Land of plenty turned into a dust bowl at the hands of al-Qa'ida

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The Shomali Plain was once the garden of Afghanistan, a verdant land of vineyards, orange groves and orchards, crossed by streams and sheltered from the cold winds of the Hindu Kush by hills.

King Zahir Shah entertained guests at the Gulhana Palace, looking down on valleys of lush green and burnt gold. Businessmen would come from Kabul and Kandahar, Iran and India, to buy crops for export to Europe and North America.

Today the Shomali is a dull brown dust bowl, miles of flat aridity littered with burnt farmhouses, skeletons of tanks and thousands of mines. The Gulhana has long been ransacked; its two remaining habitable rooms are now occupied by the fighters of a Tajik commander, Mullah Taj Mohammed. The area, north of Kabul, was destroyed on the direct orders of Mullah Mohammed Omar and Osama bin Laden, as part of a scorched-earth policy to deny advantage to Northern Alliance forces advancing on the capital.

What has happened in the Shomali is a microcosm of what has happened to Afghanistan, and shows how daunting it will be to get the broken country back on its feet. Once self-sufficient communities are now destitute, and not even the beginning of an infrastructure exists for basic amenities. At the end of this month, potential donor nations will meet in Tokyo to discuss the billions of pounds in aid needed, but the people here remember that similar promises have been made before, and came to nothing.

In Shomali, members of al-Qa'ida – Pakistanis, Arabs and Chechens – carried out most of the damage. The trees were chopped down and the wood sold to Pakistani merchants, irrigation systems shattered by explosives, houses bulldozed and schools and clinics shut down. Almost all of the plain's inhabitants, around 600,000, were driven out to live as refugees. Among the victims of dozens of summary murders was Nek Mohammed, a farmer and father of three. He was taken from his garden as he was tending his roses, and shot. His family fled with his parents to Kabul where 10 of them now live, among 23,000 other refugees, amid appalling overcrowding in the old Russian embassy.

Yesterday Mr Mohammed's 60-year-old father, Khoir, and his three children were back at their farm at Maliki to collect firewood. "We found his body with my daughter-in-law weeping over him," he said, shaking his head. "He was killed by some Pakistanis. They went from farm to farm, looting, chopping down trees. Then they came back and poisoned the wells and burnt our home. It had been in our family for generations. We lived well on the land. This area produced almost everything we needed.

"Now I am the only member of the family who gets to work, maybe one or two days a week. We have one meal a day, bread and tea, and spinach with meat perhaps once every four days. We used to get four pieces of bread a day from the WFP [World Food Programme], but that has now stopped. We now hope America and Britain will help us rebuild our homes here. Without that there is no hope."

His 14-year-old granddaughter Furazan, unusually for a young Afghan girl, is eager to join the conversation. "I have never been to a school yet, and I would like to go. But I do not know what will happen after that. Where does a girl go to get a job?"

Commander Haji Daoud had been fighting the Taliban for the past five years and had seen the land being ruined around him. "This was one of the richest parts of Afghanistan," he said. "Look at it now. Even with a lot of money it will take at least six years to get this back to a working area. Our political leaders say the international community will give us all the money we need. The same was said when the Russians left, but nothing happened."

The embassy complex the Russians left behind at Kabul is now a heaving mass of humanity, squeezed into 24 buildingsIn a dark room in what was the consular section, Yasmina Mir Nasirullah tries to comfort her hungry four-year-old daughter. "The Iranian embassy is supposed to be sending some food here, so we may get something soon," said her husband, Ahmed Ali. "We all miss Shomali. Zahir Shah had his Gulhana there, but we, too, lived like kings. Now we are beggars. This is the qesa [life story] of our country."