He suffers from diabetes, and there were rumors he’d been poisoned before the Taliban swept to power.Īt the height of the Taliban’s summer offensive, Dostum confirms to Rolling Stone, he was in fact poisoned by unknown “enemies.” Unresponsive, he was transferred to Mazar-i-Sharif, the largest city in northern Afghanistan, and then medevaced by plane to Ankara for treatment. Once a heavy drinker of Russian vodka, liver problems forced Dostum to give up booze and banquet feasts several years ago. “By having General Dostum in the northern provinces,” he told me back then, with his usual flair for speaking in the third person, “the people will again feel like they are in the belly of their mothers.” The Taliban was resurgent and Dostum swore that, if asked, his militia would mop up the militants without any help from government forces. I remind him that the last time we met was in August 2009, in his Sheberghan stronghold in northwestern Afghanistan, the day he returned from Turkish exile to deliver a million votes that helped get Hamid Karzai reelected as president. But he still sports his soldier’s buzz cut, underlined with thick black eyebrows that arch into daggers when his temper flares. His movement is slow, his cheeks slack and pale. He’s no longer the beefy warrior I remember. Special Forces officer poring over a map, and a statuette of a rearing stallion.ĭostum enters wearing a striped Uzbek cape and extends a frail hand. An adjacent reception room is stocked with Red Bull and assorted mementos: swords, a framed picture of Dostum and a U.S. Special police patrol the periphery of his estate for assassins, and a pair of fighting mastiffs bark at me as I’m led past a fountain up to a villa fronted with candy-cane columns and giant golden lions bathed in floodlight. After more than a year and a half of waiting, Abdul Rashid Dostum, Afghanistan’s most notorious and elusive warlord, has summoned me for an interview, his first since the Taliban takeover that forced him to flee his homeland. IT’S PUSHING MIDNIGHT when my armored escort pulls up to a high-walled compound on the outskirts of Ankara, the Turkish capital.
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