Sunday 4 August 2013

A day’s toil in the suicide bombers’ graveyard


In a city with no shortage of hard jobs, Khwaja Naqib Ahmad lays claim to one of the toughest of all — burying the unclaimed dead.

Mr. Ahmad, left, with his colleague Ghulam Sarwar. They work at a graveyard where suicide bombers are buried.

Interred in his graveyard are orphans, homeless people and other nameless victims, who are sent off with a prayer and a tablet-shaped headstone. But increasingly the bodies that turn up here belong to another class of the unwanted: suicide bombers.

Mr. Ahmad has been a municipal government courier for the last five years, responsible for shuttling bodies between the morgue and his sloped and barren plot of rocky soil on the eastern edge of Kabul. It has been a period marked by a steady stream of suicide attacks, which were virtually unheard-of in 2001, when the war began.

The work has grown harder for Mr. Ahmad, exacting as much of an emotional toll as a physical one. He says virtually nothing of his work to strangers, seeking comfort in the Koran. The scent of decomposed flesh lingers on his clothes. In the winter, when the roads are impassable, he hoists the corpses on his shoulders and carries them. The cemetery sits on a slight hill overlooking an emerald lagoon, incongruously beautiful.

“I look at them as humans and treat their bodies with respect because I believe that they were full of hope and life when they were alive,” he said. “I do not think about what they do. I become sad when somebody cuts a tree, let alone when people kill each other.”

For years he has searched for a replacement, someone to handle the physical challenge — turning the unyielding earth in sun and snow — and the mental tax the work exacts. They all turn him down. So the 52-year-old father of eight with a salt-and-pepper beard carries on, often with the help of a friend.

Three times a week, he visits the site, situated just past a mud village on the way out of town. He comes to tend to the graves and to ensure that no one has tampered with his work. He lives in fear that the Taliban will come to reclaim the bodies of their bombers. Only once has a family tried to collect remains.

“Normally no one claims the bodies,” he said. “Most of these people don’t have families.”

Having made peace with the worst of his work, Mr. Ahmad has found ways around the grim details. Every time there is a suicide attack, he says, his colleagues circle his desk at the municipal center in central Kabul, smiles edging up their faces.

“My colleagues make fun of me: ‘Khwaja, be prepared, there is another attack!’ ” he said.

“What can you do?” he continued. “Afghanistan has been at war for the last 30 years. One of the ways we have survived is a sense of humor.”

Empathy for the authors of indiscriminate violence is scarce here, but Mr. Ahmad finds his humanity in Islam.

“Every single Muslim’s duty is to bury his Muslim brother, no matter how rich he is, poor he is or what social status he comes from,” he said. “To me, my job is important. I don’t care who I am burying. I see no difference between the addict or the bomber.”

Suicide attacks have remained somewhat steady since 2009, averaging about 150 a year, according to statistics from the NATO-led coalition. But the complexity of attacks and the number of bombers have increased.

Violence has been especially focused on Kabul this summer, as the insurgency targets the heart of the national government. At least a half-dozen major suicide attacks have rattled the city in the last three months, striking American convoys, international aid agencies, the Supreme Court and a hotel believed to house Western intelligence personnel.

Attacks come in many forms, and typically at the hands of young men. Often educated in madrasas in Afghanistan or neighboring Pakistan, they have memorized religious scriptures day after day. The more sophisticated insurgent groups plan their attacks for months or longer, training their attackers in weapons and explosives before carrying out orchestrated assaults on high-value targets.

Some, like the bombers that attacked the Ariana Hotel in June, near the presidential palace, speak English and are well financed. In that attack, the insurgents drove vehicles outfitted to look armored. They wore American military uniforms and carried high-quality counterfeit coalition identification badges, according to coalition officials.

At the International Organization for Migration, an agency that has worked with the United Nations and another target this summer, six insurgents stormed the compound and fired rockets on it from neighboring rooftops, staging a six-hour battle in the heart of the city. For these long battles, they bring little to sustain themselves: often just water, pistachios and a pocketful of Pakistani rupees.

The insurgents usually fight to the death, leaving a trail of carnage in their wake. When the bloodshed ends, Mr. Ahmad is there to collect the bodies.

On a clear day last month, Mr. Ahmad and his colleague, Ghulam Sarwar, arrived at the cemetery to bury three anonymous bodies. Were they among the attackers who had recently carried out the assault on the Ariana Hotel? The men would not say, but often the bodies of attackers are kept for weeks as they undergo forensic examination, breaking with the Islamic tradition of burying the dead within 24 hours.

The corpses arrived in white shrouds, their stench faintly masked by a rose perfume. The men took the bodies to the top of the graveyard, where crude tombstones jut into the air like crooked teeth. White and blue latex gloves used to handle the departed covered the ground.

With a pickaxe and shovel, the men widened the pre-dug graves, raking stones from the earth the size of melons. Sweat poured from their brows.

They placed the bodies into the ground and covered them with the sun-bleached earth. When they finished, Mr. Ahmad tucked a flat black stone at the head of each grave and marked them with a number. The men poured water over the mounds, rubbed their hands and faces, and turned toward Mecca to pray.

Sunday 4 August 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/world/asia/a-days-toil-in-the-suicide-bombers-graveyard.html?_r=0

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Death toll of flash floods in Eastern Afghanistan rises to 58


Heavy rains swept across eastern Afghanistan, leveling homes and killing at least 58 people in five provinces, while an estimate 30 others remain missing, officials said Sunday.

Provincial spokesmen in Nangarhar, Kabul, Khost, Laghman and Nuristan said that all the floods struck early Saturday. Flash floods are common in those provinces and all are fed by rivers that eventually intersect in Nangarhar.

In Kabul's Surobi district, police chief Shaghasi Ahmadi said 34 people were killed in a remote and mountainous area. He said 22 of the bodies from Surobi were later found downstream in Laghman.

Surobi has a number of rivers running through it. It is also rife with Taliban activity.

Ahmadi said food, tents and other emergency supplies were being sent to the district from the capital.

Downstream in the adjacent province of Nangarhar, a government statement said 17 people were killed by the floods.

President Hamid Karzai's office said another seven died in Khost and Nuristan.

Rains can quickly weaken the structures of the mud-walled homes that dot the countryside in Afghanistan, causing the buildings to quickly collapse during heavy downpours. In neighboring Pakistan on Saturday, the same storm system brought heavy rains that caused more than 100 homes to collapse and caved in a factory wall, killing at least 14 people.

Sunday 4 August 2013

http://www.weather.com/news/flash-floods-kill-58-eastern-afghanistan-20130804

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Malaysian rescuers recover three bodies; 37 missing at sea


Malaysian rescuers today found three bodies at sea as hopes faded for 37 other Indonesians who went missing days earlier when their boat sank.

The wooden boat was believed to be carrying 44 people including women and children from Malaysia’s southern state of Johor to Indonesia’s Batam island. It sank in heavy seas late Thursday and four men were rescued on Friday.

Malaysian authorities found two bodies today, while fishermen discovered another corpse, the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency said in a statement.

“It is believed these three bodies — two women and one man — are victims of the boat accident,” it said. “Thirty-seven are still missing.”

The accident occurred 13 nautical miles (24 kilometres) off the coast.

The passengers are believed to have been illegal migrants working in Malaysia who wanted to return to their country to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, the end of the Muslim fasting month next week, without passing border controls.

Amran Daud, an official with the maritime agency, said earlier today that six vessels had been dispatched, while several helicopters were on standby with the weather clear.

“After three days in the ocean the chances are very slim to get a survivor,” he told AFP, adding based on the survivors’ accounts the boat was “not seaworthy”.

Survivor Edey Muliadi was quoted by The Star daily as saying that when high waves hit the boat, the passengers panicked and crowded to one side of it, causing it to overturn.

“When we were thrown into the sea, all I could hear was people and children screaming in the pitch darkness,” said the 26-year-old, who worked as an excavator operator near the capital Kuala Lumpur.

He said the passengers tried to hold on to the overturned boat in the storm, but the vessel sank.

Muliadi said he managed to hold on to a plastic container filled with hot petrol, some of which spilled and scalded his chest, abdomen and hands.

“I was also bitten by small fish. It was really painful but all I could think of was to stay alive for my family,” he was quoted by The Star as saying.

Another survivor, a farm helper who was hoping to reach his home island of Lombok via Batam, said he paid some RM1,300 ringgit for what was to be his first trip home in 13 years.

Amran said the four men would be handed over to Indonesian consulate officials to be returned to their country.

An estimated four million foreigners, mostly from poorer countries in the region such as Indonesia and Myanmar, work in Malaysia — many illegally. They fill low-paying jobs shunned by locals on plantations, construction sites and in factories.

In mid-July an Indonesian woman died and seven people went missing after their wooden boat capsized off Johor.

Twenty-seven Indonesians, heading to Batam without valid travel documents, were rescued.

Sunday 4 August 2013

http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/rescuers-recover-3-bodies-37-missing-at-sea

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