Gabriele Torsello was kidnapped on Thursday 12 October while travelling along the road between Lashkargah and Kandahar: one of the most dangerous stretches of road in all Afghanistan. We retrace it.
 
The opium capital. Lashkargah is a large and dusty city of low houses which rises on the northern edge of the Desert of Death (Dasht-i-Margo) and the Desert of Registan, at the convergence of the river Helmand and its greatest tributary, the Arghandab. These waterways, and the numerous canals connecting them, bring fertility to the lands which are cultivated with opium poppies. Lashkargah is considered the capital of Afghani opium: not only because it is produced here in great quantities, but because this is the departure point for most of the opium produced in the country and headed for the refineries in nearby Iran.
The trade is managed by the rich local traffickers, who take care of organising the shipments (often escorted by the conniving local police) along the caravan routes which connect the oases dotted around the Desert of Death. And, at a lower level, by the opium dealers who, mingling with the money-changers and chicken sellers, buy and sell tariak, opium, in the dark backs of the shops of the town bazaar.
 
As always, army bases. Around the city, among the turbans, the long beards and the black eyes of the Pashtun people, the soldiers of Her Britannic Majesty move like aliens, having established their principal base in the country in Lashkargah. They are honouring the ancient tradition of this city, which was settled a thousand years ago as a military encampment. Lashkar-Gah, in fact, means “the soldiers’ place”, because the Ghaznavidian army was garrisoned here when the emperor, each winter, transferred his court from Ghazni to Bost, the ancient name of Lashkargah. The magnificent ruins of the ancient imperial palace rise, still imposing, at the edge of the city, on the banks of the river Helmand, in whose shallow waters the women wash their children and the men wash their cars and trucks.
 

 In the heart of Taliban territory. The road which leaves the city is an eternal construction site: the old track which connected Lashkargah to the Ring Road (the circular road joining Kabul, Kandahar and Herat) is changing into an asphalt ribbon. But the work proceeds slowly, because the teams of Afghan workmen – who work under armed escort – are regularly attacked by the Taliban. Beside the road, the headquarters of the foreign businesses that manage the work are impossible to tell apart from the NATO military bases: reinforced boundary walls topped with barbed wire with watchtowers manned by armed guards.
Just outside the city lie Taliban territory and the war zone. Here, various Taliban groups are in charge, answering to local commanders who, in theory, should all be united and loyal to Mullah Omar, but who in reality often make war among themselves.
Travelling this road by day is dangerous, at night, unthinkable.
Moving north-east across a flat and desolate landscape, a boundless stretch of sand and crushed stone, broken by little villages of low mud houses. Following the dead-straight track of the work in progress, moving along rough, unsurfaced side trails or, where the work has not yet started, coasting the row of high-voltage pylons.
After an hour of jolting you arrive at the Ring Road, turning into it in an easterly direction.
We are in the Grishk zone: a Taliban stronghold which for months has borne witness to ambushes, fighting and aerial bombardment. But there is also a small American Army base: a little walled fort with a tower from which the stars and stripes waves. Outside, the militiamen of Mullah Daud are camped; this commandant of the zone decided to side with Bush instead of Mullah Omar. His men are completely indistinguishable from the Taliban which they purport to fight: both in their appearance (sharwal kameez, turban and Kalashnikov) and in their practices (roadside ambushes, kidnapping and extortion to the detriment of the local population).
 
On the Ring Road to Kandahar. The road to Kandahar – on this unsurfaced tract, which is still paved with the old slabs of cement used by the Soviets – runs straight and fast. The only traffic is the NATO military convoys, the trucks of the Afghan police and the colourful Pakistani trucks.
The terrain we cross remains the same for almost the entire trip to Kandahar; that is, for a couple of hours.
On the left, towards north, the sharp rocky reddish crests of the southern offshoots of the Hindukush are now nearer, now farther away; the locals call them “The Mountains of the Dragon” because of their jagged profile, which looks like a dragon’s back.
On the right, towards the south, stretch endless plantations of opium poppies and, in the distance, a yellow sea: the sand dunes of the desert of Registan. Beyond the horizon: the Pakistani border.
Every so often, along the road, a blackened crater and a pile of twisted metal bear witness to the frequent ambushes which the Taliban carry out using remote-controlled bombs on the NATO armoured vehicles and especially on the tankers transporting fuel for the bases of the Coalition.
 
A nice name and little else. At the gates of Kandahar, a series of checkpoints manned by the Afghan police stop all vehicles entering for the purposes of blocking any kamikazes headed for the city: all suspicious cars are stopped and the drivers searched, none too gently. But it doesn’t help much: by now Kandahar chalks up a suicide attack every week.
Cross the bridge over the river Arghandab and you enter the outskirts, a maze of shacks against which the old municipal grain silo from the Soviet era stands out: a concrete tower decapitated by the bombs and missiles launched first by the Taliban, and afterwards by American airplanes.
The further into the city you penetrate, the noisier and more chaotic the traffic becomes. Not even the NATO armoured cars manage to pass, remaining bottled up in the jams that form despite, or rather, thanks to the bearded Pashtun traffic police.
Finally you cross the magnificent old gate of the city, and soon afterwards you arrive in the central square: a big roundabout, where an endless and disorderly stream of traffic circles a small blue mausoleum, the symbol of the city.
As for the remainder, apart from a few beautiful old mosques hidden among horrendous concrete buildings, Kandahar appears as a giant, uninterrupted bazaar, with nothing of that exotic charm that its evocative name would suggest.
 
Rambo in an Afghan version. At the edge of the city stands the former palace of Mullah Omar: an enormous complex immersed in green, at the feet of the hills which loom over the northern outskirts. Today it is a base of the American Special Forces where pick-ups loaded with furtive men armed with machine-guns and rocket-launchers, all without uniforms, continually arrive and depart. Many have their faces covered with kefiahs and turbans: it is not possible to see if they are westerners or Afghani; they all look like Taliban versions of Rambo.
In the Afghanistan of today, it really is difficult to distinguish which side anybody is on.