the_taliban_shuffle_-_kim_barker

Warlords then took positions outside the city, shelling it while trying to
kill and intimidate their rivals’ supporters. The Kabul Zoo was not
immune—walls were knocked down or scarred with bullets. The zoo
museum and the restaurant were rocketed.
Fighters from various factions, hungry for meat, soon realized the zoo
had a ready supply. They kebabed the crane and the amingo, roasting
them over an open ame as zoo workers watched. They killed the two
tigers for their pelts. One day a few ghters wanted to see how many
bullets it took to kill an elephant. The answer: forty. Others stole the
wooden fences from the zebra enclosure to feed res. Animals died of
starvation, of disease.
The bedlam inside the zoo mirrored what was happening in the city.
Ask Afghans when the worst period of time was in Kabul, and they’ll
never mention the Soviets or the Taliban. They’ll talk about this time,
the civil war, when chaos and crazy ruled. They’ll talk about the
warlords.
One afternoon at the zoo, a Pashtun ghter inexplicably jumped into
the cage of Marjan, who promptly bit o the man’s arm. The man later
died. The next day, the man’s brother went to the zoo for revenge. He
threw a grenade into the lion cage, which sent shrapnel into Marjan’s
muzzle, destroying one eye and almost blinding him in the other. The
lion’s face was frozen in an expression somewhere between grief and a
Halloween mask, with eyes that appeared to have melted into his nose.
Even then, the indignities were not over.
The Taliban, a Pakistan-supported movement of ethnic Pashtun
students from Islamic schools called madrassas, had seized control of
much of the south. Spreading fear and the sick kind of security that only
fear can deliver, the Taliban marched north and east, nally arriving in
Kabul in 1996. The warlords ed. Taliban leaders then declared that
Afghans must live by their version of Islam. Women could not go
outside without a burqa or a male escort. Men had to pray, grow
beards, and cut their hair. No music, no TV, no photographs of people,
no gambling on bird or dog fights, no flying kites, no fun. With this new
if perverted kind of justice, life calmed down inside the zoo, but only
slightly and only after the zoo director proved that a zoo did not violate
Islam, a task more dicult than it sounds. Even so, bored young