Spring in Afghanistan, Part 4 - By Anna Badkhen

Abdul Bashir, a shepherd and land mine victim.

MARMUL, Afghanistan — The ravine is called Shadian: the Gorge of Many Joys. The women's brilliant embroidery echoes the spring dazzle of its terraced valleys, of green mountain rills that generously water its cornfields and apple orchards. The men, whose clay homes cover its vertiginous scarps, tell proud stories of their fathers, brave minutemen who were among the first in Afghanistan to take up arms against the invading Soviets more than 30 years ago.

But Shadian, too, is the gorge of countless miseries. For that internecine war, long since finished and eclipsed by more recent ones, continues to collect a ghastly annual oblation of limbs here.

Land mines lie hidden in these northern Hindu Kush ridges. They wait in the wild pistachio groves that cascade in puffs of fuchsia down the copper-streaked cliffs. In the pebbled beds of north-flowing freshets that carry precious snowmelt to the thirsty Bactrian desert. On the alluvial slopes patinated with spring grass upon which shepherds graze their flocks.

And in the spring, when snowmelt rushes down the mountains, mines -- light, plastic disks barely larger than a compact mirror -- tend to migrate. A rivulet may push one downstream. A torrent of muddy snowmelt may wash up another at some farmer's doorstep, or anchor it at an old rock wall on a grazing hill.

The International Committee to Ban Landmines reports more than 73,000 mine victims worldwide over the past decade. In the last five years, at least 20 of them were from Marmul. Most of them were injured between February and May, when water gushes in irradiant streams past Marmul and north toward the Amu Darya, the river that marks Afghanistan's northern frontier.

Last month, two brothers herding a flock of 400 goats and sheep to pasture accidentally tripped the firing pin of an antipersonnel mine lodged in a loose rock wall demarking some arcane boundaries. The mine scythed off most of Abdul Bashir's left hand, gashed his right thigh, and lacerated his chest. Shrapnel deeply rent the stomach and arms of his younger brother, Abdul Farid.

The shepherds, both in their 20s, belong to the generation of Afghans who grew up with a grim computation in the back of their minds: Planted mostly by the Soviet troops and anti-Soviet mujaheddin in the 1980s, the estimated 10 million mines in Afghanistan's soil are enough to maim or kill a third of the country's population. Most of the explosives lie in wait in grazing fields and farmland; most of their victims are civilians. Just 20 pounds of pressure are enough to detonate such a device. Unexploded ordnance kills or injures, on average, 40 Afghans each month.

Abdul Bashir and Abdul Farid had taken the same route to pasture each spring for almost 20 years: down the slopes of red ferric soil and white limestone; past the two rusted exoskeletons of T52 tanks, one barrel raised at the mountains in gratuitous warning, the other pointing to the ground in defeat; then at the spring pooling with clear, sweet mountain water, a sharp southward turn into the hills girdled with centuries' worth of hoof paths. It was the same route their grandfather took when he was still alive -- except at that time, there were no tanks.

When they set out, the brothers were certain that they were not in danger. But you can never be certain with land mines, especially in the spring.

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