New contact with the kidnapped journalist
Gabriele Torsello spoke on the phone with Emergency hospital staff: "I am fine, we have moved from where we were"


A new phone call between the italian journalist Gabriele Torsello and Rakhmatullah, the security advisor of Emergency hospital in Lashkar-Gah, has taken place tonight at 9,30 pm afghan time. Gabriele Torsello, the photoreporer disappeared last Thursday has reassured Rakhmatullah on his health conditions. "I am fine - he said - we have moved from where we were before". Rakmatullah also spoke with Torsello's kidnappers, who promised a new contact.

Gabriele Torsello had just returned from Musa Qala, a city north of Lashkargah, above the district of Sangin. A city unknown to the world, but firmly in the target sights of the NATO-ISAF fighters and bombers. He was there with his Nikon D200, and he came back with important pictures. Musa Qala was gone. Instead of apartment buildings and homes there was nothing but giant craters. Even the hospital had been razed to the ground by bombers on a peace and stabilization mission. And this had come as quite a shock to the personnel of another hospital, operated by Emergency in Lashkargah, who were, however, not only shocked, but indignant: "How can they possibly bomb a hospital?". Quite possibly, if the rules of war are accepted. Rules which do not change, whether the war is fought with explosive-filled belts or bomber planes. There is only one objective: to terrify civilians, strike them, kill as many as possible, and then call them collateral damage. Or put Kalashnikov machine guns next to the bodies and disguise them thus as Taliban fighters.
Gabriele moved around alone, without a driver. He knows the area well. He knows the people of southern Afghanistan and he wants to tell the story of what is happening to them, far away from the klieg lights on TV.
So, though everyone had advised him not to, he left a month ago for the areas that had been hit the worst by Western aviation forces. "He is a very passionate man,” says Marina Castellano, a nurse with Emergency, “and not at all naïve. And he speaks Pashto, the language of the Taliban. I found him outside the hospital a month ago. The local police had just released him.” They had taken him for a Taliban terrorist – wouldn’t you know – because he was dressed as an Afghan, but he had all the satchels and side-packs that a photographer carries around. He had stopped for a drink in the street which runs parallel to the one where the governor’s residence is located, and the bodyguards had jumped him, knocking him down and keeping him face down with their machine gun barrels in his face. It is dangerous to stop in that street, which is also where the NGOs connected to the British and US forces are headquartered. “I want to see what we are doing in the provinces hit by air raids”, he had announced. So he left, though not before taking pictures of the attack that hit Lashkargah on Sept. 26th, right in the street of the NGOs, killing 20 people, 8 policemen and 12 civilians.

"He finally really did go, there was no stopping him”, says Marina. "We gave him our phone numbers. We asked him to keep in touch, to let us know how it was going. Frankly, we were a little worried about Gabriele, who in spite of all our fears, was going to some truly dangerous places to document the horrors of war."
Then he returned. “Last Tuesday I got a message: I’m here, I’m back, everything OK.” Gabriele passed by Emergency’s hospital, and showed them his work. “He had run out of money, but he wanted to keep on documenting the mess that Westerners are making of those provinces. So he decided to go back to Kabul, to try and sell his pictures from there, and then set off again.”
"The last time I saw him, last Wednesday, I walked him to the gate.”
He was carrying a prayer rug over his shoulder that, since he is Muslim, had just been presented to him by Rahmat, our hospital’s Afghan security consultant. He was already at the gate, and I called him back. I told him, please be careful, don’t make me worry, you are already someone I worry about.
He turned to me and said, “Don’t worry, as soon as I get to Kabul I’ll call you.”
Gabriele did, in fact, call the hospital run by Emergency, probably the only non-local number in his Afghan cell-phone’s memory chip. But he did not call from Kabul.

Maso Notarianni