52 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
and girls attended. “The people were
happy,” Qayum said.
In 2003, the Taliban began reëmerg
ing in Kunar. They closed Qayum’s school,
burned the books, and killed a teacher.
Qayum fled. Word was conveyed to him
that, if he joined the Taliban, he could
return. “I was the only person taking care
of my mother,” he said. “So I came back.”
Despite his initial reluctance, he
quickly embraced his new identity. Dur
ing the Presidential elections of 2004,
he fired from a ridgeline on Afghans at
a polling station in his home district. He
remained with the Taliban for about a
decade, sometimes fighting U.S. and Af
ghan forces, other times collecting taxes
and acting as a Sharia judge. If Qayum
saw a contradiction between this life and
his previous one, he didn’t acknowledge
it to me. Whenever I pressed him on
the subject, he replied, “We were doing
jihad.” In Kunar, as in many other parts
of Afghanistan, the government had be
come synonymous with the American
military, which had become synonymous
with foreign occupation.
In 2014, when ISIS appeared in east
ern Afghanistan and began accusing the
Taliban of serving the interests of Pa
kistan, Qayum found himself agreeing.
He knew that Pakistan gave the Tali
ban financial support, and in refugee
camps across the border he’d seen Paki
stani agents pushing young people to
join the Taliban. Qayum had even ac
companied his superiors to a meeting
with Nasrullah Barbar, a former inte
rior minister of Pakistan, who is widely
considered an architect of Pakistan’s al
liance with the Taliban. Qayum asked
himself, “If we’re taking orders from an
other country, can we call this jihad?”
On Facebook, he began watching
ISIS videos from Iraq and Syria. The
leader of ISIS in Afghanistan, Hafiz Saeed
Khan, had attended the same madrassa
as Qayum. In 2016, Qayum, who now had
a wife and four children, joined Hafiz
in the Mamand Valley. He was placed
in charge of thirtyfive men, whom he
led in combat against the Taliban. After
eight months, Hafiz asked Qayum to
leave the front lines, return home, and
recruit more Afghans from Kunar Prov
ince. Qayum began preaching at mosques
about the coming caliphate.
It was apparent why Qayum had ex
celled as an imam, a teacher, a com
mander, and a recruiter. He liked an au
dience, and held forth with aplomb and
a disarming sense of humor. He couldalso read a room: he seemed to relish
playing whatever role circumstances de
manded of him. Hours after quitting
isis, he was disparaging the group he
had persuaded others to join. “When I
saw they were finished in Syria, I knew
isis was false,” he said. “The Prophet
didn’t say there will be a caliphate that
is defeated.”
An interest in selfpreservation might
have spurred this epiphany. U.S. air
strikes had killed Hafiz Saeed Khan, his
successor, and that successor’s successor.
The Taliban had looted Qayum’s house
and forced his family to flee. He had
nowhere to turn.
The deputy police commander for
Kunar, Mohammad Yousef, came from
the same district as Qayum, and, for
years, the two of them had fought against
each other. According to both men, the
experience had created a certain bond
of trust between them. Yousef, whom I
met at the station, told me, “He said
that he would surrender, on one condi
tion—if I guaranteed his safety. I gave
my word.”
I returned to Asadabad a few weeks
later. The former ISIS militants were liv
ing in a safe house guarded by an Af
ghan counterterrorism unit. They were
free to leave, but they felt that their lives
would be imperilled if they did. I was
impressed by how reverentially Qayum’s
men, all of whom he had recruited to
ISIS, still deferred to him, despite the
predicament he had led them into. No
doubt they respected his stature as a
mullah, but I also wondered if they rec
ognized the value, in such uncertain
times, of his ideological versatility.
Mohammad Yousef had told me that,
when he and Qayum were enemies,
Qayum had written songs about want
ing to kill him. I asked Qayum if this
was true. He said he didn’t remember,
but quickly added that he’d written a
song about Yousef just the other day.
Reaching into his pocket, he unfolded
a piece of paper with lyrics in blue ink
and sang, “You are strong for the peo
ple, strong like Russian steel/ May your
operations succeed, may you win more
territory/ Your enemies fear you, they
do not sleep because of you.”
Qayum’s recruits, many of whom had
lost family members to Afghan and U.S.
forces, listened attentively. Abdul Salam,
a slight man with large hazel eyes, told“It gets rid of the spiders and it doesn’t make any noise, so
as far as I’m concerned it can stay.”