar - the same age as the war. Shakira called her "Deputy" because he helped her with the young children. The Shakira family crossed an old-fashioned footbridge across the canal, then meandered through reeds and irregular fields of beans and onions, past dark and vacant homes. Their neighbors were also warned, and the village was deserted except for chickens and cows roaming the fields.

Shakira's family walked for hours under the scorching sun. She began to feel voices in the distance, and saw people pouring in from the village by the river: men carrying bags full of everything they could not bear to leave behind, heavy luggage weighing down their waists. Women walked as fast as their burqas allowed.

The roar of artillery filled the air, heralding the start of the Taliban attack on Afghan army outposts. Amid the lightning and thunder in the sky, Shakira placed her youngest child, a two-year-old daughter, on her back. When night fell, the family came to the central market in the valley. The corrugated iron storefront was largely destroyed in the war. Shakira found a one-room storefront with an intact roof, where she planned to spend the night with her family. She has a set of ragdolls for the children, some of the distractions she made during her years fleeing the war.

Around dawn, Shakira stepped outside and saw dozens of families taking refuge in the abandoned market. This was once the most prosperous bazaar in northern Helmand, with shopkeepers weighing saffron and cumin on scales, wagons with women’s robes, and shops selling opium. Now, buildings are in ruins, and the air smells of rotting animal carcasses and burning plastic.

The ground in the distance suddenly burst into fountains of mud, Afghan army helicopters buzzed overhead, and Shakira and her family hid behind a store, contemplating their next move. There are battles on the stone walls to the north and the river banks to the west. To the east is a red sand desert. Their only option was to head south to the tree-lined city of Rashkaga, still under the control of the Afghan government.

The journey involves traversing a barren plain with abandoned bases for both American and British troops and full of snipers. In addition, they have to go through culverts that may be full of explosives. Several families have already set off. Even if they got to Lashkaga, they couldn't be sure it was safe there. Since the start of the Taliban's blitzkrieg, Afghan army soldiers have surrendered in droves, begging for a safe return home. It is clear that the Taliban will soon arrive in Kabul, making the past 20 years and trillions of dollars in vain. Shakira's family stood in the desert, discussing the situation. As the gunfire got closer, Shakira saw Taliban vehicles approaching the market, and she decided to stay where she was. She was exhausted and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Shakira decides to face what comes next, no matter what happens, like accepting a verdict. " Our whole lives were on the run ," she told me. "I'm not going anywhere."

The longest war in U.S. history ended on August 15 this year when the Taliban seized Kabul without firing a shot. Bearded men in black turbans took control of the presidential palace, and around the capital, the plain white flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was raised. Panic ensued. Some women burned their school records and went into hiding, fearful of returning to the past overnight, when the Taliban banned them from travelling alone for education. For Americans, the real possibility that the gains of the past 20 years could be wiped out presents a dire choice: re-engage in the seemingly endless war, or abandon the women of Afghanistan.

This summer, I traveled to rural Afghanistan to meet women living under the Taliban and hear what they had to say about their lives. More than 70 percent of Afghans don't live in cities -- insurgent groups have devoured swathes of rural areas over the past decade. Unlike in relatively free Kabul, visiting these women living in the hinterland is not easy : Even without Taliban rule, women traditionally do not speak to strangers. The public and private worlds are sharply separated: when a woman leaves the house, she makes a secret cocoon for herself through the burqa, a tradition that predates the Taliban by centuries. During puberty, girls are largely invisible at home, using their grandmother as a messenger, if any . It was through my grandmothers that I found and talked to dozens of my interviewees, but I never saw their faces. Many, like Shakira, lived in tents or hollowed-out storefronts in the desert. When the Taliban found her family hiding in the market, the fighters advised them and others not to go home until someone could clear the mines. I first met her in a safe house in Helmand. " I've never seen a foreigner before ," she said shyly. " Well...a foreigner without a gun ."

Shakira is good at finding humor in grief, but also in the sheer absurdity of the men in her life: In the nineties, the Taliban offered to power the village, which locals initially rejected because they were afraid of black magic. " Of course, we women know that electricity is a good thing, " she said with a smile. Shakira pulled her shawl to her face as she laughed, leaving only her eyes exposed.

I told Shakira that she shares the same name with an international pop star, and her eyes went wide. "Is this true?" she asked a friend who accompanied her to the safe house. " Is there really a big star with the same name as me? "

Shakira, like other women I met, grew up in the Sangin Valley. The Sangin Valley is a green crevice between the surrounding steep mountain peaks, fed by the Helmand River and a canal built by the Americans in 1950. It only takes an hour to walk from one end of the valley to the other, passing dozens of hamlets, creaking footbridges and mud-brick walls. When Shakira was a girl, she heard from her mother the old story of the village of Pankira, where she lived - at that time, there were about 80 families in the village: children swimming in the canals in the warm sunshine, Women pounded grain in stone mortars. In winter, smoke wafts from the clay fireplace; in spring, the rolling fields are covered with poppies.

In 1979, when Shakira was a baby, the communists seized power in Kabul and tried to start a women's literacy program in Helmand, a province the size of West Virginia, with few schools for girls. , tribal elders and landowners refused. In the villagers' accounts, Sanjin's traditional way of life was shattered overnight as outsiders insisted on giving rights to women in the valley.

" Our culture couldn't accept sending their girls out to school ," Shakira recalled. "It was like this in my father's time, in my grandfather's time." When authorities began forcing girls to take lessons at gunpoint, a rebellion led by armed men who called themselves jihadists erupted. In the first operation, they kidnapped all the school teachers in the valley - many of whom supported girls' education - and armed men slit their throats. The next day, the government arrested tribal elders and landowners on suspicion of funding the mujahideen. These community leaders were never seen again.

Soviet tanks crossed the border to support the communist government and liberate women. Soon, Afghanistan was basically divided in two. In the countryside, young people are willing to give their lives for the new ways of life imposed on them, including girls' schools and land reform. In cities, the Soviet-backed government banned child marriage and gave women the right to choose a partner. The number of girls educated reached new highs, and by the early 1980s women held seats in parliament and even held the position of vice president .

Violence in the countryside continued to spread. One early morning when Shakira was 5 years old, her aunt hurriedly woke her up. The children were led by village adults into a cave, where they hid and huddled for hours. At night, Shakira saw cannons streak across the sky. When the family returned to Panjira, the wheat fields were charred and crisscrossed with the stampede marks of Soviet tanks. Cows were killed by machine gun fire lying on the ground. Everywhere she saw, her "neighbors" - people she used to call "uncles" lay in a pool of blood. Shakira's grandfather didn't hide with her, and she never saw him again in the village. When Shakira grew up, she learned that he went to another cave and was caught and executed by the Soviets.

Night evacuation became the norm . For Shakira as a child, it was also a source of excitement: in the dark corners of the cave, the children were buzzing together. “ We’d look for Russian helicopters in the sky — like trying to identify strange birds .” Sometimes, when the birds swooped low, the ground exploded in an instant, and children rushed to the scene to pick up debris, hoping the tin could fetch a good price . Occasionally, Shakira also collects scraps of metal so she can build a dollhouse. Once, she showed her mother a magazine photo of plastic dolls that came to life. The mother snatched the photo, saying that such an exposed doll was inappropriate. So Shakira learned to make dolls out of cloth and sticks.

At 11, Shakira stopped going out . Her world shrunk to the three rooms and yard of her house. There, she learned to sew, bake and milk cows. One day, a passing jet shook the house and she hid in the closet. Under a pile of clothes, she found a children's alphabet book that belonged to her grandfather. Her grandfather was the last in their family to go to school. In the afternoon, while her parents were sleeping, she started matching Pashto words with pictures. " I had a plan to teach myself a little bit every day, " she recalls.

In 1989, the Soviet Union withdrew in defeat, but Shakira continued to hear the roar of mortars from outside the mud walls of the house. Fighting mujahideen factions are now trying to carve up the country for themselves. Villages like Pankila are lucrative targets: there are peasants to levy "taxes", rusted Soviet tanks to rebuild, and opium to export. "We didn't have a single night that was safe," recalls Pazaro, a woman from a nearby village. "We were all afraid of the same person, Amir Dado."

When Shakira first saw Dado, it was through the front door of his home: he was in a pickup, and surrounded by a dozen armed men, he marched through the village "as if he were the president." Dado was a wealthy fruit seller who became a mujahideen commander. He has a black beard and a huge belly. Dado was already attacking his potential opponents before the Soviet Union was defeated. He is from the upper Sangin Valley, where his tribe, the Alikozais, has had huge feudal plantations that have existed for hundreds of years. The Lower Valley is home to the Ishaksai people, and Shakira belongs to a poor tribe. Shakira watched Dado's men go door-to-door to demand "taxes" and search homes. A few weeks later, the armed men returned, and they ransacked her living room, leaving her huddled in a corner . Her sacred home has never been violated by strangers. Shakira felt as if she had been stripped naked and thrown into the street.

In the early 1990s, the Afghan communist government lost the support of the Soviet Union and gradually disintegrated. In 1992, Rashkaga fell to a faction of the Mujahideen. Shakira had an uncle who lived there. He was a Communist who rarely had time to go to mosques and was very interested in Pashtun music. He recently married a young woman, Sana, who had just escaped being forced to be engaged to a man four times her age. The couple started a new life in "Little Moscow," a Lashkaga community that Sana called "a land of freedom for women." However, when the Mujahideen took over, they were forced to flee to Panjira.

One night, Shakira was tending cows when Dado's men surrounded her with guns. "Where is your uncle?" one of them shouted. Armed men burst into the house, followed by Sana's abandoned fiancé. "She's the one I'm looking for!" he said. The armed men dragged Sana away. Shakira's other uncles tried to rescue her but were arrested. The next day, Sana's husband surrendered to Dado's troops, begging them to take him away and let Sana die. In the end, both of them were sent to the Inquisition in Dado and sentenced to death .

Soon after, the jihadists overthrew the Communist Party in Kabul, taking their rural customs with them. In Kabul, their leaders, generously funded by the United States, issued a decree declaring that "women cannot leave their homes unless absolutely necessary, in which case they must cover themselves completely." In addition, women are prohibited from "gracefully" Or walk with pride". Religious police began patrolling the city's streets, arresting women and burning records and videotapes .

However, the new mujahideen government soon fell apart and the country was once again plunged into civil war . On Panjira's night, Shakira heard gunshots and sometimes the shouting of men. In the morning, while tending to the cows, she saw neighbors carrying wrapped carcasses. Her family gathered in the yard and whispered about how they escaped. But there are checkpoints along the way that belong to different mujahideen groups. In the town of Greshk, south of the village, a militia group called the 93rd Division set up a particularly infamous barricade on a bridge; passing men were robbed or killed, women and little boys was raped. Shakira's father sometimes crosses the bridge to sell products at the Greshk market, and her mother begs him to stay at home.

Shakira's family, trapped between Amir-Dado to the north and the 93rd Division to the south, grew increasingly desperate. One afternoon when she was 16, Shakira heard shouts from the street, "The Taliban is coming! " Then she saw a convoy of white Toyotas filled with black-bearded fighters holding white flags. Shakira had never heard of the Taliban. Her father explained that the Taliban members resembled the poor religious students she had seen begging for alms. Many had fought under the mujahideen banner but withdrew after the Soviet withdrawal. The Taliban say they are now remobilizing to end the unrest. In a very short time, they overcame the Greshk Bridge and dismantled the 93rd Division. When they came to Sanjin, volunteers flocked to join them. Shakira's brother went home to report that the Taliban had also taken Dado's position. The warlord has abandoned his men and fled to Pakistan. "He's gone," Shakira's brother kept repeating, "he's really gone." The Taliban quickly disbanded Dado's inquisition, released Sana and her husband awaiting execution, and called off inspections stand. After 15 years, there is finally peace in the Sankin Valley.

When I asked Shakira and other women in the valley what they thought of Taliban rule, they were reluctant to judge the movement by some universal standard, only by the standards of the time . " They were gentler and treated us with respect," said Pazaro, a woman living in a neighbouring village. The women said their lives under the Taliban were no different from those under Dado and the jihadists, Except no strangers and scary checkpoints breaking into doors at night.

Shakira told me about the serenity of her new life: quiet mornings, sipping steaming green tea and toast; summer nights chilling on the roof, as her mother, aunts and grandmothers began discreetly asking her questions— —In the village, marriage is the bond that connects two families. Shakira was soon betrothed to a distant relative, and his father disappeared — presumably captured by the Soviets. The first time she saw her fiancé was at their wedding: he sat timidly surrounded by village women who were laughing at his plans for the wedding night. "He was a fool!" Shakira recalled, laughing. "He was very embarrassed there and wanted to run away. People had to catch him and bring him back."

Like many enterprising young men in the valley, Shakira's husband works as an opium hauler, and she likes the sparkle of determination in his eyes. However, she began to worry that courage alone might not be enough. With the establishment of Taliban rule, a conscription campaign began. Young people are brought to northern Afghanistan to help fight a gang of mujahideen warlords known as the Northern Alliance. One day, Shakira saw a helicopter land on a field and unload the bodies of fallen soldiers. People in the valley began to hide in friends' houses, moving from village to village, afraid of being drafted. Poor tenant farmers face the greatest risk - the rich can buy their services. "This is the real injustice of the Taliban," Shakira told me. She felt a pang of disgust at the sight of the Taliban patrols.

In 2000, Helmand province experienced a severe drought. The watermelon fields were completely abandoned, and the roads were littered with bloated corpses. The valley's economy collapsed when the top Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, announced a ban on opium cultivation. " We had nothing to eat, nothing in the fields, we couldn't support our family," Pazzaro recalled. "The children were crying and screaming, and we felt like we were going to die ." Shakira was pregnant and hid a few pieces Long-aged naan dipped in green tea and fed to her nephews and nieces. Her husband went to Pakistan to try his luck in the fields there. Shakira thought that her children would die of starvation, that her husband would never return, and that she would be left alone with great pain. Every morning, she prayed for rain, for deliverance.

One day, the announcer on the radio said that there was an attack in the United States. Suddenly, it was said that the richest country in the world was sending soldiers to overthrow the Taliban. For the first time in years, Shakira's heart stirred with hope.

One night in 2003, Shakira was awakened by the voice of a strange man. She hurriedly wrapped herself up tightly. When she ran to the living room, she was horrified to see the muzzle of the rifle pointed at her. These people were taller than she had ever seen, and they were still in uniform. Shakira realized with horror that these were Americans. They were joined by some Afghans, skinny men with guns in their hands and plaid scarves. A man with a beard was giving orders - it was Amir Dado.

U.S. forces quickly overthrew the Taliban and established a Hamid-Karzai government in Kabul. Dado, who had a good relationship with the US special forces, became the intelligence director of Helmand province. One of his brothers was the magistrate of Sangkin County, and the other became the chief of police in Sangkin. In Helmand province, the first year of American occupation was peaceful, with poppies growing again in the fields. Shakira now has two children, Nilofar and Ahmed. Her husband came back from Pakistan and got a job transporting opium resin to the Sangin market. But now, with Dado back in power - rescued from exile by the Americans - their lives have regressed to the Civil War era .

Almost everyone Shakira knows has a story about Dado. At one point, his fighters demanded that two young men either pay taxes or join his private militia—a militia he maintains despite his official duties. The two young men refused, and Dado's militia killed them, hanging their bodies from a tree. “They were cut open and their intestines fell out,” recalls one villager. In another village, Dado’s forces went door-to-door to execute people suspected of being the Taliban; an elderly man who had never participated in the movement Scholars were shot.

Shakira is baffled by the ally the Americans have chosen. "Is this their plan?" she asked me. "Are they here to bring peace, or is there another purpose?" She insisted that her husband stop shipping opium resin to the Sangin market, and he diverted the trade to the South Glesk. He came back one afternoon with the news that it was no longer possible. Amazingly, the United States restored the 93rd Division and made it the province's closest partner. The division's armed men began to intercept passers-by again on the bridge, looting everything they could loot on passers-by. Now, however, their most lucrative job is as bounty hunters in the United States : According to Mike Martin, a former British officer who wrote the history of Helmand, every Taliban commander they capture Make two thousand dollars.

That's no small challenge: There are hardly any active Taliban to catch. “We knew who the Taliban were in our village,” Shakira said, “but they were not involved in guerrilla warfare — they were sitting at home and doing nothing.” A lieutenant colonel of U.S. special forces deployed in the area at the time Stewart-Farris told a U.S. Army historian "there was little resistance to the attack."

Militia groups like the 93rd Division started blaming innocent people. Hajji Bismillah is the Karzai government's traffic director in Jereshq, where he collects tolls in the city. In February 2003, the 93rd Division turned him into a terrorist, and the Americans immediately sent Bismillah to Guantanamo. With Bismila eliminated, the 93rd Division controlled regional traffic and monopolized toll revenue .

Dado's political path went further -- in March 2003, American soldiers visited Governor Sangin -- Dado's brother -- to discuss renovating a school and a health clinic. As they left, their convoy was shot, and Sgt. Jacob Fraser and Sgt. Orlando Morales became the first U.S. service members to die in Helmand province. The U.S. suspects that the culprit is not the Taliban, but Dado — a suspicion confirmed by a former commander of the warlord who said Dado planned the attack to keep Americans dependent on him. Still, the US took Jalil to Guantanamo when Dado's forces claimed to have captured the real assassin, a former Taliban soldier named Mullah Jalil. Inexplicably, Jalil's classified Guantanamo files show that US officials knew that Jalil was identified only to "cover up" the fact that Dado's forces were "involved in the ambush ."

The incident did not affect Dado's relationship with U.S. special forces, which saw him as valuable in his service to "terrorists." They patrolled together, and soon after the attack, the joint operation searched Shakira's village for suspected terrorists. The soldiers didn't stay at her house for long, but she couldn't forget the sight of her rifle being pointed at her. The next morning, she removed the carpet and wiped away the marks left by their boots.

Shakira's friends and neighbors were too frightened to speak, but the United Nations began to agitate for Dado's removal. The U.S. has repeatedly thwarted this effort, with a guide from the U.S. Marine Corps arguing that while Dado is "far from a Jeffersonian democrat," his crude form of justice is "a tried-and-true method for reining in rebellious Pashtuns." solution".

Shakira's husband stopped going out as more and more Helmands were taken away for inexplicable reasons. A farmer from a nearby village, Mohammed Nasim, was arrested by the US military and sent to Guantanamo. According to a classified assessment, that was because his name was similar to that of a Taliban commander. A Karzai government official named Ehsanullah went to a U.S. base to report two Taliban members; no interpreter was present, and amid the chaos, he was arrested and transported to Guantanamo. Nasrullah, a government tax collector, was randomly pulled off a bus and taken to Guantanamo after a skirmish between U.S. special forces and members of local tribes. "We were very satisfied with the United States," he later told a military court. "I didn't know I was going to come to Cuba."

Nasrallah eventually returned home, but some of the detainees never returned. Abdul Wahid of Greshq was arrested by the 93rd Division and severely beaten; he was sent to the US detention center, where he was caged and died there. U.S. military personnel noted burns to his chest and abdomen, and bruises to his hip and groin. According to a declassified investigation, special forces soldiers reported that Wahid's wounds were consistent with "normal interview/interrogation methods" used by the 93rd Division. A sergeant said he "can provide pictures of previous detainees with similar scars". The United States’ continued support of the 93rd Division violates the Leahy Act, which prohibits U.S. personnel from knowingly supporting organizations that flagrantly violate human rights .

In 2004, the United Nations launched a plan to disarm pro-government militias. When a commander of the 93rd Division learned of the plan, he renamed part of the division's militia a "private security company" under contract with the Americans, allowing about a third of the division's fighters to remain armed. . Another third kept their weapons by contracting with a Texas-based company to protect road paving crews. (When the Karzai government replaced these private guards with police, the leaders of the 93rd Division planned an attack that killed 15 police officers and then withdrew the contract). The remaining third of the division found themselves threatened by extortion from former colleagues and absconded with weapons to join the Taliban .

The message from the U.S.-led coalition tends to characterize the growing insurgency as an issue of extremists fighting for freedom, but NATO documents I have obtained confirm that the Ishaqqiz have “no good reason” to believe the coalition, who had Oppressed by "Amir Dado". In Panjira, elders encouraged their sons to take up arms to protect the village, and some reached out to former Taliban members. Shakira wanted her husband to do something — help protect the villages, or move them to Pakistan — but he disagreed. In a nearby village, when U.S. troops raided the home of a beloved tribal elder, killing him and leaving his son seriously wounded and paraplegic. The women shouted to their men, "You guys have big headscarves on your heads, but what have you done? You can't even protect us. What kind of men are you? "

Fast forward to 2005, four years after the U.S. invasion, and Shakira's third child is about to be born. Her chores drained her energy — "I worked from morning to night, sweating" — but when she took a break from burning an oven or trimming a peach tree, she realized she The sense of commitment it once had to this life has been lost. Almost every week, she hears about another young man being captured by the Americans or the militia. Her husband was out of work and started smoking opium. Their marriage soured. There is an air of distrust in the house that matches the gloomy atmosphere in the village.

So Shakira watched with interest those men in black robes and holding high white flags as a Tully shuttle bus pulled into Panjira. This time, things might be different, she thought.

In 2006, Britain joined a growing number of U.S. special operations forces working to quell Sonkin's rebellion. Soon, Shakira recalled, Panjira became a "hell on earth." The Taliban attacked patrols, launched raids on fighting outposts and erected barricades. On a hilltop, the Americans commandeered a drug lord's house and transformed it into a compound of sandbags, watchtowers and accordion-shaped barbed wire. Before most of the fighting, young Taliban members visit houses and warn residents to leave immediately: Immediately, the Taliban will attack, the coalition will respond, and the ground will tremble.

Sometimes, even running away is no guarantee of safety . During a fight, Shakira's husband's uncle, Abdul Salam, took refuge at a friend's house. After the fighting, he went to the mosque to pray. Several Taliban members were also there at the time. A coalition airstrike killed nearly everyone inside. The next day, mourners gathered for a funeral; a second attack killed a dozen more. Among the bodies brought back to Panjira were Abdul Salam, his cousin and his three nephews, aged between six and 15.

Growing up, many people Shakira knew were killed in air raids . She is now 27 years old and sleeps restlessly every day, as if she has to get up and take shelter at any time. One night, Shakira was awakened by a screeching noise, thinking her house was going to be demolished. Her husband was still snoring, she cursed him secretly, and crept to the front yard. Coalition military vehicles pass by, dragging on scrap metal scattered ahead. She woke the family - it was too late to evacuate, and Shakira prayed that the Taliban would not attack. She tucked the children into recessed windows - to protect them in case the roof collapsed due to an attack. She covered the children with thick blankets.

Back in the front yard, Shakira found a foreigner's car parked motionless with a pair of antennas pointing skyward. They're going to kill us, she thought. Shakira climbed onto the roof and found the car empty: the soldiers parked and left on foot. She watched them walk across the flyover and disappear into the reeds.

A few fields away, the Taliban and foreigners exchanged fire. For hours, Shakira's family huddled indoors. The walls shook and the children cried. Shakira took out the doll she made, rocked her son Ahmed gently to his chest, and whispered a story to him. When the gunfire fell silent, it was already dawn. Shakira went out and looked again, and the car was still there, unattended. She was shaking with rage—a whole year, about once a month, that she suffered from this horror. The Taliban attacked, but most of her anger was directed at the intruders - why would they let her and her children suffer like this?

A crazy idea flashed through her mind . She rushed into the house and spoke to her mother-in-law. Soldiers are still on the far side of the canal. Shakira found some matches and her mother-in-law got a can of diesel. On the street, a neighbor glanced at the can in her hand, understood immediately, and hurried over to take a can of diesel. Shakira's mother-in-law poured diesel fuel on a tire, then opened the hood, soaking the engine. Shakira struck a match and threw it on the tire.

Inside the house, they watched the sky turn grey from the fire. Before long, they heard the whistling of a helicopter coming from the south. "It's for us!" cried her mother-in-law. Shakira's brother-in-law, who lives with them, frantically gathers the children, but Shakira knows it's too late. She thought, if we were going to die, let's die at home .

They threw themselves into a shallow ditch in the backyard, with adults on top of the children. The ground shook violently, and the helicopter flew away. When they showed up, Shakira saw the foreigners targeting the burning vehicle so that none of its parts fell into enemy hands.

The women of Panjira came to congratulate Shakira. One woman said she was " a hero ". But it was hard for Shakira to muster any pride, just a relief. "I don't think they will come here again," Shakira said. "We finally have peace."