The Cave Dwellers of Bamian

Sanawbar Hussain had walked the path a hundred times, up the steep cliff from the cave where she makes her home. But this time, as she hurried to reach her crying baby one day last winter, she stepped on a land mine a few feet from the mouth of her cave.

In one of the most remote corners of Afghanistan, in an area where displaced families live in caves carved in sandstone cliffs, Hussain managed to get emergency surgery at a tiny clinic run by the International Committee of the Red Cross. A Finnish surgeon amputated her right leg and saved her life.

Land mines are just one hazard among many for the cave dwellers of Bamian. The families scavenge for food while children die of disease or malnutrition. They freeze in the harsh winters and breathe noxious smoke from the crude stoves that heat their caves and their food. There is little work for the men, no school for the children, no solace for the women.

“It’s a very hard way to live, but our caves are all we have left,” said Hussain’s husband, Mohammed, a long-limbed man with wild black hair and yellow teeth.

The Hussains and hundreds of other ethnic Hazaras, a Shiite Muslim minority in a predominantly Sunni nation, have been living in caves since the Taliban pillaged and burned a string of Hazara villages west of Bamian in central Afghanistan last summer, slaughtering thousands of people. International relief agencies have been uncovering mass graves in the area since January.

The caves were hewn in the same sheer cliffs as the two majestic Buddha statues that were destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001. Some are centuries old, cut in the cliff face by early Buddhist monks for monastic cells and later used by ascetics, hermits and nomads. Many once contained frescoes, statues and elaborate lantern roofs.

The caves honeycomb the cliffs, some more than 100 feet up and accessible only by roughhewn steps.

About 400 people live in the caves, according to Werner Amrein, head of the small Red Cross delegation in Bamian. Almost all are Hazara survivors of the villages plundered by the Taliban. Every three months, they receive Red Cross rations of rice, biscuits and vegetable oil, along with blankets, tarps and jerrycans. The supplies have helped reduce, but not eliminate, child mortality, Amrein said.

Many of the men, who normally are subsistence farmers, earn the equivalent of a dollar a day hauling produce on donkey carts in the Bamian bazaar. The women and children haul water from streams and forage for firewood. The cave dwellers say their children aren’t allowed to attend Bamian’s schools because they aren’t registered in the town.

Karim Khalili, the Hazara warlord who rules Bamian and the surrounding region known as Hazarajat, said the cave dwellers should return to their villages as soon as possible and begin rebuilding homes and schools. But the families say their fields have been mined by the Taliban and they have no money for reconstruction.

“The ones in the caves are the lucky ones,” Khalili said, shrugging. “Other refugees are living in the mountains, in tents, in abandoned houses.”

Khalili himself had no home when he returned in triumph to Bamian in mid-November after his soldiers drove out the Taliban with the help of U.S. warplanes and Special Forces units. He said he lived temporarily in the Red Cross clinic, which had been ransacked by the Taliban.

In Bamian, where caves are a prime residential option, housing is primitive and in short supply.

Khalili, for instance, now lives in what he calls his “guest house,” a modest, reconstructed concrete building where Special Forces soldiers are frequent guests, arriving in pickups or dune buggies.

The Special Forces soldiers are housed in a rough, fortress-like compound made of mud and clay, guarded by Khalili’s gunmen.

Red Cross officials and other Western relief workers live in a tent city within a compound of mud and concrete buildings.

Compared to some of the local housing options, the caves are airy and relatively comfortable, thanks to “home improvements.” The dwellers have installed wooden doors and window frames fitted with clear plastic. They’ve carved shelves into the walls, covered the floors with tarps, and put decorations and coat hooks on the walls.

The centerpiece of each cave is a homemade stove, complete with elaborate piping that vents most smoke but permits a permanent blue haze to settle in, especially at mealtimes.

“We can survive here, but we are accustomed to proper houses. We had very fine homes before the Taliban destroyed them,” said Mohammed Hussein, a squat, bearded man of 35. He has carved an elaborate staircase leading to his cave, halfway up the yellow cliffs, where his family and his brother’s family live in a single room.

Just below Hussein’s cave is the cave that housed Sanawbar Hussain, who was eight months pregnant when she stepped on the land mine on a dirt path above her home in late January. She lay bleeding for 30 minutes, she said, before someone fetched her husband from the bazaar and he found a car to take her to the clinic.

Because the clinic had been plundered by the Taliban, it was barely functioning and still being refurbished, said Norma McRae, the project manager. But a tiny operating theater has been restored. There, Dr. Yukka Siegberg, a Finnish surgeon who has performed more than 3,000 amputations in Afghanistan, removed Hussain’s right leg. She lost her baby.

After eight more visits for skin grafts to her left leg, Hussain recuperated in a recovery room at the clinic. In the next bed was another cave dweller, a premature baby named Sardar. Born in a cave, she was a month old but weighed just 2 pounds. She fit easily into the palm of Michael Woodman, a Zimbabwean physician who was trying to save her.

“The prognosis is pretty poor,” Woodman said through a translator to the baby’s mother, Sima, a slender girl of 17. “She’s so small and weak.”

Sima was weak herself, and she sat slumped in a chair. She said she had tried, with little success, to breast-feed the baby until her mother insisted that they go to the clinic.

Woodman began trying to feed the baby fortified infant formula through a nose tube. Sardar, wrinkled, red-faced and barely visible inside a swaddling cloth, let out a weak squawk. Woodman turned to the mother. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It really doesn’t look good.”

Several weeks later, Hussain and her husband arrived in Kabul, the capital, for treatment at a Red Cross orthopedic center. Freshly scrubbed and seated in a wheelchair, she looked radiant and healthy. The skin grafts had saved her left leg from amputation.

Hussain had news about Sardar, the premature baby.

“Alive,” she said. “The baby is still alive.” The infant formula had saved the child, she said.

Hussain faces several weeks of physical therapy. She will be fitted for a prothesis and will learn to walk again.

“She needs to work harder,” said Alberto Cairo, the orthopedic center’s director, patting Hussain’s shoulder. “She’s lazy.”

Hussain blushed and smiled. “I want to learn to walk,” she told Cairo. “I want to be able to go back home.”

If she works hard, Cairo promised her, it will be only a matter of weeks before she is back home in the caves of Bamian.