Afghanistan by born2travel.it

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Kabul (AFGHANISTAN) 01.07.09

After a so-called "tactical" landing, we set foot in much-discussed Afghanistan...

Total desolation... A bale of hay rolls across the runway, carried by the wind... Out of 130 passengers, only three of us are bound for the capital... All the rest stops here... I join up with some EUPOL people and the first thing that strikes me about the apron is that all the flags are flying at half-mast... An army marshal, watching me, explains, as if it were nothing, that somebody dies there every day... I shudder... Peacekeeping?

They introduce me to an army corporal who two days earlier had driven his jeep over a mine and, through an endless series of coincidences, was still there able to tell the tale, though stunned and half deaf... The marshal who was accompanying me on the visit confesses that so far they've always been lucky, but sooner or later "we'll be bringing 5 or 6 of them home" (his exact words).

With a major of the Folgore and a journalist (Andrea Angeli), we manage to board an American C130 bound for our destination: Kabul. An hour later I embrace my base colleague and replacement, Angelo!

Kabul (AFGHANISTAN) 02.07.09

This morning I had my first real encounter with war. We receive a radio call; they need us to coordinate a MEDEVAC (medical evacuation); two American Black Hawks land from who knows where with two seriously wounded Afghans on board... We escorted the two ambulances (one Belgian and one Croatian) until they loaded the wounded... it struck me to see those blood-soaked boys and to think that shortly before they had been shot... I thought about it all day...

Kabul (AFGHANISTAN) 03.07.09

The daily morning briefing outlines the whole current situation in this land forgotten by God or by Allah, depending on your point of view... It talks about attacks, suicide bombers, mines, our soldiers (ISAF) WIA or KIA (wounded in action or killed in action), that is, wounded or dead... There's a war here... The flags are always flying at half-mast...

Kabul (AFGHANISTAN) 04.07.09

Today an elderly British lieutenant colonel and an 18-year-old soldier were killed... Death doesn't look at rank or age!

It's so stimulating to see soldiers from so many different nations, different religions, different armed forces, a mix of camouflage, desert uniforms and not, different badges and little flags, working side by side for a single goal: to bring peace back to this tormented country. You see American marines training Afghan soldiers, German C130s carrying Polish troops, Greeks working with Turks; French, Portuguese and Belgians treating us etc. A single team.

I saw a small group of children playing with homemade kites; I'd forgotten I was in the land of Khaled Hosseini and his kites...

Kabul (AFGHANISTAN) 05.07.09

I was chatting with Angelo, it was around midnight, when we see a middle-aged man with a long beard; he was wearing a jacket all torn, which let you glimpse the bulletproof one underneath, helmet in hand, a camera and video cameras dangling from one shoulder, a completely dirty backpack and a small case with airport stickers from the most disparate and disreputable places in the world...

He needed to get to the opposite side of our airport and didn't know how to reach it... We gladly give him a lift... Chatting in the car we discover he was a London photojournalist working for "The Guardian"; he told us about adventures in Liberia, Benin, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Iraq...

What interesting encounters you have in places like that...

Kabul (AFGHANISTAN) 06.07.09

The adrenaline is through the roof. We're waiting for the British convoy that will take us to the Headquarters in the centre of Kabul. We look like ninja turtles in our anti-shrapnel vests and with our helmets, but that's the procedure for moving around the city... The soldier from the Fiji islands who will escort us begins the briefing, shows us the route decided for today, the various passwords and counter-passwords, how to position ourselves in the armoured vehicle, how to hold our weapons etc.

We climb aboard, the radio is turned off, the jammer activated, the weaving between the barbed-wire obstacles begins... we pass through various checkpoints... we're on the road... Now it's us and them... Through the armoured, darkened windows I glimpse fragments of their daily life; barefoot children chasing each other among the rubble, donkey carts carrying brushwood, long-bearded men arguing heatedly in a circle, giant posters with turbaned, bearded men calling for political elections... every now and then a scooter or car came a little too close and instinctively I saw again the images of the suicide bombings that had impressed me so much during the preparation course for this mission in Villafranca... promptly one of the soldiers opened the door and, motioning him to move away, pointed his rifle at him... The nervousness and tension are sky-high... The heart begins to pump harder...

Kabul (AFGHANISTAN) 09.07.09

Today, for the first time, I managed to connect to Facebook... I read the messages that so many of my friends had left me and for about an hour I was completely detached from the world... It felt like I was in my little room in Cesena... It was strange when, stepping outside, I was swallowed up again by sand and dust, dozens of soldiers moved about armed, Black Hawks passed over my head, a C130 was taking off... I had my laundry bag in hand and was heading to the laundry... I'm still in Afghanistan

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