In Kabul clinic, Taliban and the soldiers they fought confront wounds of war

KABUL, Oct 20 (Reuters)-Former Taliban fighter Mohammad Ishaq, who spent times battling Western colors and original forces in Afghanistan, lost his leg in combat and is now learning to walk with a new branch. Standing near him at a Kabul clinic is one of the dogfaces he defeated.

In the Red Cross Hospital in Kabul, Ishaq spoke simply of the eight times he spent in Helmand, the southern fiefdom where some of the fiercest fighting of the war took place and where thousands of civilians and combatants were killed and mutilated.
“For times we fought against the apostates and we defeated them and I was injured,”he said, wearing the traditional black turban worn by numerous Taliban during their 20- time insurrection.

That rebellion turned to subjection in August when the strict Islamist zealots advanced on Kabul and seized the capital. At the same time, the last foreign colors were withdrawing and what little resistance there was from original Afghan forces snappily wilted.
Ishaq awaited as an educator fitted a new artificial branch to replace the left leg he lost to a pellet crack, before marching across the long exercise hall watched by medical staff and cases from both sides of the conflict.

With Afghanistan in deep profitable extremity and its health service in disarray, the Red Cross, with decades of experience treating the war’s victims, is one of the many centres that can supply prosthetic branches.
“They help all people in need; whatever the people need they give,”Ishaq said.

The staff are used to treating Taliban fighters, said Alberto Cairo, an Italian physiotherapist with three decades of experience in Afghanistan who leads the orthopaedic programme for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
“There were Taliban coming then, but veritably many and intimately. Now they come veritably openly, so we’ve numerous, every day 10-15, they come for different reasons,”he said.”We help them like we help everybody.”

The centre, one of seven the Red Cross operates in Afghanistan, helps people with natural disabilities as well as the war wounded, and has continued operating since the Taliban palm, treating all moneybags inversely.
“There have been no changes compared to how we worked ahead, everything is normal. Just as cases came before they come now,” said Malalai, a womanish physiotherapist who has worked at the centre for the once 10 times.

Unlike numerous Afghan women forced from their jobs since the Taliban returned to power, she has been allowed to carry on.
While Ishaq tried out his new leg, members of the old Afghan National Army sat in the same hall looking on alongside wounded Taliban fighters, all victims of a conflict that has killed and wounded knockouts of thousands of Afghans over four decades.

But there has been no palm to ease the suffering of defeated dogfaces from the ousted administration, some of whose leaders fled when the Taliban approached Kabul and left the megacity to its fate.
Mohammad Tawfiq, a former dogface from Panjshir fiefdom in the north of the country was paralyzed from the midriff down after a Taliban ambush in which he was the only survivor of his three- man command.

He has spent the last three times in bed and still needs support to stand up.
As he took in the morning sun, he was philosophical about being treated alongside his former adversaries and wanted to be left alone to put the war behind him.

Yet after so numerous times of bloodshed it was hard to banish dubieties about the future.
“The fight is over for me, my fight is over,”he said.”I want to live in a peaceful terrain. I can talk to anyone now. But I do not suppose they can rule for a long time.”