KABUL, Afghanistan | It was a somber day of celebration for mothers in Afghanistan.
They were not exchanging gifts with their children but instead telling tales of the deaths of their sons who died fighting during and after the Soviet invasion of 1979.
When Salah´s third son died fighting the Russians, she didn´t know until they brought his body to Kabul on the day he was to be married.
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“I screamed in agony,” said the elderly woman who recalled how her family dwindled to nothing during a succession of wars that dominated her lifetime.
“I went back to the house where I took the flowers we had gathered and buried him with them,” she said.
More than 50 women gathered in the privacy of a large living room in the home of Registani Saleh Mohammad, one of two members of parliament who represent the Panjshir Valley of Northern Afghanistan.
Not far from their meeting, a group of young boys, one only a toddler, herded goats through the rocky streets while dodging Kabul´s confusing traffic.
Their sons, said the mothers, once played in the streets together like the boys outside. Now, their children lay wrapped in white shrouds, deep in the rough earth of Afghanistan.
“Time to time I can hear your voice,” said a young woman reading words dictated earlier by an illiterate older mother who sat at the front of the room. To a visitor unfamiliar with the language, it sounded like poetry, or even a prayer said in a soft voice with tones resembling a sad piece of music.
“When I´m ready to die, you told me not to cry. A mother´s tears are like water for flowers that give life to her children, and even when they are taken back to God, a mother´s tears never stop flowing.” said Mr. Saleh Mohammad, a former mujahedeen commander, who fought along side the legendary Ahmed Shah Masood.
“How can I describe him - it is not easy to say. Masood was not just a friend, but a father, a teacher, a brother and a great warrior for his people,” said Mr. Saleh Mohammad.
Mr. Masood, known as the “Lion of the Panjshir” was never defeated by the Taliban and his ethnic Tajik homeland the Hindu Kush mountains of northeastern Afghanistan was never completely conquered by either Soviet or Afghan troops.
Throughout Kabul, portraits of the “great Masood” as some call him are displayed in shop windows and car windshields. Many Afghan admirers believe they can see his face and beard when the moon is full.
“Can you see the beard?” asked Sher, a young man who guards the front gate of a Kabul neighborhood. “No matter how bad things become, we know that the great Masood is watching over us. He is our strength.”
Mr. Masood was assassinated by al Qaeda suicide bombers posing as journalists on Sept. 9, 2001, just two days before the terrorist attacks in the United States.
When U.S. Special Forces backed by air power attacked Afghanistan less than a month later, Mr. Masood’s fighters joined the front lines and within weeks drove the Taliban from Kabul.
“These women are also the real heroes of the war,” Mr. Saleh Mohammad said. “These are the mothers of Afghanistan.”
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