GroundTruth

In Kabul, your life depends on a good driver.

And there’s no one better than Ramazan.

For almost 30 years, Ahmad Gul Ramazan, 66, and always known simply as “Ramazan,” has been the legendary driver of correspondents in Afghanistan and we were lucky enough to get to work with him on this trip.

His weathered hands grip a steering wheel on a beat-up old taxi that glides through the roads where he has seen so much history. He first started driving correspondents in the early 1980s as the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan got underway. The mujahadeen, or “freedom fighters” as the insurgents were called, were largely supported with US covert aid funneled through Pakistan. Back then Afghanistan was a Cold War proxy.

I ask Ramazan if he ever fought with the mujahadeen and he looks at me in the rear view mirror and replies, “My jihad was driving journalists.”

He turns the old taxi down Stone Cutter Street past the mortar-punched and machinegun-pocked ruins of the worst days of the civil war in the early to mid 1990s. And he turns past the less obvious reminders of the tyranny of the Taliban like the stadium where they held public executions, floggings and amputations.

Photo: Seamus Murphy

Ramazan, who was famous for a bullet-riddled and battered 1972 Peugeot 504, was a driver for AFP and Reuters and ABC News and others. He earned a reputation for never leaving journalists behind even in the worst of situations. He had taken many journalists to the hospital in the heavy days of fighting.

He would take on freelance writers and photographers. The good ones. He wouldn’t ride with anyone who wasn’t serious about the work. He worked for many years on and off with Seamus Murphy, the photographer who I am working with on this trip and who has been shooting Afghanistan since 1996. Now Seamus more frequently works with his son, Rasoul, who has taken over some of his father’s clients.

In the last few years, Ramazan says he’s mostly been driving a man named “Bob” who is an American consultant to the Afghan electrical company. The hours are more steady and there’s far less danger involved. I ask him which he likes better driving Bob or the journalists?

“It was more fun with the journalists. But better pay with Bob,” he says with the deep lines of age in his leathered face turning upward into a grin so wide you can’t see his eyes anymore.

I asked him about his worst day. He said it was in October 1996 when Terrence White of the AFP, who he had worked with for many years, and his translator were both badly wounded when a mujahadeen mortar backfired on them. Ramazan wrapped their wounds in plastic bags to stop them from bleeding out and rushed them across frontlines to get to a hospital and saved their lives.

The best day?

“That was the day the Taliban government collapsed. That was a beautiful time for us all,” he said, referring to the November 13, 2001 toppling of the Taliban after the US-led air strikes helped paved the way for the Northern Alliance troops to re-conquer Kabul.

He has three sons and three daughters who he says are all prospering and he is thankful to have lived through the war years without losing immediate family.

“Today I’m very happy,” he says and pulls the old taxi to a stop on Stone Cutter Street where we set out to do some reporting.

When we return he is there at the side of the car kneeling on a small rug and offering evening prayers as the sound of the minarets echo with the call to prayer. We wait for him to finish his prayers and then bundle back in the taxi and move down the road.

Photo: Seamus Murphy