Helmand through to Kandahar & Ghazni
There are few places in our recent military history as evocative as Helmand province, the principal base for British troops fighting the Taliban insurgency from 2006 to 2014. The fighting here was intense at times, particularly in the late 2000s where it seemed the death of a soldier was an almost daily occurrence.
So it was with a strange sense of foreboding that we set out on our 11 hour journey from Herat through to Kandahar, a name in itself that haunts the memory as a major British theatre of counter-insurgency operations. I don’t know why this was the case. What were we expecting to see? Miles of abandoned tanks and field guns? Memorials to the fallen on the roadside?
As it happened, we saw very little. There’s really nothing much to see. We were only ever passing through to get to Kandahar city and crossed the highway at speed.
There were peaks of interest – the road as it reaches Helmand from Farah and Nimruz provinces suddenly becomes uneven in places. These are repaired bridge crossings, very small and shallow spans crossing dried creeks, with concrete blocks and dispersed chunks of tarmac littering their surrounds. These were the places where the Taliban planted bombs designed to detonate under British convoys and no doubt the scene of many a death and maiming. I asked to stop at one. I tried to talk to Jalal about our involvement in his country’s recent past, but he seemed reluctant to talk about it. There was one lone other witness – a man squatting on a bright green ice-cream cart, here in the middle of nowhere, shouting at me to buy one. I was hoping for pathos and solemnity. What I got was a cheap iced lolly. It seemed about as incongruous a moment as it gets.
Herat province village
Helmand province
Helmand province ice-cream van
The featurelessness continued until we reached Camp Shorabak, the new name for the former British base Camp Bastion, which grew to the size of a small town at the height of our deployment. Obviously no photos allowed here, but you can only see it from afar in any event. It looked deserted, but clearly it wasn’t. The ubiquitous Taliban flag is displayed here in abundance.
We had lunch in Lashkar Gar, or at least on the outskirts anyway. A pretty horrible, fly-blown place which we were glad to leave. And with that we crossed over into Kandahar province where the lack of any visual reference at all to our involvement in the war was even more pronounced in its absence. I was disappointed, to tell the truth. Not in a voyeuristic sense, but in a more profound way. You expect to feel something, anything, but all I felt was tiredness from the journey….
Not much to see in the city of Kandahar either to be fair, though the shrine of Mirwais Khan, a nationally respected hero of the 18th century, was delightful. A compact affair with unusually vivid red, green & blue ceiling decoration and a small party of women using the power of their reverence for the man to affect cures for ailments. You can sleep in an adjoining room to expedite your recovery by all accounts. We also toured a place called Chilzina, a small rock-cut shrine dedicated to no-one knows who and reached by 40 enormous slippery steps (Helen’s mandatory floor-length abaya making climbing quite a perilous task), then took a turn round the local bazaar, which is always great fun, at least for me…
Kandahar bazaar
Mirwais Khan shrine
Mirwais Khan shrine
Mirwais Khan shrine
Mirwais Khan shrine
Last stop was the Mausoleum of Ahmed Shah Durrani and the Mosque of the Cloak of the Prophet, two places of huge significance in Islam that put our town permissions to the test. Both centres are located together, but we had 3 separate checks, each with a grilling for Jalal, and then taken to an area where I was asked questions, all of which were carefully written down. Kandahar is an extremely devout centre in a very devout country so we should have expected something like this. I was asked my name, my father’s name, my WhatsApp number (!?!) and my religion, to which I said “Christian”. “Would you consider, given a choice, whether to convert to Islam?” was the final question. “Err,” I replied, “I’m happy being a Christian thanks, so I think I’ll stick with that.” My answers were referred to some other parties in a room next door. I must have passed the test as 5 minutes later were allowed in, thankfully with no pre-condition of conversion to Islam. Only then did we realise that our grant of entry was limited in the strictest terms to simply looking at and photographing the outside of both buildings. Photographs were not to include any persons at all. We probably spent a good half hour getting to this point, all for the sake of a quick 10 minute walk around the perimeters. Lots of intense staring here and we felt a little uncomfortable – to be honest, we were glad to leave.
Breaking the rules at the Durrani shrine
The Mosque of the Cloak of the Prophet
We had a 5am start for the long trip to Ghazni on the worst roads in Afghanistan. Miles and miles of construction work that’s been going on for years. Some towns on the route live in a permanent dust cloud. Not the best of journeys. The day’s highlight was our arrival in the bonkers Uranus Hotel in the centre of town. Our room had 2 murals, one a tropical pastoral scene that included cranes and seagulls, one a sea-scene of leaping dolphins seemingly breaking through a white brick wall. Both were about 6ft x 6ft. It had a black and white stripe thing going on beneath a dado rail, a maroon padded panel above that and topped with bluey-silver shiny wallpaper, most of which was still on the wall. Gold coloured curtains were draped about 3ft away from the windows they were meant to cover. We had 4 beds, each with a different firmness – from ‘sinking into the bowels of the earth’ soft to ‘snooker table’ hard (alas, unlike for Goldilocks, nothing ‘just right’). All had bright red blankets heavy enough to give you breathing difficulties. Oh, and then there was the squat toilet in the bathroom. A real gem indeed….
Our trip round Ghazni was spoiled by the head of the provincial tourism bureau who insisted on coming round the sights in our car with us. As he’s Taliban, Jalal felt he couldn’t refuse, so we begrudgingly went along with it. The man was a total arse, telling Jalal what to tell us, making sarcastic comments in our direction, leading us off on a route march to god knows where. I lost my rag after a while and insisted that he took no further part. He stayed in the car the rest of the time but still had the temerity to ask for a significant tip at the end of the afternoon. I refused point blank. Jalal played peacemaker and gave it to him. In retrospect, I probably should have been more guarded – he was Taliban after all. I played the ‘your hospitality towards a guest in your country is shameful’ card and that seemed do the trick.
Ghazni itself is a relatively pretty town in parts – single storey mud-brick houses surround the crumbling fortress and large swathes of fields and trees extend further into suburbs. The town is dominated by its Bala Hissar, a fortress heavily bombed in the civil war and now largely a jumble of broken and eroded mud dollops. It does have an old Soviet tank however, on which the local kids (and visiting tourist kids) amuse themselves. The Ghazni minarets are the best draw here though, a couple of remarkably well preserved and fairly squat examples of the hundred of monuments local kings seemed obliged to erect for piety’s sake. As with most things here, the extent of the archaeology has been severely reduced due to conflict or general neglect, depressingly more of the latter than the former.
One of the remaining minarets of Ghazni
Soviet military relics litter Afghanistan
A somewhat challenging, hot and tiring few days in territory that seemed a little hostile at times, especially in Kandahar. On to Bamiyan next, the place where the Taliban took it into their heads to blow up the massive 1,500 year old stone standing buddhas in 2001. So that should cheer us up then…..
Simon (24th May 2025)
What a random place for an ice cream!
Glad to read you escaped your taliban escort unharmed
Yeah – I did think it might have been rash on my part for a while. However no one came in the night to take us away, so now glad we shamed him for his awful behaviour….
What an experience, Simon you are a bit daring with the Taliban. I could have been visiting you in on e of their detention centres.Brave Boy. X
It wasn’t daring or brave – just saw red for a moment and spoke my mind. Another one I’ve gotten away with. 9 lives maybe…..
I would have been terrified in the places you passed through.you were very courageous. XXX