On the Frontline with the ALP

This episode, I speak with Abdul Jamil, a 75-year-old member of the Afghan Local Police (ALP) originally from Marjah in Helmand province. It's a special and sobering episode, because the 33-year-old Helmandi journalist Aliyas Dayee, with whom I'd worked since 2016 and who assisted with this and the previous two episodes, is no longer with us. On November 12, less than a month after this interview was recorded, Dayee was leaving the provincial hospital in Helmand's capital Lashkar Gah with his brother after dropping their mother off for a routine visit when a bomb exploded beneath his car.  His brother and two other passers-by were injured and Dayee was killed.He had been receiving threats from the Taliban as long as I’d known him. His bosses at Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) had flown him to Kabul several times when the threats were deemed particularly serious. They had wanted to do the same in October, before he and I worked together on the interview that follows, but felt he couldn't. After the Taliban moved in on Lashkar Gah from the surrounding districts on October 11, a wave of residents from the same districts moved ahead of them to avoid the fighting. Dayee took ten families -- 50 or 60 people and an assortment of chickens -- into his modest home and didn’t want to leave his elderly mother, wife and their infant daughter Mehrabani.And so, unlike previous episodes,  the interview that follows is from the original recording, conducted in a yard on October 18, surrounded by the men from Abdul Jamil’s ALP unit. It's Dayee's deep, husky voice; the same voice that told the stories of Helmand and it's people for more than a decade for RFE/RL you'll hear translating  for Jamil and I, with sounds from the frontline peppered throughout. On the day we spoke, October 18, Jamil was commanding a platoon-sized unit who'd occupied a residential compound in Bolan, a couple of kilometres west of Helmand's capital, Lashkar Gah.The Taliban had pushed in on Lashkar Gah a week prior but hadn't gotten any further than the row of houses Jamil and his men, as well as units from the Afghan National Army and police were holding. Although the ALP are in the process of being wound down and absorbed into other branches of the security force, Jamil's unit, far from the area it was originally tasked with securing, had been moved from frontline to frontline in the months prior, more like commandos than the lowly paid and trained local, pro-government militia they are. Abdul Jamil had to think back decades to a time he could remember Afghanistan at peace and his outlook for the future was just as bleak.The loss of Aliyas Dayee, too, darkens the horizon for those who knew, loved and listened to him. He was buried the same day he died in a cemetery not far from where our interview was conducted in Bolan. Chahr-i Anjir, where he grew up, and where his father was buried last year was out of the question; the Taliban controlled the area now. He  is survived by his wife and daughter. Rest in Peace Dayee.