50 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
Eid ceasefire, he told me that he had
recently attempted to return to his home
village, in the Korengal Valley, in Kunar
Province, north of Nangarhar. He had
not been able to do so: the valley, where
Zubair and his comrades had defeated
the U.S. military, was now occupied by
ISIS. Despite ISIS’s advances in Kunar,
though, some militants there had been
abandoning the group. This summer, I
visited a police headquarters in Kunar’s
capital, Asadabad, where thirteen ISIS
militants, all locals, had surrendered to
the government, in exchange for immu-
nity. When I arrived, their weapons—
Kalashnikovs, Dragunovs, mortar tubes,
and rocket launchers—were displayed
on a table outside. A brief ceremony
was conducted. The police commander,
Lieutenant Colonel Shafiqullah Sahaar,
held a Quran, which each militant kissed
before disavowing ISIS. The governor
of the province then placed colorful gar-
lands around their necks and traditional
pakol hats on their heads.
After the ceremony, Sahaar invited
the ISIS commander, Abdul Qayum, to
eat lunch with him and his lieutenants.
Sahaar, a muscular, clean-shaven former
Special Forces officer, sat as far away as
he could from Qayum, who nervously
picked at his food. Later, Sahaar said,
“I didn’t want to look at his face. I don’t
know how many of our men he’s killed.
If it were up to me, I’d hang him.”
Qayum was a slim man in his mid-
thirties with shaggy black hair, a bleary
gaze, and thin eyebrows permanently
tented in lackadaisical amusement.
When he was a boy, his father was killed
by Russian soldiers, and his mother’s
leg was mangled in a Russian air strike.
She and Qayum moved to a refugee
camp in Pakistan, where, for eleven
years, Qayum studied at a madrassa, be-
coming a mullah. They stayed away
from Afghanistan while the Taliban
were in power. After the U.S. invasion,
Qayum and his mother returned to their
village, in a remote corner of Kunar,
where Qayum became the imam at a
mosque. When the newly formed Af-
ghan government offered to finance a
primary school in the village, Qayum
was named headmaster. It took him
three days to transport chalkboards,
textbooks, and other supplies from Asa-
dabad. Classes were held on carpets
under trees. More than a hundred boys A market in Jalalabad, where crime is rising. Doctors there recently threatened to strike,