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Samim Faramarz was an animal lover who often rescued kittens and needy little ones. Here, he comforts a dog that he found semi-conscious in a street in Kabul.
Samim Faramarz was an animal lover who often rescued kittens and needy little ones. Here, he comforts a dog that he found semi-conscious in a street in Kabul.
Photo: Washington Post Photo by Pamela Constable
Samim Faramarz was an animal lover who often rescued kittens and needy little ones. Here, he comforts a dog that he found semi-conscious in a street in Kabul.
Samim Faramarz was an animal lover who often rescued kittens and needy little ones. Here, he comforts a dog that he found semi-conscious in a street in Kabul.
Photo: Washington Post Photo by Pamela Constable
KABUL, Afghanistan – When I entered Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, I was surrounded by young men who had fought in anti-insurgency militias and whose former commanders had fought the Soviet army. One of them stood guard all day in front of my hotel in Jalalabad, his Kalashnikov rifle worn in his arms. He was about 18 years old. I asked him if he had already been to school. He shook his head sadly and said, "No, I grew up with this gun, I have never worn a pen."
In the years that followed, I lived and worked in Kabul for long periods, watching a new generation of Afghans evolve in conditions very different from those that were in times of war and destruction.
Money has flocked from abroad, funding schools, literacy courses and scholarships. Civil rule has returned and Afghan leaders have struggled to build a democratic system on the ashes of conflict, predation by warlords and religious repression. Public universities have reopened and private universities have been established, including the highly regarded American University of Afghanistan.
Internet has arrived and, more recently, social media has also exposed formerly isolated youth to a world of ideas and information, as well as temptations. It raised the hope that Afghanistan could leave behind a culture of power and become a more open, inclusive and peaceful society.
One of these young people was my friend Samim Faramarz, a television reporter who died Wednesday in a suicide bombing in Kabul while he was live from the site.
Samim was 28 and he earned $ 400 a month for politics, news and insurgent violence. Wearing a bulletproof vest, he was on camera, describing the horror and death around him, when a second explosion exploded nearby, killing him and his cameraman instantly.
Several hours later, when I heard someone using "instantly" this adverb, I was overwhelmed with relief, because I had often seen victims of bombs, still in danger. life, with horrible wounds and burns, in identical scenes.
In some ways Samim was the product of his time and place in the post-war culture of urban youth in post-war Afghanistan. He was addicted to high-tech gadgets, with a smartphone permanently tucked into his palm and a laptop full of downloaded movies and music.
He posted constantly on Facebook, sending a stream of comments about everything he was thinking about. He had recently let his beard grow a little, but he dressed in a casual Western style, usually jeans and boots and rinsed shirts. He had a university degree in journalism and easily evolved between Dari, his native language, fluent English and several other languages.
But Samim was very different from many of his contemporaries, a rare embodiment of the qualities that Afghanistan needs to become a human, open and modern society.
He was an iconoclast in a culture of often suffocating conformity, a questioner of traditional dogma whose ideas of modernization were much deeper than the last gadget or the latest haircut in fashion. He was unobtrusive rather than aggressive, but in a place that has long defended hard heroes, his silent and persistent investigation has made people feel uncomfortable.
In informal meetings, he challenged conservative attitudes towards family life and religion, two topics still taboo among most of his hip peers. He loved animals and often saved orphaned kittens or wounded puppies, an unusual vocation that affected some Afghans but drove others back. He was generous and direct in a hypocritical society of elaborate politeness and cruel bottom handles. He was unpretentious and indifferent to luxury in a period of post-war prosperity, when anyone with an ounce of ambition had gone to seek Western aid or military contracts and had started buying SUVs.
What Samim aspired above all was knowledge. After obtaining a solid university degree in Kazakhstan, where his independent spirit flourished, he returned home to be close to his family. But he dreamed of going to study in the United States and he was studying for his English admission test upon his death. "I want to learn about everything," he once said, "and then I want to bring him back to improve my country."
Although many Afghans need western money but flee Western ideas, Samim was the opposite. He searched websites looking for all the creative, stimulating fragments of literature, journalism, film and foreign music he could find.
I am proud to say that I played a small role in this pilgrimage by introducing him to Victor Jara and Joaquín Sabina, Ta-Nehisi Coates and "Sophie's Choice". Samim, in turn, introduced me to Persian poets, to Kurdish lamentations of Ahmet Kaya and to the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Whether traveling for news or chatting over coffee in a Kabul café, each of our meetings has become an intense cultural and intellectual exchange.
And then came the night of September 5, when the culture of death met the culture of competitive war journalism. A car bomb attack, proclaimed by the Islamic State as an attack on "apostates", cost the life of a wonderful man who would have had many years to live and who could become a catalyst for intellectual creativity and of social progress. country.
Others were killed that night, others who did not deserve to die and who would be mourned just as deeply by their families. But for me, his death was a new reminder of the disbelief and horror of violence here.
How could this happen? How could a crazy Islamist cult, devastated by human destruction at the same time, attack the same urban community, killing 48 promising students last month during a preparatory internship and then three weeks later in a lecture hall? fight? and two journalists nearby? How did the main Afghan television channel, a member of a still-mourning media community in the capital that lost nine journalists to match the April suicide bombings, then called for better protection of the press? live from the first blasting site? How has the local police, who apparently neglected a parked car containing a jammer and explosives, been so careless?
The answers to these questions indicate how little has changed despite 17 years of Afghan and international efforts. Conflict has invaded everyday life in Kabul, government efforts to contain it have repeatedly failed and young men are trained and paid to shoot, kill and chronicle deadly troubles.
Since the fall of the Taliban regime, insurgent violence has claimed the lives of more than 40,000 Afghan civilians, and Samim was hardly the only promising one. The 2016 attack at the American University killed a young and brilliant law professor, Naqib Ahmad Khpulwak. The 2017 attack at the Kabul Military Hospital killed a trained military surgeon, Behroz Haidary, at the age of 37.
Samim was also not the only good friend I lost in this war and in other wars. Kamel Hamade, the gallant owner of La Taverna du Liban in Kabul and companion in love with animals, died in 2014 with all his clients when the Taliban attacked and bombed his bistro, a refuge from stress and conflict. years. Elizabeth Neuffer, a childhood friend in New England and an intrepid journalist whose career as a foreign correspondent followed mine, died in a tragic car accident in Iraq in 2003.
When Samim died, he was still a young and restless soul with a dark, dark side that had not yet found his ultimate calling. But he was also a rare spark of compassion and independent reflection in one country at a time. My friend will miss me very much. Afghanistan will miss him more.
