A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [94]
For two years now, the Taliban had been making their way toward Kabul, taking cities from the Mujahideen, ending factional war wherever they’d settled. They had captured the Hazara commander Abdul Ali Mazari and executed him. For months, they’d settled in the southern outskirts of Kabul, firing on the city, exchanging rockets with Ahmad Shah Massoud. Earlier in that September of 1996, they had captured the cities of Jalalabad and Sarobi.
The Taliban had one thing the Mujahideen did not, Rasheed said. They were united.
“Let them come,” he said. “I, for one, will shower them with rose petals.”
* * *
THEY WENT OUT that day, the four of them, Rasheed leading them from one bus to the next, to greet their new world, their new leaders. In every battered neighborhood, Mariam found people materializing from the rubble and moving into the streets. She saw an old woman wasting handfuls of rice, tossing it at passersby, a drooping, toothless smile on her face. Two men were hugging by the remains of a gutted building, in the sky above them the whistle, hiss, and pop of a few firecrackers set off by boys perched on rooftops. The national anthem played on cassette decks, competing with the honking of cars.
“Look, Mayam!” Aziza pointed to a group of boys running down Jadeh Maywand. They were pounding their fists into the air and dragging rusty cans tied to strings. They were yelling that Massoud and Rabbani had withdrawn from Kabul.
Everywhere, there were shouts: Allah-u-akbar!
Mariam saw a bedsheet hanging from a window on Jadeh Maywand. On it, someone had painted three words in big, black letters: ZENDA BAAD TALIBAN! Long live the Taliban!
As they walked the streets, Mariam spotted more signs—painted on windows, nailed to doors, billowing from car antennas—that proclaimed the same.
MARIAM SAW HER first of the Taliban later that day, at Pashtunistan Square, with Rasheed, Laila, and Aziza. A melee of people had gathered there. Mariam saw people craning their necks, people crowded around the blue fountain in the center of the square, people perched on its dry bed. They were trying to get a view of the end of the square, near the old Khyber Restaurant.
Rasheed used his size to push and shove past the onlookers, and led them to where someone was speaking through a loudspeaker.
When Aziza saw, she let out a shriek and buried her face in Mariam’s burqa.
The loudspeaker voice belonged to a slender, bearded young man who wore a black turban. He was standing on some sort of makeshift scaffolding. In his free hand, he held a rocket launcher. Beside him, two bloodied men hung from ropes tied to traffic-light posts. Their clothes had been shredded. Their bloated faces had turned purple-blue.
“I know him,” Mariam said, “the one on the left.”
A young woman in front of Mariam turned around and said it was Najibullah. The other man was his brother. Mariam remembered Najibullah’s plump, mustachioed face, beaming from billboards and storefront windows during the Soviet years.
She would later hear that the Taliban had dragged Najibullah from his sanctuary at the UN headquarters near Darulaman Palace. That they had tortured him for hours, then tied his legs to a truck and dragged his lifeless body through the streets.
“He killed many, many Muslims!” the young Talib was shouting through the loudspeaker. He spoke Farsi with a Pashto accent, then would switch to Pashto. He punctuated his words by pointing to the corpses with his weapon. “His crimes are known to everybody. He was a communist and