Posted on 10/27/2004 6:20:33 AM PDT by 2banana
Graves become shrines to Taliban, al-Qaida fighters in Afghanistan
By James Rupert Newsday
MATA CHINA, Afghanistan — Standing before the rows of graves, Afghan men open their hands to the sky. Their lips move in silent prayer to honor the dead.
These dead are fighters of the Taliban and al-Qaida, killed in 2001 when an American bomb crushed the mosque nearby where they had mustered outside the eastern Afghan city of Khost. Since then, U.S. officials have paid for the mosque to be rebuilt. It stands freshly painted, but empty, a few hundred yards down the road.
There has been building, too, at the fighters' grave site. Donations by visitors have paid for brick walls and decorative iron grates around the graves, and there are plans for a roof over the enclosure. Unlike the American-funded mosque, the shrine draws a steady stream of visitors from eastern Afghanistan and from neighboring Pakistan.
Three years after America's military defeat of the Taliban and al-Qaida, graves of their dead — here and elsewhere — have become shrines for the ethnic Pashtuns who live in much of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The shrines underscore a reality for the U.S. effort to encourage democracy in both countries — an effort that formally defines the Taliban as an enemy.
While Afghanistan's Taliban are reviled by the international community and by most Afghans for their brutally oppressive rule here in the 1990s, they remain heroes for many Pashtuns, Afghanistan's most powerful ethnic group. And even for Afghans and Pakistanis who oppose the militants' aims and violence, there is deep respect for their spiritual commitment to a religious faith that many Muslims believe is under attack by the Christian and secular West.
The shrine at Mata China has 40 graves, most of them for Arabs and Pakistanis who died alongside the Afghan Taliban.
The shrines "are a sign that people respect the Taliban and want them to have a place in our government even now," said Niyamatullah, a merchant who stopped to pray at the Taliban shrine in Kandahar early this month. (Many Afghans go by only one name.) Around him, standing amid headstones and flags dedicated to the martyrs, Pashtun men in turbans acclaimed the idea that President Hamid Karzai, who is cruising to an overwhelming victory in the vote count from this month's presidential election, should include Taliban members in the new government he is expected to form in coming weeks.
Karzai has said that reconciliation with Taliban members is possible in principle.
At the Kandahar shrine, the other demand of Karzai was that he get prisoners — many of them Taliban — released from Afghan or U.S. jails.
Afghanistan's roughly 12 million ethnic Pashtuns are divided between north and south, and talk of a political role for the Taliban seemed more widespread in Kandahar, where the movement was born, than here in the north.
At the Mata China shrine, the discussion was not of politics, but of the spiritual power that arises from the Taliban's commitment to its faith.
The men buried here had gathered in the mosque to prepare an attack on an Afghan faction allied with the Americans, residents said. "They died in a mosque, on a holy spot, and so they are martyrs," said Noor Wali Khan, a peasant from a nearby village.
Some of the worshippers said the men were martyrs, and their souls blessed, because they had been fighting non-Muslims in defense of a Muslim land. Such men were surely guaranteed a place in heaven, even if their struggle against foreigners was in defense of Muslim tyrants, they said. But since they had also been fighting other Muslim Afghans, people were divided on whether their combat earned them martyrdom.
People here have given the shrine an aura of spirituality. The graves are set in two long rows with painted metal markers telling what is known of the men buried there. They give names and hometowns for many of the Afghans and for several Pakistanis who had come from Karachi to fight the Americans. But most of the Arabs are anonymous.
Two local men, one of them mentally disabled, keep the shrine swept clean. They provide salt for worshippers to sprinkle on the graves and rice that can be bought to feed doves at the site.
But the splendor of the shrine comes from the cloths of every color that are strung, knotted, tangled and stretched in a web that nearly covers the grave site like a roof. Each cloth represents a prayer, brought in hopes that barakat — spiritual power such as that of martyred souls — might help a request to be better heard and answered by God.
The appeal to God through miracle-working saints and martyrs is a tradition in much of the Muslim world, but the men buried here would almost certainly be horrified at having been made part of it. The puritanical interpretation of Islam for which they fought rejects such customs as a corruption of the faith.
But Afghanistan's deep Islamic traditions have outlived them. "I saw a kuchi [nomad] whose legs could not work and who came with his family to pray for the martyrs' souls," said Khan, the peasant. "After some time, he got up and walked. ... He said, 'These men truly are martyrs in paradise, that they have healed me.' "
The logic of the muslim mind that we are up against...
Since the terrorists love to blow our things up, we should blow up this shrine ASAP
Let's build them some more "shrines".
How's about that 6' 6" grave around Tora Bora?
Make them graveyards even bigger to hold the next batch ...
Kudos to our coalition forces for creating lots of shrines!
These Pashtuns are honoring the graves of men who, if they were alive, would kill them for the sacrilege of honoring graves.
I don't know. Isn't it a fitting revenge and a message of hope that these men, who were willing to die for their intolerant view of Islam, found this fight becoming absolutely meaningless to those who just mourn their passing ?
"It stands freshly painted, but empty, a few hundred yards down the road."
I guess we've answered that question.
I want the guy who ordered the shrine rebuilt using my tax dollars FIRED RIGHT NOW. My tax dollars should only be spent on bombs, missles and bullet to kill the terrorists, not rebuild a stupid ass shrine that the terrorists will look at for the next couple of years then enter it and use it for shelter to fire on our troops.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.