A woman’s war: The rise and fall of Afghanistan’s female warlord

It was the late 1990s, at the height of the war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. Barren mountains loomed over the warring factions, overshadowing what little life existed on the rocky hillsides and making the afterlife that much more appealing to future martyrs. Commander Kaftar was leading a group of men opposed to the Taliban. During this bitter standoff, a Talib commander new to the area tuned in to Kaftar’s radio frequency from his hilltop bunker. He introduced himself to his enemy: “I am Mullah Baqi and I will fuck your wife.”

Kaftar grabbed the radio and fired back, “My husband will fuck your wife.”

Confused, Mullah Baqi thought he’d heard wrong. Commander Kaftar, whose nom de guerre translates to Commander Dove, clarified that she was in fact a woman. The Talib had unwittingly found himself squaring off against Afghanistan’s only known female warlord. 

In their next exchange, Kaftar warned him, “If you come after me and do your operations in my valley, people will laugh at you if you arrest a woman. If you come to my valley and I arrest you, then it will be bad for you.” Not wanting to suffer the humiliation of fighting a woman, or worse yet, losing to one, Mullah Baqi swore he’d never attack Commander Kaftar. 

Commander Kaftar started her life as Bibi Aisha Habibi, the daughter of Haji Dawlat, a prominent arbob, or community leader, in the village of Gawi in Baghlan province’s Nahrin District in northern Afghanistan. As a whole, the province has remained on the fringes of Afghan history. The majority of residents, past and present, make their living farming land that is overwhelmingly brown, an entire stretch of hills and valleys God created but forgot to water.

One of the middle children of 10, Kaftar remembers being her father’s favorite. She followed him everywhere, even as he worked to settle disputes and advising villagers on everything from farming to family matters. In her earliest memories, Kaftar sat by her father’s side in the local mosque where he conducted business in the winter. People crowded into the low-ceilinged, mud-brick building and huddled around fire pits that billowed smoke into hanging chimneys while they awaited their turn to speak with Dawlat. In the summer, people met in his walled garden, where he invited guests to pick what they wanted from his fruit trees and drink from a small stream running through the property.

It was at these gatherings that Kaftar’s life began to follow an unconventional path. Listening to her father solve disputes over who had access to a particular piece of farmland or advise people on what to do during a dry growing season, Kaftar learned how to lead a community. Her father used to send her to deliver playful insults to his friends, and Kaftar developed confidence and a reputation for attitude.

For most Afghan girls, this level of freedom would have ended at puberty, when girls join the closed-off women’s section in a different orbit from the world of men and village business. But Kaftar’s father continued bringing her to the gatherings, and as she got older he allowed her to take a more active role, even stepping in for him from time to time. 

“Imagine that an alien enters your house. How do you feel? You never saw him in the past, you never talked to him in the past, just suddenly a random guy, an alien face enters as your future husband. At that moment I felt like Angel Azrael [the archangel of death] came and took my breath away,” recalls Kaftar.

Three months later the two were able to talk for the first time. Her mother helped arrange a secret meeting, a common Afghan practice. In the pervasive darkness of night in the countryside, they met behind her family home and spoke for about 10 minutes. A half century later, Kaftar can’t remember what they talked about, but she says it did little to make him feel like less of a stranger. After three years of passing word-of-mouth messages through friends and family, the two formally married.

In Kaftar’s recounting of her life, her husband may as well be an uncredited extra, whose only notable virtue was that he accepted her role as a community leader. In the wars that would come he stayed at home with their seven children while his wife went into battle. Several years ago he fell ill. By the time he managed to get medical treatment it was too late, and he died shortly thereafter.

Her marriage settled, Kaftar continued her unofficial apprenticeship. Increasingly, Kaftar rode to nearby villages, acting as a roving arbob on her father’s behalf. She took satisfaction in resolving marriage disputes and forcing families to allow women to choose whom they wanted to marry.  She also implemented rules to reduce dowries, removing a barrier that blocked many couples from marrying.

Mohammed Zaher Ghanizada grew up a short distance from Kaftar and became friends with her family. He recalls a story about Kaftar as a teenage girl crossing a small stream. A man sat on the shore watching her and shouted lewd, suggestive remarks at her. Once she’d crossed over to his side, she responded by pummeling the man. As Ghanizada tells the story, before leaving the catcaller to lick his wounds, Kaftar said, “You wanted to lay me down on the ground, and now I’ve laid you on the ground.”

Years later, when her father was on his deathbed, he told Kaftar, “I wish one of my sons was like you, this intelligent and brave and hardworking.”

“I feel that I am your son, not your daughter. I can do the same job as your son,” she replied.

On Christmas Eve, 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in support of the pro-Soviet government, which had begun facing serious opposition. In Kaftar’s slice of rural Baghlan, the particulars motivating the invasion mattered little. Word spread that foreign forces had entered the country and their soldiers were slaughtering Afghans.

Soviet forces had pushed close to Kaftar’s village, but it remained unclear if they would go any further. Still, the villagers piled stones to make basic fighting positions near key entry points. Lookouts watched for Soviet troops. Those who had hunting rifles cleaned their weapons.

The morning stillness of the countryside around Kaftar’s village normally erodes like a piece of sandstone dropped in water, crumbling away as humans and livestock rise and return to work. But two days after the preparations began, the sun had just crested over Baghlan’s haphazard hillside when gunshots cracked on the mountain, instantly bringing the village to life.

Kaftar slung a bolt-action rifle on her back, the shoulder strap lined with bullets, Pancho Villa–style, and ran toward the gunfire. She joined other villagers, some armed with rifles like hers, others carrying swords and shovels or whatever makeshift weapon they could find.

Until that moment, almost every villager had spent their entire life farming. Kaftar knew how to use a gun, but admits she was a lousy shot. As an acknowledged leader in the village, she started to become the one that people looked to for direction. The only order she knew to give was to attack.

“If you get killed, you’ll be martyred, and if you kill them, you will be a hero,” she shouted to the growing crowd.

Armed with assault rifles and light machine guns, the Russians had the villagers outgunned, but the locals easily outnumbered the Soviets. By sunset, the mob had chased the Russians back to their strongpoint, where Soviet tanks forced the Afghans’ retreat. The small victory came at a cost, leaving dozens dead, including three of Kaftar’s relatives.

“It was like Judgment Day. It was the first time in my life I’d seen that many dead bodies. Everyone from the area gathered and came to see the dead bodies laying on the ground. It was really hard for us to see,” she recalls.

It was the bloodiest single day of the Soviet war for Kaftar’s small village, and the beginning of a violent spell that continues 34 years later.  

Facing an unpopular and seemingly unwinnable war, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in Feb. 15, 1989. Kaftar and the villagers celebrated what they thought was the return of peace. But almost immediately after Russian Lt. Gen. Boris Gromov stepped onto the Friendship Bridge, crossed over the Amu Darya River, and became the last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan, civil war erupted. No longer united by a common enemy, mujahedeen factions began turning their guns against one another, vying for control of the country.

“Very soon we realized that it was the same donkey with a different harness,” says Kaftar. “It was the same thing happening, the same fighting and killing and bloodshed.”

By 1996, the Taliban had emerged as the dominant force in Afghanistan, capturing Kabul and, eventually, 90 percent of the country. Commander Kaftar’s piece of Baghlan was among a handful of areas that remained beyond their reach, making it a principal front.

“We never ate a single lunch from beginning to end like normal,” says Kaftar of life during the war against the Taliban. “Sometimes we would be starting lunch and the fighting would start and we would have to shoot back at them. In the morning, you’d have two sips of tea and then the fighting would start.”

After the 9/11 attacks, when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001, swiftly routing the Taliban, Kaftar thought peace might once again return to her country. There was still fighting, but it was focused in the southern and eastern regions of Afghanistan. International forces now patrolled the country and were building up the Afghan security forces, and decentralized militia groups like Kaftar’s were seen as a source of instability. By 2006, the situation seemed stable enough that Kaftar agreed to surrender the majority of her and her fighters’ weapons as part of a United Nations–sponsored program to disarm unofficial militia groups.

But as many people who pick up arms discover, putting them down often proves more difficult. Shortly after Kaftar agreed to disarm, the Taliban made a sharp resurgence. Now she regularly receives calls from people threatening to murder her with a suicide bomb attack. 

At her hotel in Kabul, Kaftar sleeps at the foot of two single beds on a thin carpet spread over a stone floor, with a well-traveled duffle bag as a pillow. After years of living in the hills, she says she prefers the floor.

Like most people in Afghanistan, she’s waiting to hear whether the U.S. will completely withdraw from the country at the end of this year. If it pulls out, she fears a return of Taliban rule, and this time she won’t be strong enough to resist. Without help or enough weapons, she worries that the hard-line militants will come after her and her family.

Kaftar would like to apply for asylum somewhere outside Afghanistan, but does not know how. She also says any nation willing to provide a safe haven would need to offer passage to 30 or 40 of her family members as well. She could flee to neighboring Pakistan or Iran, but she’s concerned that neither country would be safer than Afghanistan.

“I was proud of my career,” she says. “But since I have been getting threats and I'm struggling and suffering, now I think I should not have become a commander. I wish I would have been just a normal housewife. That no one would know me, no one would come to talk to me, and I would have been just a normal housewife. Now I am sitting awake at night, always on guard, with a gun, ready to protect myself.”