Afghanistan: A deadly playground

Bishgay can't remember the blast that killed his siblings and claimed his legs. He remembers playing outside with his brother and sister, and he remembers the smooth metal tube they found in the dust near their home, on one of Afghanistan's most bitterly contested battlefields. "It was as long as my arm," he says, still enchanted by the deadly ammunition which exploded in their hands. "I didn't know what it was. I didn't know it was dangerous. "My brother and sister were younger than me. They didn't know either." His seven-year-old sister, Kalima, and their brother, Jumal Gul, 8, were killed when the tube exploded. Their father says they died quickly. He remembers picking up the pieces of their bodies in his shawl. It was probably a mortar round. The Shomali plains, which flank the main road north of Kabul, have been fought over for decades. It could have been left by the Russians, the Mujahedin, the Taliban or the Northern Alliance. Another day, it could have been one of the millions of mines which litter Afghanistan, or part of a cluster bomb, dropped on the Taliban lines by the US-led coalition during the 2001 invasion. On average, three people are killed or injured in Afghanistan everyday by mines and leftover ammunition. It is the lethal legacy of three decades of war that continues to this day. Somehow Bishgay, 10, survived. But the blast shredded both his legs and they had to be amputated below the knee, once his father, Raza Gul, found an ambulance to drive them more than hour to the Emergency Hospital, in Kabul. Four months on Bishgay is happy to be alive. His father thanks Allah that one of his children survived. Bishgay is learning to walk again on two prosthetic legs at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Orthopedic Center in Kabul. He staggers a few steps at a time, and swings playfully on the back of his wheelchair, when walking gets too much. Sayed Musa, his dedicated physiotherapist, understands well what he's going through. Musa lost his left leg below the knee to an anti-personnel mine 20 years ago. He was a young officer in Najibullah's army, training mine clearers in Kandahar, but got called to the front, to help fight Gulbuddin Hekmatyr's men, during Afghanistan's civil war, when he stepped on a mine. "I was very poor," Musa says. "I came from a very poor family and I had sold everything I had because I wanted to go to Iran after that. But I came to the ICRC for a prosthetic leg. They asked me what skills I had and I said all I could do was type. They gave me a job, and now I am a trained physiotherapist." There are 240 staff at the Orthopedic Center and 98 percent are amputees. Even the ebullient chef, who serves up three hot meals for hundreds of patients a day, is a veteran amputee dedicated to helping the legions of new victims. Mehrabuddin, 42, was walking to school 28 years ago in Badakhshan, in the north east of Afghanistan, when a landmine blew off his leg. "I still have little problems, but what should I do?" he asks, half smiling, as he hobbles across the kitchen to give a young mother and her child lunch. The center treats around 250 patients a day. They manufacture the braces and replacement limbs that help their patients lead almost normal lives from waste plastic on site. "The first time patients come in here they are usually very depressed," Musa says. "They think they can't walk and their life is ruined. But I show them my leg, and I tell them it's God's plan, and they smile." Musa commutes more than six miles to work every day on a bicycle, and regularly competes in long distance running races. But most of the amputees have much humbler ambitions. Pretty 16-year-old Salma Aslany longs to wear high heels. She lost her left leg below the knee in a rocket attack on her home when she was just three. She doubts she'll ever own stilettos. "The rocket landed directly on my house and the walls collapsed on me," Salma says. "I've had a prosthetic limb since I was seven. When I was a child it was never a problem with other children. But now it is a problem because people ask me why I can't wear high heels. I wish very, very much that I could wear high heels, but I can't." Her home was in a residential district in Kabul that was indiscriminately shelled as warlords competed for control of the capital. Her family fled to Tehran, in neighboring Iran, but they were among thousands forced back in recent years. The UN estimates there are almost 130,000 long-term displaced in Afghanistan, and a further 80,000 internal refugees of the recent fighting. The head of the ICRC in Afghanistan, Reto Stocker, said that in the last nine months alone more than 4,500 families have had their homes completely destroyed and they have spent at least five nights in the open with no friends or relatives to house them. Salma visits the Red Cross clinic once a year, and says she wants to be a doctor. "People who are suffering pretend to be happy, but in reality they are not," she says. "I want to understand other people's problems and I want to help them." Helping each other his how people cope in Afghanistan. Their depth of suffering is also a wealth of experience. "When I see someone very sad on a stretcher, I pull up my trousers and show them my legs and they laugh," says the center's director Najmuddin. "They know then it might be alright." Najmuddin, 43, lost both his legs to an anti-tank mine when he was driving along a riverbed to collect sand to repair his war-damaged home. He has helped transform thousands of patients' lives, but he is still angry at the faceless men who made the mine, and the soldiers tasked to hide it in his path. "I did not have any enemies," Najmuddin says. "Why should I lose my leg? I didn't want to cause anybody any pain. Why should I hurt like this? There are hundreds of people like me, but still, I cannot accept it. To lose part of your body is not easy, but I have no choice." Najmuddin knows he will not see an end to landmine injuries in his lifetime. "This place is a sad place," he says. "But it is a happy place as well. People come in here crawling and they leave on new legs. "Even if the wars stop, still there will be mines around. This country is heavily mined. But at least, if the wars stop, there will be hope."