Camels: Afghan proxy warriors FEATURE 06/01/2010

Camels: Afghan proxy warriors

FEATURE 06/01/2010 MAZAR-I-SHARIF — Afghan warlords Ghawsudin and Sher Arab have been at war for most of their lives, sometimes fighting side by side as they did against the Soviets, other times fighting each other. Now, almost nine years into a new era — a US-sponsored government challenged by a Taliban-led insurgency tearing their country apart — the two men are again at war, but this time they use proxies to fight their battles. At sports festivals across Afghanistan’s relatively peaceful north, Ghawsudin and Sher Arab are represented in the ring by giant Central Asian camels. Banned as un-Islamic under the Taliban’s radical 1996-2001 regime, camel fighting is a violent feature of daily life in Afghanistan, a country where the value of both men and animals is based on their fighting skills. In the northern province of Balkh, Ghawsudin and Arab are well known, not only as veteran warriors but as owners of the best fighting camels in the land, and as masters of the game. “We wait all year for this,” said Khwaja Habib, a farmer from Balkh’s Dawlat Abad district, ahead of a mighty clash between Luk and Nar, two enormous camels representing, respectively, Ghawsudin and Arab. “They have the strongest camels, it’s going to be a real game,” Habib told AFP, as more than a dozen men escorted the two camels onto a dirt field circled by thousands of spectators, almost all of them men. The animals are positioned face-to-face and then, spitting with fury, ram each other in a battle that resembles a men’s wrestling match. The crowd roars its approval as one of the camels — it is Luk, Ghawsudin’s beast — forces the other into submission by pressing down on his neck with his massive chest.... MORE     Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100601com3.html

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