Kabul, Afghanistan
By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Correspondent
KABUL, Afghanistan – Behind a metal door on Flower Street, past a courtyard piled with junk, up some steep concrete stairs and along a narrow corridor with ornate metal railings in the style of Stars of David,
lives the last Jew in Afghanistan.
His home is a side-room off the synagogue; a thin mattress laid along one wall is his bed. In one corner, there is a small table with dusty prayer books, three folding chairs, a crumbling carpet, and a few pictures on the wall, including one of a bearded Hassidic Jew. In the corner by the door, opposite the guest’s chair, there is a small blackboard with his name spelled clearly in chalk: Zebulon Simantov. "So that journalists spell my name correctly," he said.
"Who do you work for?" Simantov asked straightaway.
"NBC News," I answered proudly.
 |
| AP file |
| Zebulon Simantov, 45, poses at the synagogue in Kabul on Jan. 25, 2005. |
"So can you give me lots of money," he said, his tone turning a question into a blunt demand.
"No, I’m afraid not."
"Did you bring me whiskey?"
The interview, which I had looked forward to ever since I received the assignment to visit Kabul, quickly became an embarrassment.
"I bring greetings from a friend of yours in Israel," I said.
"That bastard," Simantov said, spitting out a nut, "he’s no friend of mine!"
I knew that Isaac Levy, a Jew who lived in another room in the synagogue, making this odd couple the last two Jews in Israel, had died three years ago. I expressed sympathy.
"Huh," Simantov answered, "I was glad when he died. I didn’t speak to him for years. He tried to get me killed." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4206909.stm
About 5,000 Jews left Afghanistan after the creation of Israel in 1948, and others left after the 1979 Soviet invasion.
CONTINUED >>
Ali Gul is one of many Afghans who lost his entire poppy crop to a police crackdown trying to stop the supply of heroin streaming out of Afghanistan and on to the world market.
Unable to pay off a $2,000 debt to a drug trafficker, Ali was forced to sell his daughter to the person he borrowed money from – making her one of many young women in Afghanistan becoming known as "Opium Brides." NBC News Jim Maceda reports from Kabul, Afghanistan.
CONTINUED >>
By Carol Grisanti, NBC News Producer
KABUL, Afghanistan – When Mirwali, 25, finally got the chance to talk to his 65-year-old father, who is held in the U.S.-run military prison at Bagram Airbase, outside of Kabul, he was so overcome with emotion he couldn’t speak. Mirwali covered his face with the long sash of grey silk hanging down from the wrap of his turban, held his head in his hands, and sobbed.
Their meeting wasn’t face-to-face, but rather via a video conference connection provided by the U.S. military and set up at the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Kabul. The video conference program is a compromise between the U.S. military authorities and the Red Cross.
Each family call is limited to 20 minutes – but after many months, sometimes years, of no communication, it is better than nothing.
"We consider this as a positive intermediary step between nothing and face-to-face visits," said Graziella Leite Piccolo, the spokeswoman for the Red Cross in Kabul. "We continue to pressure, to insist on the relevance of face-to-face visits," she said.
Red Cross connection
There have been more than 600 family video conference calls since the program started in January of this year – a lifeline for families who had lost all hope of ever seeing their loved ones again.
Dozens of families turn up at the Red Cross offices in Kabul every Monday to wait their turn at the video booths provided by the U.S. military.
CONTINUED >>
By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent
OUTSIDE GARMSER, Afghanistan –
The U.S. Marines began a major operation to try to disrupt the Taliban’s stranglehold on southern Afghanistan early Tuesday. NBC News’ Jim Maceda is embedded with Marines at Forward Operating Base Dwyer outside of Garmser, Afghanistan, in Helmand province, and responded to questions via satellite phone.
You’ve reported from Afghanistan extensively since the war began in 2001 – what makes this military embed different from your past trips to Afghanistan?
The most significant difference is that this embed is in southern Afghanistan. Most of my trips into Afghanistan over the last couple of years have been with U.S. forces in the east, along the Pakistan border. During those missions, the U.S. troops were self-contained, giving themselves their own orders. Here they are working with the British-led NATO forces responsible for Helmand province.
The troops in the east were making big changes, I think, in improving the situation for local Afghans up and down the border with Pakistan. In April 2006, they started to apply a kind of Gen. Petraeus counter-insurgency plan, which has not been the case in the south. Since probably 2002, this area has been no-man’s land for Westerners and for international coalition forces, and it has become a safe-haven and fiefdom of the Taliban.
The reason why we are here now is because we had the opportunity to embed with the first large contingent of U.S. forces to operate this far south in Helmand province, the first Marines to be here since they left in 2002. So this is really a kind of "back to the future" type operation. The Marines arrived in Afghanistan about six weeks ago, and after weeks of preparation, the first major offensive operation launched today.
CONTINUED >>
Three-thousand Marines from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit have returned to Afghanistan to assist their NATO allies battling the Taliban. NBC News correspondent Jim Maceda, who is embedded with the force, reports on the Marines’ first southern Afghan tour in six years.
CONTINUED >>
By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent
No matter how many times I’ve visited the country, or been embedded with US forces, or covered the lives of ordinary Afghans caught up in the almost 6-year-old war, I still cringe when asked – and I’m ALWAYS asked when I get back – ‘how’s things in Afghanistan?’’ Invariably I pause for a few seconds, hoping to find the magic answer as I collect my thoughts. But there is no silver bullet: ‘’Good,’’ I venture. ‘’And bad.’’
In fact, if you were to list – as I often do after each trip – both the encouraging and disturbing developments in Afghanistan, or what is better now than, say, a year ago, I suspect your columns would be pretty much like mine: equal. And that holds true on ANY scale. Take Kabul, for instance. On the plus side, business is booming. 5-star hotels, shopping malls, modern glassy trade centers, electronics stores and expensive foreign cars jam the streets. Also, former enemies now seem to be working together. At a recent reception for the Ahmad Shah Masood Foundation, held at the relatively luxurious Serena Hotel in central Kabul, the ‘beautiful’ people I saw tended to be former Mujihadeen generals and wily warlords. Those nice, smiling men sipping their black tea and chatting now were killing each other’s militias 10 years ago.
But, say critics, Kabul’s success is built on nothing but funny money: either from the billions of dollars in humanitarian assistance that never spread beyond the capital, or from war booty and drug money. And while there may be bubbles of peace here and there, overall, Kabul is too unsafe today for a foreign reporter to walk its streets without the kind of protection he would take into the streets of Baghdad. What about Afghanistan’s progressive President, former Baltimore restaurateur Hamid Karzai? We, in the West, tend to see him as a bastion of moderation, a leader who understands the value of bringing democracy to a nation that still lingers in a previous millennium. But many Afghans see Karzai as the failed leader of a failed state, rampant with corruption. ‘’This government and all of those in it are thinking only of themselves, ‘’ says one outspoken critic, Dr Wadi Safi of Kabul University. ‘’They don’t know the nation, and they don’t think they are accountable to the people because nobody punishes them.’’
CONTINUED >>
