Guruko, District of Dur Bobo, Province of Nangarhar, Afghanistan (December 2018)

The caravan of camels leaves the village of low stone houses that are as bleak as their rubble-strewn surroundings. The few men that lead the camels take the same slow, even steps in the dust as their beasts. They head for the mountains in the south, dully visible through a light haze on the horizon under a bright winter sun in the otherwise clear blue sky. Every camel carries several bags and boxes, held in place by rope harnesses and balanced on each side of their humps. The white or grey box wrappings and bags give no hint of what might be hidden inside them. But whatever it is, it is contraband.

Somewhere in the mountains that rise in front of the caravan lies the Durand Line, the (although by Afghanistan not recognised) effective border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And the people in this place that is called Guruko have made a living of smuggling things over it. Hashish, opium, firearms, base chemicals for home-made explosives, but also mundane things such as air conditioners, dozens of which are neatly stacked  beside a group of other waiting camels.

The lawlessness and the desolate surroundings of Guruko suggest that it is more forlorn than it actually is. Driving on the main thoroughfare from Kabul via Jalalabad toward Pakistan, it is only a stone’s throw away from the busy official border crossing of Torkham. Passing a long line of parked lorries that wait to be processed through customs, one has just to take an inconspicuous dirt track that branches off the main road to the right just before the official border crossing. 

At first, the dusty road into the foothills of the small mountains seems to lead nowhere. The lorry carrying a shipping container coming down the road is already the first sign though that more is going on here than meets the eye. And the many white Taliban flags that surround one lonely Afghan tricolour, all flying in the light breeze over graves in a nearby cemetery, indicate that the Afghan government has not much of a presence around here.

Soon the road gets riddled with potholes, but it is still fine enough for the Corolla that I sit in. In particular as it is a short ride. After about only 15 minutes drive from the main road, the car passes the first houses of Guruko. Their walls are bleak mud, crumbling in more places than not. Some host small shops. But the wide-meshed wire grills separating their empty-yawning porches from the side of the street make them look more like poor cages rather than bazaar stalls. 

Between the small groups of houses, wide arms of pebble wind down from the mountains through the plain, washed down by streams that only appear with heavy rains, or maybe snowmelt. Although – given their width and size – it is hard to imagine that there is ever that much water in this dusty surroundings. Apart from some half withered small bushes and the few trees tended in gardens adjacent to some houses, nothing seems to grow.

In some places in the cluster of hamlets that is Guruko, men sit outside. Some on weaved mats and carpets on the ground; others on the in this part of Afghanistan common kats – wooden frames with ropes tied to a net in the space inbetween so that they form a sort of bench. They don’t seem to have anything to do. The barren land does not give much, if any opportunity for subsistence farming, even for harsh Afghan standards. And the smuggling runs are normally done under cover of darkness, I am told. Apparently to evade infrequent government forces’s patrols as there are no permanent posts along the border in the immediate area. At least no government posts that is. Pointing out one peak on the still hazy mountain ridge on the horizon, smugglers claim that it hosts a Taliban outposts. However, the Taliban – apart from taking a small toll – leave the smugglers alone.

The way the camel caravan went is only one of several ratlines over the porous border. Another one that gunrunners show me leads up a small valley from one of the hamlets. With larger rounded stones taking up its whole floor, it resembles even more a dried out river bed. But given the firm tire tracks cutting through the stones, it certainly has been a long time since water has flown down here.

Soon, the tire tracks will end though, the arms traffickers say, and the contraband has to be tediously carried by men to the Pakistani side. Given that gunrunners are one of most paranoid people that I ever met in Afghanistan – much more paranoid than Taliban or even the opaque self-declared Islamic State – they lead me only a little bit up the valley and I can’t see how difficult or easy the latter footpaths are.

A small flock of goats roams through the valley searching for meagre tufts of grass between the rocks. Although I can’t see much, if anything, they seem to find something to graze every now and then. 

But the goats are not the only ones that try to get something from the inhospitable surroundings. Just when we were about to return, a group of women and girls come down the valley. In rural Afghanistan, in particular in an even for Afghan standards traditional Pashtun part like this area at the rim of Nangarhar, women hardly interact with men in public. However, this time is an exception as one of the women asks in local Pashto, whether we are here to cut down the few trees that, branching off just above the ground and remaining low, rather resemble bushes. One of my companions assures her that we are not. But it is hard to tell, whether or to what extent this eased her obvious worries that we might deprive them of the scarce source of the firewood that they came to gather and carry back to their houses.

Going down, passing the hamlet at the mouth of the valley, where also the women’s homes must lie, I am told that it is called Majburobod. An apt name, as “majbur” means “to be forced to” (“-obod” is a suffix indicating a city or settlement). As folklore has it, the name derives from the fact that the first inhabitant was unable to get a plot of land anywhere else and was finally forced to live in this barren place. Hence, and although the smugglers’ den of Guruko, including Majburobod, is an interesting place, it is certainly not anyone’s Shangri-La.

(For my news report on arms trafficking in Guruko see:

“In Search of Illegal Arms Traffickers in Afghanistan,” published by Popular Front on 13th of June 2019 or listen to the corresponding podcast.)