Is it time to leave Afghanistan?

'Kabul is a war zone'

Famous actor says it's time to leave

By Nick Paton Walsh, CNN

Updated 9:32 PM ET, Thu February 1, 2018

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN)Action movie star Massoud Hashimi has a painful cough, but it's not caused by the dirty Kabul air. Hashimi has a Kalashnikov round lodged in his ribcage that he needs swiftly removed.

The operation to remove the bullet from Hashimi's chest is scheduled to take place overseas. The 35-year-old actor has made numerous trips outside of the country, only this time he wishes he didn't have to come back.

For years, Hashimi has been a voice in Afghanistan -- in between the studio lights and theatrical fireworks -- urging its youth to stay in their homeland.

But no longer.

A deadly encounter in the Intercontinental Hotel -- one of several recent attacks to transform the capital into what many say feels like a new frontline in the war -- has changed his message to Afghans to something starker: Get out while you can.

"Kabul is not safe for anybody ... There is no hope. I am not feeling secure even inside my house," he says pointing around his apartment.

"Now Kabul has changed into a war zone, not a civil society for people to live in. Every night I wake up in the middle of the night."

Hashimi was discussing film projects in the hotel's luxurious salon when the violence he was used to seeing in staged productions became very real.

"I saw a German woman, very calmly listening to the music," he recalls. "They first shot that lady. It's really hard to see someone killing people in front of your eyes. It's unbelievable, unimaginable."

The gunmen calmly moved through the salon, shooting dead in front of him two of his friends. A bullet struck him in the chest.

When the lights went out, Hashimi used his knowledge of the hotel's layout to guide others into a dark room away from the fighting. Once there, the group threw their cellphones away, so their vibrations, ringtones and lights wouldn't give them up, and waited for help. For three hours.

"We all kept silent in a corner. I was bleeding, horribly bleeding. It's very hard, you see your death is coming to you."

The Afghan special forces then arrived. The commandos, recognizing Hashimi, held their fire as he and 14 others emerged from their hiding place.

Hashimi shifts awkwardly in his seat: "One bullet here," he says, pointing at his ribcage. "But a long time ago, another bullet was in my leg. So, it's two gifts that Afghanistan gave me".

Now he wants out. Surgery to remove the bullet in the Turkish capital of Istanbul first, and then perhaps America. Stark words from a man who once implored other Afghans -- even on US radio in Washington D.C. -- to stay, build and fight.

"Most people welcomed me that I was encouraging people to stay in Afghanistan," he says.

"But I'm not saying that again because I feel guilty if I do it publicly. I am a famous person, so if I say something people may just accept it."

Outside, the still Kabul air belies what should be the bustle and chaos of rush hour.

The decision by many to stay off the streets of Kabul follows a bloody 9-day period in which the Taliban attacked the hotel, ISIS hit a children's charity in the east of the country, the Taliban used an ambulance as a suicide car bomb to kill over a hundred, and ISIS attacked a secure military academy.

To some, the week of violence was a watershed moment. For US President Donald Trump, it was a reason to set aside, temporarily at least, a key tenet of the US military strategy: The idea of talks with the Taliban. The Afghan government has agreed, saying the attacks had crossed "red lines."

Political negotiations have remained a far-fetched prospect throughout the insurgency, but the open dismissal of them now has led many in Kabul to conclude that the situation is likely to worsen.

We are still in a bleak midwinter, with the violence of the summer months far off. Yet already the city is at times panicked, at times deserted, struggling to adapt to its new, frontline status.

Checkpoints and barriers provide a veneer of security. One near Abdul Haq Square appears most interested in checking cars with government plates. It's unclear if intra-government rivalries are at play, or if there is a genuine fear insurgents are disguising themselves as police.

At the checkpoint, soldiers demand documents. The arrival of one SUV sees soldiers rip out some police-style emergency siren lights from the car's front grill, crushing them underfoot.

Another SUV with black government plates is detained until it proves its association with a regional governor. But this is the nature of trust here in Kabul: there is little.

You can see why outside the Jamariyat Hospital, where days earlier one of the most vicious bombs the city has seen was detonated.

The bomb was in an ambulance. The vehicle passed the first checkpoint, and then loitered in the hospital car park for 20 minutes, hoping to avoid suspicion before then trying to pass another checkpoint into the more secure areas.

Now the patients at the hospital cannot be brought in by car: ambulances are banned unless the drivers are personally known to the staff.

Kabul's sick are hand-carried by relatives into a building whose windows were blown out by the blast.

A city that was once a safe sanctuary struggling, day by day, with less and less.

Jihadists beheadings sow fear, prompt Muslim revulsion

Getty Images: Haidar Mohammed Ali, AFP

Supporters of al-Fadila party hold placards during a protest against the Islamic State militants on Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2014, in the southern Iraq city of Basra.

1 day ago By AFP

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Brutal beheadings recorded on video by the jihadist Islamic State are intended to terrorise the group's enemies, but are also angering and alienating the Muslims the group claims to represent.

On Tuesday, the jihadist group released a new video purporting to show the beheading of Steven Sotloff, the second US journalist to be decapitated by its fighters in a fortnight.
The video was described as "sickening" by the United States and provoked widespread anger as well as fear -- which experts say is precisely the group's intention.
For Rita Katz, director of extremist monitoring group SITE, releasing videos of the beheadings of Sotloff and journalist James Foley before him "has a straight-forward purpose from an analytical standpoint: intimidation".
"The brutality demonstrated in the video says, 'Don't mess with us.'"
The Islamic State claim "to be the only 'true Muslims' and resort to murder and mayhem as a psychological tactic to terrorise other people," said Asma Afsaruddin, a professor at Indiana University's religious studies department.
Beheading has become almost a calling card for IS, which has used the method on opponents ranging from Syrian and Iraqi government troops to activists who have opposed its abuses.
As well as the two US journalists, in the last two weeks IS has also released videos of a Lebanese soldier and a Kurdish fighter being beheaded.
The method has clearly been effective in spreading fear: when the group advanced in Iraq this year, hundreds of thousands fled in terror.
- Re-emerging tactic -
As a tactic, decapitation by jihadists is not new -- extremists beheaded US journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002.
It also became a favoured method of Al-Qaeda's Iraqi affiliate, a precursor of today's Islamic State, under the leadership of militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
With Zarqawi's death in a US raid in Iraq in 2006 and the weakening of his group, its use declined.
But with the emergence of the Islamic State, which has broken with Al-Qaeda and declared its own Islamic "caliphate" in Syrian and Iraqi territory, decapitation has once again become a potent tool.
Katz said videos of the brutal tactic also served the "alarming" purpose of "recruitment to jihad," by attracting a small minority of radicalised Muslims impressed by such violent excesses.
"A dangerous community with a dark view of the world has interpreted the video in a celebratory and empowering vein," Katz wrote in an analysis for the group.
But for most in the Muslim world and elsewhere, the Islamic State's tactics produce revulsion and anger.
"The acts and practices of IS in terms of beheadings and insulting minorities are at complete odds with the message of Islam and Muslim belief," said Sheikh Khaldun Araymit, secretary-general of Lebanon's Supreme Islamic Council.
"Islam is mercy and love and communication with the other," he told AFP.
"The heinous acts carried out by IS not only contradict Islam but are offensive to it."
- 'No basis' in Islamic law -
Muslims express similar feelings online, taking to Facebook and Twitter after each new IS outrage, whether the crucifixion of Syrians or the reported trafficking of Yazidi women kidnapped in Iraq.
Scholars of Islam say there is no crime for which beheading is religiously prescribed, though the tactic was used in war by Muslims and non-Muslims alike at the time of Prophet Mohammed and after.
"Beheading certainly was the common way to carry out criminal prosecutions throughout Islamic history, and it therefore was the default," said Haider Ala Hamoudi, an Islamic law expert and professor at Pittsburgh University law school.
"The custom developed among peoples who were aware that it was on balance much less painful than other available means of execution."
Beheading remains in use in Saudi Arabia, but Araymit noted that there it is used only "after a trial in the presence of a judge and where a pardon is not given."
Rights groups have criticised its continued use there however, and accused the Saudi judicial system of serious flaws.
Officials at Egypt's prestigious Al-Azhar religious authority have rejected the Islamic State and its practices as un-Islamic.
"These criminal acts have nothing to do with Islam" Azhar official Abbas Shoman told AFP. "There is no basis for them in Islamic law."
"These people do not represent Islam," he added.
Online and on television, Muslims have been increasingly responding to IS atrocities.
Twitter user @LibyaLiberty, writing after Foley's killing, said: "If you think Muslims aren't condemning ISIS.. you're not listening to Muslims."
"Feel free to quote: 'I, a Muslim, do hereby condemn ISIS for cutting off the heads of people, including mine, if they could'," she said, using another name for the extremist group.