Pakistan Weapons Bust

Welcome to Gun City

Moeen ‘Zack’ Zackarias is crazy – about weapons. This time it’s a Glock 18, a rare and valuable murder weapon. He’s been searching for years for this piece, even though at home he already has two Kalashnikovs and nine pistols: among them a Glock 17, 22 and 34; a Colt nine-millimetre; a Walther PKK; a Luger MK II and a Tommy gun HJ MP5 stashed away.

‘If I can’t get this piece here, then where?’ he asks, stroking his silver-clouded nine-millimeter revolver with the engraved barrel. ‘Call me Zack’, the Pakistani says with a strong American accent. Zack is in his early 40s and wears a bomber jacket, gold aviators and red cowboy boots. He leans casually against the wall of his house and fills the magazine of his revolver with cartridges. Once a week he drives to Darra Adam Khel. ‘This is the toughest village in Asia,’ he says, and without even looking, raises his weapon above his head and shoots a bullet to the sky.

Trigger happy 

Darra Adam Khel, 42 miles south of Peshawar, in the middle of the autonomous tribal region of Pashtun, Pakistan, consists of 60 gun factories with 300 small enterprises and 400 dealers. The industry provides employment for 6,000 people, while another 10,000 are dependent on the sale of arms. In the village, hundreds of shops along the main street show all kinds of weapons: American M16s, Russian Kalashnikovs, German G3 storm weapons, Italian pump guns. Depending on demand, you can also find rocket launchers, bazookas, small cannons and anti-personnel mines. More than 10 million Pakistani civilians are thought to own illegal weapons – four to seven million of those alone in the Pashtun region, where the estimated population is fourteen million. Statistically speaking, this is a lot. If you subtract women and children from this number, almost every male Pashtun has a small weapons arsenal in his mud hut.

Meeting someone like Zack there is easy, because Darra is teeming with such weapons freaks. Getting to Darra, however, is considerably more difficult. Foreigners are only allowed to travel into and around the village with permission from the autonomous tribal government, and such permission is no longer granted. ‘Too unsafe,’ a turban-wearing official explains in the alien office of Peshawar. ‘And if we catch you on your way there, we throw you into our jail. For your own safety,’ he adds with a smile. We had presented ourselves as German weapons fanatics who wanted to visit Pakistan’s largest illegal weapons manufacturer, but foreigners have not been allowed into this sovereign territory since the Americans marched into Afghanistan. Every foreigner could, in their eyes, be a CIA agent, which they would then be forced to kidnap or murder. So now we’re stuck in Peshawar. Just dusty streets, donkey carts that block up the streets, taxi drivers that blare their horns, bearded Mullahs drinking sweetened tea, and Osama bib Laden t-shirts hanging in storefront windows. A few visitors have come today to catch a glance of the Khyber Pass, which is the gateway to Afghanistan and offers spectacular views. Or perhaps because of Cold War nostalgia: in the 80’s, Peshawar was a hotbed of KGB and CIA activity. Here, they conspired and exchanged suitcases of money in order to influence the Soviet war in Afghanistan. From here, indeed, the United States supplied the Mudschaheddin with stinger missiles.

Sneaky entrance 

‘Hello, Mista,’ a tiny, hunch-backed man says to us. He has been lingering around the alien office and has been following us since we left. He wears a salwaar kameez, a wide shirt and harem pants. ‘America?’ he asks skeptically. ‘No, Germany,’ we answer. ‘Ah, friends. Very good. I heard you want to go to Darra,’ he whispers, pressing his pointer finger to his lips and pulling us into a narrow side street. A steep staircase leads to a windowless room stuffed full of engraved daggers, knit wall hangings and water pipes. He points to a carpet and we sit down dutifully. A young boy pours green tea in dirty bowls. The man fingers a thumb-thick clump of hashish from a cloak and stuffs it into his pipe. ‘My name is Jamahl Khan. For forty dollars I’ll bring you to Darra. The police controls are slack and I know a few of the guard posts’. We agree to this quickly – probably too quickly. As a parting gift he presses a clump of butter-soft hashish into our hands.

The next morning we leave Peshawar in a tiny Subaru. ‘This is a borrowed car. Just in case you guys get kidnapped. I won’t risk my car for that,’ Jamahl says. ‘Slump down and don’t look out the window. If the cops stop us, tell them I’m bringing you to Karachi.’ Mountainsides flit by out the window. There are many windowless, several meters-high walls encompassing brick erections, which looks like military guard towers. ‘Jihad the U.S.’ or ‘Fight the non-believers’ has been written on the walls by the owners.

On a bleak mountain, on whose hillside only a few gnarly fig trees are growing, Jamahl Khan stops and begins to explain his story. He is from Kabul, but when the Russians marched into Afghanistan he and his family fled to the refugee camps in Peshawar. ‘Unfortunately, times aren’t what they used to be,’ he says. ‘So…so…exciting.’ Back then, Papa Khan taught his son, Jamahl, how to smuggle rocket launchers and grenades. ‘Those were good times,’ Jamahl reminisces, passing us a joint. ‘Now listen carefully. I’ve known the people in Darra since I was little. When they say we should leave, we have to disappear. You don’t want to see your faces on the CNN evening news.’ In order to emphasize the warning he adds: ‘If they kill you, no one will hang for it. You just bribe the police and walk free. That’s how it works here but don’t worry now.’ He grins. ‘These are good, hospitable people.’

Clan war 

The Pashtuns have their own code, the Pashtunwali. This is based on honor and hospitality, and if you do anything against it, you are met with vendetta. Which of course leads to more vendettas. When, for example, Farmer B offends Farmer A’s guest, Farmer A has the right to assassinate Farmer B. Farmer B’s clan must then, of course, seek vengeance against a member of Farmer A’s clan. And so it continues. An unbelievable number of people have become victims of the familial and tribal feuds, which belong to everyday life here. In the centuries-long feuds, the clans decimated each other. ‘Me against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, we and our cousins against our enemies,’ goes the old saying of the Pashtuns. For the past few centuries, the feuds have been carried out with automatic weapons and hand grenades, and since then the weapons trade has flourished.

Darra Adam Khel looks just like any other village in Pakistan – a row of one- and two-story mud huts on a pothole-lined gravel road. In every house there is a store, and in some display windows there are thick brown bricks: hashish, twelve dollars per kilo. In most of the stores hang automatic weapons – pistols and shotguns. Of these, 18,000 leave Darra yearly, according to Jahmal. Most of them end up in the mountain villages of the clans, some in the hands of clan brothers in Afghanistan. Influential traders in Darra talk about the town’s role in arming the Islamists: more than once, U.S. intelligence has described the whole region as a refuge for Al- Quaida leaders. Actually, Taliban-inspired gangs in Darra have run out some hash dealers, bombed DVD shops and closed girls’ schools. So something else is apparent – aside from narcotics and weapons - not a single woman is in sight. Jamahl laughs. ‘Women? They belong in the house and not on the street.’ Eye contact with a man is considered an offense punishable with a beating. Adultery is punishable by death. Darra is not Peshawar or Islamabad, where women dare to speak with men in public and some even run around without a burka, Jamahl explains. ‘A man who doesn’t hit his wife is known here as a man without a penis.’ This explains, of course, why women hide behind high walls in their houses from the time they hit puberty.

As I think about how dull life would be without female companionship, a man in an olive green uniform jacket, black harem pants and a beret pulled down over his forehead stops our car. ‘Tribal police,’ Jamahl whispers. The man does not look happy to meet two non-believers in his village. He waves us out and leads us to a back courtyard where he asks to see our passes. He is not surprised that we don’t have any. Twenty dollars exchanges hands and a smile magically appears on his stern face. ‘Call me Kamal,’ he says. ‘But of course, that’s not my real name.’

Death by replica 

Under Kamal’s protection we walk through the bazaar. A man jumps into the street, pulls a shotgun onto his shoulder, fires twice into the air and goes back into the store. We crouch down, but no one else even blinks, because Pashtuns all around us are shooting into the sky or at the rocks surrounding the village, just to test the weapons. It sounds like a slaughter is raging through. ‘In Darra you get copies of the best weapons,’ Kamal says and shows us his Kalashnikov. ‘The original costs three hundred dollars. In these stores you can get them for thirty.’

In the back courtyards off the main street are the weapons manufacturers and workshops, holes in the wall in which a VW Beatle would barely fit. The floors are strewn with individual pieces and half-finished weapons – screws, feathers, triggers and cartridges. In one garage men are turning pistons, in another one barrels are being ground down. A boy stacks magazines. There is hammering, varnishing, grinding. A white-haired man runs his flat hand along the barrel of an imitation Kalashnikov, testing it – the Pashtun’s favorite weapon. The smallest bump in the barrel would cause the weapon to explode, he tells us.

‘Welcome to Gun City,’ shouts Moeen Zackaria – AKA Zack - from his studio. ‘Pashtun whiskey?’ he asks, and pours tea in porcelain bowls. According to him, there is no more beautiful place on the entire planet. Once a week he drives 170 kilometers from Islamabad to Darra to satisfy the warrior within him. ‘I find my peace when I’m surrounded by weapons,’ he gushes. ‘Artists work here. Some copies are so good, you can only distinguish them from the original when you hold them in your hand and note the difference in weight.’ He lifts up a half-finished M16. ‘American crap, even the original. The Russian AK-47 is a thousand times better. It never sticks, it’s lighter and it has a better range. These people can imitate every weapon in the world: they are identical, with the exception of the serial number. They need five days for a rapid fire weapon, seven for a pistol. Ten for a model they don’t know,’ he explains. His eyes light up. ‘The quality is moderate, of course. Most of the weapons don’t survive the shots that accompany our weddings.’ This is due to the fact that the precision instruments used to drill the barrels are often insufficient. ‘But the replicas are therefore much, much cheaper,’ Zack says. Those with money and desire like Zack can also purchase the originals in Darra.

The men in Darra greet Zack like a barkeeper greets his patrons, only instead of drinks on the house, he is allowed to fire off a replica of a Kalashnikov or a Czech pistol. He goes to his weapons dealer, whispers something in his ear and comes back shortly with two AK-47s. ‘These were just finished. Come with me,’ he orders. A dirt trail leads us out of the village and along a steaming pile of garbage. He comes to a standstill at a large rock face and presses the weapons into our hands. ‘I set them to automatic. It’s more fun that way.’ It costs us about twenty Euros for thirty shots. ‘I’ll get you guys some bazookas now. Fifty dollars only.’ We politely decline. Muezzin, who calls us to lunch, allows the weapons fire to get silent for a few minutes. Zack sits on a rock, a Kalashnikov on his knee, a pistol in front of his feet and looks sadly to the sky. Pretty soon he has to go back to Islamabad; he didn’t find his Glock 18. ‘Weapons are my true love. I stroke them, kiss them and sleep with them. A weapon is better than any woman. It is always loyal to me,’ he murmurs. Zack is a bachelor.

‘I heard that President Musharraf wants to declare an outlaw on weapons in Pashtun, in order to eliminate terrorists and religious extremists,’ Kamal says later, with a resounding laugh. ‘Terrorists and extremists! Such people don’t exist here. But if someone should try to take our weapons, he’ll get what’s coming to him.’