Abdullah rallied female supporters at Ghazi Stadium in Kabul today. Though small in number, their presence in a place where women were once executed is highly symbolic of the fight for Afghanistan. ©2009 Derek Henry Flood
"Takbir?" Abdullah says to the crowd. "Allah o Akbar" they respond in unison of thousands. Dr. Abdullah holds court in one of his final rallys before Thursday's election. ©2009 Derek Henry Flood
Dr. Abdullah Abdullah had a rally of several thousand supporters in Kabul today, primarily Tajiks from the Panjshir Valley and Shomali Plain. The scene was one of rapt intensity as throngs of people, mostly teenage boys, pressed up against the stage sweeping up journalists and Abdullah’s Jamiat-e-Islami bodyguards in their wake. Amazingly, no one was crushed to death as happened at Abdullah’s massive rally in Mazar-e-Sharif last week when crowds were riled up by Balkh Provincial governor Atta Mohammed, one of Abdullah’s strongest backers, and a potential voter was trampled to death. “We are all Afghans, we are all Muslims” Abdullah told the crowd pinning long sought hopes for inter-ethnic solidarity on the country’s next generation. I rode out of the madness with a group of wire service guys in the back of a Hi-Lux when we ended up inside Kabul’s Green Zone. I was the only one in the group that had seen the site of Saturday’s blast and pointed it out to everyone like a macabre tour guide. And if you didn’t think Kabul’s diplomatic and security enclave was yet a Green Zone, than you needed to see the beige boxed Rhino Runner vehicle lumbering by us. Basically, it’s a Rumsfeldian bus from hell that transports occupation VIP’s around, usually from the Baghdad airport to the Green Zone in Iraq. Seeing it in Kabul looks like the Iraqification of Afghanistan. Ali Farhad, Dr. Abdullah’s Western reporter wrangler, seems to have one of the harder jobs on the planet right now. Ali was organizing a second trip for reporters to Gardez today, the capital of Paktia Province south of Kabul. I wasn’t planning to go anyway and when Ali told us after we exited the diplomatic area that they had changed their plan and were going by road, every journalist jumped out of the back of the truck and we hailed taxis to Shahr-e-Nau to our respective hotels to edit our work. Why Abdullah is going to such risk is hard to say. The only thing that comes to mind could be that Mohammed Najibullah, the last Marxist leader of Afghanistan who was executed by the Taleban, is buried in Gardez. Many Afghans now look back on him with what seems to be a new found respect since, for reasons that seem lost in the toxic dust of Afghanistan’s brutal 1990’s history, he was a symbolic victim of the Taleban’s ultimate brutality. Maybe in Abdullah visiting Gardez, he is hoping to heal some of this country’s very, very deep wounds.