Paul Muir
“I have long carried this load of griefs in the cage of my heart. Now I have given them to you. I hope you are strong enough to hold them,” Qais Akbar Omar tells readers at the end of this extremely poignant account of his family’s struggle to survive in conflict-ravaged Afghanistan.
As the front lines “shifted like angry snakes” and the “ground was soaked with blood” as rockets indiscriminately hammered Kabul, he and his family abandoned their house and fled to the relative safety of the enormous Fort of Nine Towers, home of his father’s affluent carpet-dealer friend.
As much a story about his family’s heartwarmingly tightknit relationship as it is a chronicle of this terrible conflict, A Fort of Nine Towers is required reading for anyone who wishes to better understand the impact of war on civilians, particularly children.
Omar’s account of his brutal treatment as a boy at the hands of barbarically sadistic Taliban fighters is particularly harrowing.
Read this endearing portrait of suffering and survival and you may see Afghanistan and its people in a whole new light.
pmuir@thenational.ae
