The darkness on him

Life is not a film and there are stories that are not made of cardboard. Stories made of flesh and blood and words that too often remain silent. Especially in countries and regions that unwittingly end up in the shadow. In our eternal present, we have now become masters in this. We think of Afghanistan, of the rivers of ink and words spent to describe the West's daring retreat. We still have in our eyes the images of the people massed at the Kabul airport, the desperation that even leads you to climb on the wings of a plane to escape, the tragic tenderness of parents who passed their babies to the marines as a last hope.
It was August. Outside the West and its utopia of exporting democracy with many weapons and little development. Inside the masters of yesterday, the Taliban and their new sponsors. Six months have passed and very little is known about what is happening. It is not easy to break the wall of silence. Still, it is possible.

A RAI journalist, Giammarco Sicurezza, did it in a correspondence that will remain among the most beautiful and tragic pages of this profession. In Kabul and Kandahar to tell about a world that no longer exists and the beginning of a new abyss. There are snapshots that take your breath away. The images of dozens of undernourished children welcomed in a Unicef ​​hospital. Ten percent of them will die.
Then the drama of the internal refugee camps, the families who fled from areas of the country and ended up living in total poverty. Giammarco writes: «Squalid huts, alleys of mud and melted snow, promiscuity with animals, epidemics and degraded conditions of children. You know it from the dirt on him, from the worn out clothes and from the sickly appearance ".
And again, the Dante area of ​​the Kandahar prison. When there were Americans, it housed Taliban detainees. Not anymore now. The sections are full of political prisoners, former soldiers of the old army, but above all of homosexuals and people with drug addiction problems. “They are clustered in three narrow, dark corridors. There is no light, there is no air, there is no dignity for these human beings. The cells are dirty beyond belief, the clothes torn and the faces paralyzed. The prisoners watch you motionless and almost lifeless from behind bars: lost souls »
But there is no end to the absurd. “While I was in the prison, - Safe said - a van brought a group of children into the institute. They were in painful conditions and were crying in despair. His hands were so dirty, his clothes were torn and he was wearing objects that were useful for the jobs they were doing. They explained to me that these are street children who are taken and taken to prison by the Taliban ”. Their faces are a punch in the stomach: you see the fear, the nonsense, the violence suffered, the exact opposite of what a child's destiny should be.

Luckily, those boys were released, thanks to the report by Sure to Unicef. But it is a drop in the ocean. "Afghanistan is the worst global crisis from both a humanitarian and human rights point of view. We cannot forget it, "confirms Andrea Iacomini, spokesman for Unicef ​​Italy.
Do not forget is everyone's task, the only one to respond to the darkness that apparently wins, taking an entire country with it. The darkness that must stick to us and that we will all have to account for.


Matteo Spicuglia
NP February 2022