Posters extolling Samaruddin, who was killed after shooting dead two American soldiers last month, as a shahid and a ghazi--a killer of infidels--stare from shop walls and windows in Maimana, the capital of northwestern Faryab province.
Image by Anna Badkhen, Afghanistan, Beneath a span beam bridge at the northern border of this provincial capital, the Maimana River trickles to a dun seep and turns to dust. Behind it, the layered escarpments of Turkestan Mountains' 12,foot crest fade to opal, then to nothing, evanescing into the blown-glass sky.
Between the mountains and the stream, on the dusty outskirts of Maimana, a handful of quivering flags mark the newest shrine in Faryab province: the grave of Samaruddin, a young border police officer killed by NATO troops after he murdered two American soldiers last month.
In this land of transubstantiation, the double metamorphosis of a policeman into a murderer and then, almost instantaneously, a saint lays bare the ultimate fulcrum for all the defeats of all the invasions that have befallen Afghanistan since time immemorial: the fervent, almost mystical, hatred of the occupier. A hatred that scores the face of every swallow-burrowed scarp, nourishes the root of every fruit tree, and supercedes all other loyalties and enmities.
Even the cops in Maimana call Samaruddin "the shahid": the martyr. Bismillah, a district police chief in whose Maimana suburb of domed clay houses and withering apricot orchards Samaruddin's body was buried.
