This month, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Fahim Abed and Jim Huylebroek reported from Mazar-i-Sharif, a city in northern Afghanistan, on the unofficial shoe of the Taliban. Below they each recount when they first came across the sneakers that have come to be synonymous with the war in Afghanistan. |
 | | A knockoff Servis sneaker on display at a bazaar in Mazar-i-Sharif this month.Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times |
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When I see someone walking in these shoes, my first instinct is to get away from him. He might kill me. These are the thoughts left in my mind from my childhood that I have never been able to rid myself of, like many other things. It is impossible to forget about the civil war. |
It was right after the Taliban's first attack of Mazar-i-Sharif in the middle of 1998, and two years after the group had taken Kabul, the Afghan capital, when I first remember seeing those pairs of white Servis Cheetah sneakers. I was 10 years old and had lived in Mazar-i-Sharif for most of my life. The Taliban's control over the city didn't last long; they were quickly attacked by another insurgent group, forcing them to retreat. |
My mother sent me to get some sugar for breakfast. When I reached the shop on the corner of our street, I saw a group of Taliban members who had been taken prisoner. One of them was tied up with a green plastic rope and bleeding. Behind the prisoners were the fighters who fought them. Nearly all of them were wearing white Servis shoes, and they were standing in the prisoner's blood. |
Those shoes became a symbol of fear for me, and in my mind they will always stand for the killing and wars in my country. |
Working as a photographer in Afghanistan often feels like a one-sided endeavor. Access to Taliban-controlled territory is extremely limited for Westerners. We usually find ourselves confined to working on the government side of the equation. |
Over the years, visiting front lines from the beautiful (but cruel) mountains in the country's northeast to the treacherous deserts in the south and west, I would often run into a militia member, a police officer or a soldier wearing an odd pair of white sneakers while others wore sandals or combat boots. It always struck me as odd, but I never paid too much attention to it. |
In March, after the United States struck an agreement with the Taliban, my colleagues Mujib Mashal, Zabihullah Ghazi and I were granted long-awaited access to territory firmly under the Taliban's grip. |
To our surprise, we were met by a group of fighters wearing uniforms and face coverings. That in itself was unusual, as the Taliban are often thought of as a bearded group of insurgents carrying Kalashnikovs and wearing local Afghan dress, a chest rig and sandals. But what immediately stood out most was their footwear. Every single one of them had on a pair of Servis Cheetahs. Some had tricked-out lacing, others went with the more nonchalant tongue-out style. A clear statement. |
And that, for me, was when the intrigue around the Servis Cheetah began. |
 | | Called Cheetahs, the sneakers are produced by Servis Shoes, one of the largest shoe companies in Pakistan. Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times |
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Distinct Footprints in the Mud |
My first encounter with the Servis Cheetah, the white high-top sneaker, was in the winter of 2010 when I was serving as a Marine infantryman in southern Afghanistan. |
I was sent to Helmand Province as part of the Obama administration's troop surge, tasked with clearing Marjah, a diaspora of walled villages and fields that was deemed the "last Taliban stronghold." |
In the first few weeks, we began encountering distinct footprints left behind in the muddy drainage ditches that lined hundreds of Marjah's fields — most of them dedicated to growing poppies. |
We would find these footprints after a firefight, when the Taliban would fire at us and disappear. The prints were always in the shape of a sneaker sole headed in the opposite direction of our patrol and, if we were lucky, there would be the distinct outline of the bull's-eye molding around the toe. |
My fellow Marines were perplexed. Were they Skechers? New Balances? Nikes? We never found out that winter. |
More than a decade later, now as a journalist in Afghanistan, I set out with Fahim and Jim to answer the question about the mysterious sneaker prints. |
Ultimately, the Servis Cheetah was just as much a part of the unending war in Afghanistan as anything else. A small, often unnoticed accessory that people feared and loathed and that fighters wore as they set out to kill, no matter which side they fought for. |
I guess one could argue that writing about a sneaker in the midst of all of this killing and dying is trivial. But when a pair of white sneakers is worn for so long and to such an extent, they invoke horrific images and memories of decades past, underscoring the depravity of this war that sees no end. |
| THE HISTORY OF THE SERVIS CHEETAHS | | |
Afghan War Casualty Report: January 2021 |
 | | A bomb blast targeting an army vehicle in Jalalabad on Jan. 28.Ghulamullah Habibi/EPA, via Shutterstock |
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At least 239 pro-government forces and 77 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in January. According to an annual report from the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission released on Wednesday, 2,958 civilians were killed and 5,542 others were wounded in 2020, a 21 percent decrease compared with 2019. The commission expressed concern over the 117 percent increase in target killings compared with last year, with no one claiming responsibility for such attacks. [Read the casualty report.] |
Here are four articles from The Times that you might have missed. |
 | | A member of the Ethiopian military near the city of Alamata in the Tigray region last month.Eduardo Soteras/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
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"It was difficult to believe a human could live in the mountain where we found him." Politicians and military commanders who once led Ethiopia are being tracked down, caught and sometimes killed by their own country's soldiers in the war in the Tigray region. [Read the article.] |
"Action, they say, is louder than words." With just two years left in President Muhammadu Buhari's tenure, can a new approach defeat the militants and bandits who are killing, kidnapping and traumatizing Nigeria's people? [Read the article.] |
"I have no doubts; I'm convinced that the election was not free and fair." The presence in Washington, D.C., of a longtime member of the Navy SEALs who was trained to identify misinformation reflects the partisan politics that helped lead to the assault on the U.S. Capitol. [Read the article.] |
"We should have a criminal justice system worthy of the sacrifices made by those who serve." After years of failure to curb the scourge of sexual assault in the military, Lloyd J. Austin III, the new secretary of defense, is open to considering significant revisions to how those crimes are prosecuted, a potential sea change that generations of commanders have resisted. [Read the article.] |
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