Bloodsport From cockfighting to buzkashi, Afghanistan’s pastimes are as brutal as the country’s history. Story and Photos by Andrew Quilty

A chapandaz (horseman) on a white horse reaches for the calf carcass as two teammates, one on either side, protect him from rival riders during a buzkashi match in Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley, Jan. 2014; Dogs clash at a Friday dogfighting event in Company, on Kabul’s southwestern outskirts, Jan. 2014.

At the top of a dusty hill in central Kabul, Hasan walks his dog, Diwana, alongside an empty Soviet-era swimming pool. The leash in his hand is doubled for strength and attached to a body harness made out of a heavy leather. It is fastened around the dog’s neck and waist as if for a horse to pull a cart. Above them, a giant Afghan flag flaps in the cold air at the top of a flagpole that stretches some 260 feet into the sky. In a few hours, Hasan and Diwana will drive half an hour to the capital’s eastern outskirts, where the Afghan National Security Forces’ presence runs thin, ceding to local strongmen who pay gunmen to provide at least a sense of security. When they arrive at the gate to the mud-walled compound, men in military fatigues carrying Kalashnikovs will pause their body searches as Diwana — 5 feet tall on hind legs, ears clipped, and with bloodshot eyes matching his henna-daubed coat — muscles his great frame out of the car. The men and boys waiting in line will turn to flatten themselves against the wall, giggling in excitable fear. They’ve come to watch Diwana fight. It’s Friday in Kabul, the second day of the Islamic weekend — a day of peace, mercy, and blood sport. Few countries have experienced the tumult that Afghanistan has in the past four decades. The 1979 Soviet invasion marked the beginning of more than 20 years of extreme violence and depredation. Following nearly a decade of bloodshed in which an estimated 1 million civilians were killed, the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 gave rise to a brutal civil war that ultimately saw the birth of the Taliban in the mid-1990s. Despite a new war raging in the hills and valleys of the provinces, the first decade of the new millennium was imbued with a sense of hope in Kabul and is telling of Afghanistan’s stamina in the face of violence. The optimism that came in 2001 was a first for more than half the young population. Afghan society and culture had been either hobbled or completely hogtied for more than two decades.

The base of a mountain serves as a grandstand for a buzkashi match in the Panjshir Valley on Jan. 31, 2014. Spectators watch traditional Turkmen pahlawani (wrestling) at Chaman-e-Hozori, a giant field in Kabul's south where thousands come to play sports of all kinds on the weekends. Men at Chaman-e-Hozori leave their places in a crowd watching pahlawani to pray the afternoon prayer on March 20.

For many men in Afghanistan, sports — often violent in nature — as entertainment are as ingrained in Friday’s routine as prayer. In the post-2001 decade, friends could attend matches in public without fear of being arrested by the Taliban-era vice-and-virtue police or being strafed by Soviet gunships. Ancient blood sports were given tacit approval by the government and police. Betting and hash smoking went hand in hand with these events, but for the most part they remained incident-free. In keeping with Afghanistan’s volatility in recent decades, however, things are changing. A new government with modern aspirations has something to do with it, as does its dubious grip on domestic security. With unemployment rife and an anxious malaise settling over the country as security and the prospects of a nation deteriorate, the appetite for public entertainment as escapism is as apparent as ever. In the current atmosphere, however, ringleaders and punters are being forced to adapt. In parts of the country that continue to be contested by the Taliban, sports — in most cases seen by the insurgent group’s leaders as frivolous and un-Islamic — have provided numerous soft targets in recent years. With the large gatherings of civilians as well as government and security officials that some sporting events can attract to public places, security can be difficult to manage. In 2008, in the Taliban heartland of Kandahar province, a suicide bomber blew himself up, killing 80 others, in an attack aimed at a prominent anti-Taliban militia commander attending a public dogfighting event. In November 2014, more than 50 people were killed in a suicide bombing at a volleyball tournament in Paktika province. Of course, for resilient and resourceful Afghans, these are but minor impediments. The appeal of illicit or combative sporting pursuits perseveres. And, like the circumstances surrounding their origins and evolution, these sports provide a mirror of Afghanistan’s social and political climate, where money and power trump goodwill and historical alliances and where ethnic divides and tribalism undermine the most well-intentioned governance.

A bloodied but victorious dog is carried off by its trainers after a fight at a Friday event in Badam Bagh, in Kabul’s northwest on Dec. 20, 2013.

The referee’s assistant pulls back the green cloth that separates two ferocious dogs, and they charge at each other, colliding in midair. The sound of teeth meeting flesh and bone draws a cheer from the crowd. A few hundred men form a wide ring around the spectacle before them — the mongrel canines in veritable combat, snarling and tearing into each other’s neck and muzzle until small gashes appear and blood begins to stain the snow. On Kabul’s southwestern outskirts — where a weathered road sign points the way to Kandahar, via other insurgent-hotbed provinces to the south — one will find the district of Char Asiab, a sprawling dust bowl of stockyards and walled compounds hemmed in by high peaks to the south. It is here that Commandant Sabur, a former mujahid, runs weekly dogfights. He charges 50 afghanis (approximately $1) per person to enter this private arena, secure in a walled compound manned by armed guards. It is a relatively safe place for a crowd as large as this one to watch a dogfight. Before sunrise in Wazir Akbar Khan, a district of Kabul, on Jan. 2, 2014, a dog trainer runs his dog along the top of Bibi Mahru Hill while the owner's son sits in a car tire tied to their animal as a means of strength training. Hasan and Diwana (“Crazy”) wrestle playfully after training at sunrise on top of Bibi Mahru Hill, in central Kabul on Dec. 18, 2013. In recent months, some provinces (such as Wardak) have announced official bans on public dogfighting. The bans have nothing to do with animal rights but rather were put in place because dogfights can be magnets for human conflict. And though the fights are attended by Afghans from all ethnic backgrounds, clearly definable clusters of Tajiks, Pashtuns, Hazaras, and Uzbeks — Afghanistan’s four dominant ethnic groups — make up the mix, and disagreements between rival dog teams will often escalate into ethnically influenced violence. In 2014, in Qasaba, in Kabul’s northwest, four men from Panjshir province were stabbed and killed by rivals from Kandahar after a trainer failed to pull his dog away when the Panjshiri dog showed the signs of submission that would ordinarily end a fight. Even Hasan, Diwana’s owner, was jailed for a month after knocking out six teeth of a rival who then revealed a knife, and stabbed the young Kabuli in the hip and wrist. Mir Gul Qayum Miri, 61, has been watching dogfights for 30 years. As an education advocate working in the Ministry of Education, Miri laments that there is little alternative entertainment in Afghanistan. For children, who often attend the fights with their fathers and older brothers, “even dogfighting is still fighting, and it’s bad, but there is nothing else for them to do.” Hasan has his own memories of watching dogfights as boy, ones that make him laugh. The Taliban was in power, and he and a friend, Khalil, went to a clandestine dogfight. Not long into a bout, Taliban police arrived and the boys ran in all different directions to escape. Khalil was the only one who didn’t get away in time. His punishment was to face off against one of the dogs himself. He still limps from his injuries. While the crowd jeers in the arena, Diwana stands on his hind legs and pulls his lead taught against stems of rebar protruding from an unfinished wall, all the while barking viciously at other dogs tied up on the periphery of the makeshift arena. With Hasan unable to find an agreeable match, Diwana won’t fight today. Hasan takes him home, where eggs and milk await. Despite not fighting, after the excitement of the morning Diwana eats first. Hasan explains that “when [the dog] is hurting, so am I.” When asked why they like to own or train animals for fighting or to simply watch any one of the various combative sports here in Afghanistan, the common refrain is simply “[because of] shoqe” — it is their passion.

In the far northern outskirts of Kabul on a Friday afternoon at the beginning of spring in March, the referee re-marks the circle where the calf carcass must be placed in order to register a score. This arena was built for buzkashi and belongs to the family of Marshal Mohammad Qasim Fahim — a prominent mujahideen leader and later a vice president of Afghanistan.

Of the combat sports unique to the region, buzkashi is the only one that Afghan officialdom sanctions. Its origins are poorly documented, but it’s believed the sport began around the time Genghis Khan and his merciless Mongol horsemen trampled large swaths of Central Asia. It is said that the Mongols lived and died in the saddle and that buzkashi was their favorite of all games. The game has changed little over the centuries, despite its many variations (which depend on who is playing and where the game is played). Buzkashi is played by two teams typically of between 10 and 20 chapandazes (horsemen) who fight over a headless goat or calf carcass. Despite ostensibly being a team sport, ethnic allegiance often trumps any illusion of teamwork, and reward is individual rather than collective, with each chapandaz collecting tattered afghani bills from wealthy spectators after scoring. To score, the carcass must be gathered from the ground, galloped around a flag at one end of the field, and placed in a circle marked in white chalk powder at the other end — always in front of the VIPs. The games are violent, with the chapandazes and their horses unforgiving. With whips gripped between clenched teeth and blood smeared across the flanks of their rearing stallions, these warriors look every bit the wild cavalrymen of another time. Tales of buzkashi being played with the heads of retreating British soldiers of the 19th century are hard to verify. Chapandazes battle over the headless carcass of a goat in a buzkashi match in Kabul’s northern outskirts on March 12. From a nearby building under construction, a buzkashi match can be seen being played on a purpose-built field in Shahrake Sol (Peace City), on Kabul’s northern outskirts on March 19. In a private arena on Kabul’s northern outskirts, toward provinces famous for buzkashi, like Parwan and Panjshir, a cloud of dust follows the pack of horses as they charge along a brick-walled boundary that doubles as spectator seating. Their riders pull up on the reins as they run out of field and a mess of sweaty hides thud against each other and the walls that hem them in. The dust cloud catches up to the tangle of beasts as the chapandazes wrestle their steeds into within reach of the carcass that has fallen to the ground. From amid the melee a rider rights himself and hooks his leg around a limb of the headless calf in order to secure it in his possession. Teammates on either side shepherd his exit from the pack until he breaks free and charges into the open field. American anthropologist Whitney Azoy, who spent several years chronicling the game from the mid-1970s until recently and who authored Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan, said in an interview via Skype that he knew a mujahideen commander from Baghlan province who, when asked about the time he was rumored to have played a game with a Soviet prisoner in place of a goat carcass, remained silent but “smiled quizzically.”

Scenes from a Friday cockfight meet in a purpose-built compound in Darul Aman, on Kabul's southern outskirts on Feb. 27.

A couple of miles from Hasan and Diwana, on a main road that leads to Kabul’s international airport, a hundred or more mostly middle-aged or older Hazara men are converging on a barren lot between two apartment buildings. Both are under construction, not nearly complete, and rise from the ground like two great concrete skeletons. Dozens of domed wooden cages, covered with colorful shrouds that conceal clucking partridges, are already scattered across the fallow expanse. Abdul Hussein, 75 years old and from central Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province, arrives with his bird. He is too old and weak to make his own way, so his middle-aged sons drive him here and pick him up an hour or two later. They don't like the kauk (partridge) fights. While dogfighting and buzkashi might require a certain amount of money to compete, perhaps the animal most commonly kept by Afghans is the kauk. Baz Ali, 61, caught his first kauk with a snare in the mountains of Baghlan, north of Kabul, when he was a boy. He now owns three kauks that, he says, range in price from $100 to $10,000. Baz Ali comes to the barren lot in the Salim Karwan area of central Kabul most Fridays, sometimes to bet on fights but mostly just to be with friends, whom he otherwise sees little of in the wintertime. The kauk fights have a more jovial, less foreboding atmosphere than dogfights. And the birds, rotund and silvery brown with ketchup-red beaks, are a far cry from the killing-machine cockerels. Yakob Ali, 37, is the referee at the weekly kauk fights at Salim Karwan. His job, however, appears to be as much about rousing the crowd as it is about enforcing the rules. The birds jump, flap, and tumble over each other in a comedic fashion that draws collective chuckles from the crowd. The bird that displays absolute domination is declared the winner. Cockerels, on the other hand, while loved by their owners, are bred solely for fighting. At the fights they’re coddled and thrust toward the foreigner’s camera with pride. It is the only one of Afghanistan’s blood sports that often ends in the death of one of the two competitors. It is almost always a result of a fatal blow from a cock’s hind spur — a naturally occurring defense mechanism that is sometimes removed and replaced with an artificial one (though still made of bone) that can be sharpened for greater lethality.

Two kauk (chukar partridge) owners stay close to their birds during a fight next to a construction site in central Kabul early on a Friday morning in March. Fights are only held during the colder months of the year or during early mornings in spring. Scenes from a regular Friday dawn kauk-fighting meet on an empty lot between two buildings under construction in Kabul. Men observe caged kauks early on a Friday morning at a weekly kauk-fighting location in Kabul. Men attend meets in order to buy and sell birds as much as to fight them. A cockerel owner wets the face of his bird after a fight on March 6. Two cocks fight a “friendly” match (without the pointed barbs strapped to their feet, because it is early in the day) in a muddy lot on a morning when the weather saw fewer than the normal number of punters arriving to watch.

Most cockfights are held in private arenas that charge a modest entry fee. Half an hour’s drive from the city’s center, not far from the pockmarked ruins of the century-old Darul Aman Palace — one of Kabul’s few remaining symbols of the destruction wreaked upon the city by the early 1990s civil war — is the capital’s premier amphitheater for cockfighting. Tiered seating is occupied by four parties — one group of owners, trainers, and supporters on each side — the groups not necessarily divided along ethnic lines as they tend to be during dogfights. Each party might have several birds that have been conditioned for battle over the preceding two to three months. Between bouts, the birds, which can grow as high as 3 feet tall, are held beneath their owner’s dust-colored woolen shawls, with their immense prehistoric claws dangling between the owners’ knees. During these pauses in fighting, wagers of up to 50,000 afghanis (nearly $1,000) are haggled over throughout the ring in scenes reminiscent of the trading-room floors of yesteryear. Salim Khyumi, 27, of Parwan province, doesn’t fight his cocks for the money, though. “The main purpose for me, because I have another good source of income, is not about the money. It’s about going somewhere safe on the weekend. It’s about shoqe.”

Amid a small crowd of spectators, a wrestler’s hand is raised after winning a bout of pahlawani (traditional Turkmen wrestling) on Chaman-e-Hozori, a giant playing field in southwest Kabul on Feb. 7.