through Khost’s northeastern valleys, so local Afghans had to brave routine violence to travel on it. In Khost City, Dilawar found three customers who were headed to the Yakubi district. It was a perfect arrangement for Dilawar: his customers’ fare would provide plenty of money for fuel and also take him closer to where his sisters lived.
His customers crammed into the Corolla. Like Dilawar, they had recently returned to Khost province after many years of fighting had forced them out of the country. One of them, Parkhudin, had worked in Dubai when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. He scratched out a modest living cleaning fish, fixing nets, and working in factories. After the US invasion, Parkhudin joined the “campaign forces” that aided American troops in the fight against the Taliban.8
Parkhudin and his friend Zakim Khan, a local farmer, were looking for a ride to Yakubi, where Khan’s sister lived; she was preparing a meal for them to celebrate Eid. Abdul Rahim, a young baker, was the third passenger in Dilawar’s taxi.
The trip from Khost to Yakubi would take just under an hour. Dilawar and his passengers headed out of town, past the lush green swaths of farms and fields that encircled the city, beyond the edge of Salerno’s perimeter that pierced the horizon, and continued on the dusty road toward the stark valleys.
The road became bumpier as they drew closer to Yakubi, and their car vibrated on the poorly graveled surface. After driving fifteen minutes past Salerno, they dropped into a narrow canyon and went by a remote cemetery festooned with tattered green flags that marked the graves of Arab warriors who helped support the mujahideen or supported the Taliban.9 An uninterrupted desert vista stretched before them, dotted only with sparse clumps of grass.
A small patrol of armed Afghans suddenly emerged and spilled onto the road. They shouted orders and stopped Dilawar’s car, then brusquely yanked him and his passengers out. Another taxi appeared. It was on its way to Khost, and the driver slowed down to steer clear of the armed men and avoid inspection. The soldiers searched Dilawar’s car and found an electric stabilizer and some walkie-talkies that Parkhudin had brought with him.
Four Afghans in a white Toyota with electrical gear and communications equipment, heading east (toward Pakistan) to a treacherous district in Khost—it was enough to arouse suspicion. Parkhudin admitted that the walkie-talkies were his and that he used them to communicate with the “campaign forces” when he helped combat the Taliban. But he didn’t have a uniform or proof of his connection to those forces. The soldiers brought Parkhudin to their commander, who searched him and found phone numbers for Dubai and Pakistan in his pocket.
Could he be al Qaeda? Why else would he have foreign numbers? And why was the driver transporting an electrical device? What was it for? Was he using it to fire rockets? Those questions were all it took.
The soldiers loaded the four Afghans into their vehicle and sped away. No one explained to them where they were being taken and what lay ahead. Their trip lasted only a few minutes, as they were first taken into American custody in Salerno. Burly American soldiers hauled them out of the vehicle and instructed them to lie down beside a chain link fence.
Dilawar trembled, and his eyes fell downcast. Strangers now surrounded him—young American soldiers with M16s slung across their shoulders, their eyes concealed by opaque plastic glasses—and he was in an unfamiliar place, wedged between his former passengers.
One hour had passed since the time of their capture.
The soldiers approached and ordered the Afghan prisoners to stand upright. They fastened the detainees’ wrists behind their backs with stiff white plastic flex-cuffs and pulled heavy dark hoods over their heads. The Afghans were then ordered to lie flat on the ground, and their ankles were cinched together with the same plastic ties.
Hours went by. Parkhudin remembered that they were left in this position on the ground outside; they couldn’t extend their limbs in a relaxed position because their wrists and ankles remained bound. Vehicles rolled past, jets screeched, and helicopters thundered above them day and night, making sleep difficult. Bored soldiers would occasionally throw small rocks at them and laugh.
Eventually, they were told they were being shipped elsewhere. Soldiers helped raise them off the ground, and their joints ached from hours of atrophy. The four prisoners were tethered together and walked forward on a gravel road, unsure where they were being shepherded. Blinded by their hoods, they could rely only on their muffled senses to grasp what would happen next. They could feel heavy rotor wash beat down on them from a transport helicopter. They were loaded into an enclosed space, then felt vibrations and the sensation of being airborne. They were being ferried from Salerno to the Bagram Air Base.
Since the day they were apprehended, time had blurred from one sleepless day to the next. But after their flight, it quickly sped up. They arrived in Bagram in what felt like less than an hour, and were loaded onto a bus and escorted to a building where they were finally unhooded. It was now December 5, four days since their arrest. None of the new detainees knew it at the time, but it was one day after a Bagram detainee known as Habibullah had died.
Their eyes burned, and they squinted against the light in their new surroundings. Once their vision cleared they saw a brightly lit hall where soldiers shuffled among prisoners, organizing them into a single-file line. Then they were ordered to strip.
“We were very ashamed, but we could not do anything,” said Parkhudin.
After a brisk medical check by Army medics, the prisoners were ordered to put on orange uniforms and herded into a cell made of chain link fence. “They were giving us water to drink and bringing us food, and there was a big drumlike pot we used as bathroom,” said Parkhudin. “But we were not allowed to talk to each other.”
They were jammed in with ten or fifteen others. Qader Khandan and Said Abaceen, two detainees from Khost whom I met during my trip there, went through the same sequence months earlier. At first, Khandan was forced to engage in acts designed more to humiliate than cause discomfort. Khandan said he was given a toothbrush and water and ordered to wash the floor while his hands were bound. Then soldiers dirtied the floor and made him start over.
Like Dilawar and his passengers, Khandan was neither permitted to look at soldiers nor allowed to speak. Infractions were met with a routine response.
“Punishment,” Khandan said in English, invoking a term that was commonly used by US soldiers throughout his detention. And “punishment” for Khandan meant “forced standing”—a stress position that involved prolonged, painful standing—for two hours, he said.10
The first time prisoners deviated from the rules, they were forced to stare into a bright light for two or three hours. First it stung. Then it became blinding. And finally, their heads pounded from the pain.
“It was not only me,” said Said Abaceen, who was in Bagram in early 2003. “I think all the prisoners there were speaking to each other and [forced] to look into the light, one night or for ten hours.” Abaceen later learned that his eyes had sustained permanent damage and he has to wear sunglasses on sunny days to lessen the pain.
One by one, detainees were led from the holding cell to small individual cells. According to prisoners’ descriptions, these cells were not high enough for standing upright nor long enough for lying down.
“It was a place designed so that you cannot sleep and cannot relax,” said Khandan.
The ordeal had already rattled Dilawar. Parkhudin had known the taxi driver only since he hired him in Khost, but to him, Dilawar seemed terribly afraid: “He was not like a brave guy—he was not used to this kind of problem.”
Fellow inmates often heard Dilawar crying to his captors, “I’m not with these people. I’m a driver and I don’t know who they are…I just don’t know. I didn’t know these people.”
Soon a regimen of interrogations would begin.
Dilawar came from a family of seven brothers and three sisters, and was always considered quiet and shy. When he was seventeen years old, his family married him off to a local girl from Khost, and soon afterward they had a daughter, Rashida.
His