Habib Abdul Rahman's mental breakdown

Habib Abdul Rahman's mental breakdown is rooted in the destruction of his village and the loss of his family during the Soviet–Afghan War. His grief transforms a schoolteacher and resistance fighter into a man whose hatred and violence make him a danger even to the people fighting beside him.

Identity and Background

Before the catastrophe, Habib was a village schoolteacher who taught the youngest children. When the Russians invaded seven years earlier, he joined the resistance, as other young men in the region did. He had a young wife and two sons, and his life was bound to the village and its people.

Two years before the account of his breakdown, Habib returned from a mission to find that a Russian attack had killed the village’s inhabitants. Abdel Khader Khan explains that Habib’s family across generations, his childhood friends, and his neighbors were among the dead; even the village animals had not survived. Habib buried them by himself, a task that took so long that it became unbearable. Once it was finished, he picked up his gun and returned to his resistance unit. The burial did not restore his former life: Abdel Khader Khan says the loss had changed him profoundly, and that Habib came back as a different man.

The Guide and the Threat Within the Unit

Abdel Khader Khan still relied on Habib as a guide despite the danger he posed. No one, Khader said, knew the mountains and the country between them and Kandahar better; Habib had survived hundreds of missions and was expected to lead the group to its fighters. His hatred of the Russians made him seem dependable in one sense, but Khader also warned that grief had destroyed his judgment. Other resistance units had expelled him, and he could not distinguish Russian forces from Afghan soldiers serving them—even though some Afghan soldiers secretly helped the resistance. The unit therefore needed Habib’s knowledge while keeping him under constant watch.

That danger surfaced in the methods Habib adopted. He set mantraps around the group’s route and carried twenty grenades beneath his cloak. Khaled Ansari warned that the traps could kill local shepherds or members of their own party as readily as enemy soldiers, but Habib continued setting them more secretly. He also rigged horses with explosives, saying this would prevent the Russians from capturing them. When Khaled challenged the danger to their own people, Habib’s answer revealed how completely his thinking had narrowed toward preventing capture and extending the fight even beyond death. As the journey continued, the others watched him with growing fear, gradually understanding why other units had cast him out.

Breakdown Becomes a Campaign of Terror

The journey reveals that Habib’s collapse is not only a private grief but a danger unfolding among the people who depend on him. During a rest stop, Lin finds him kneeling alone before a slab of stone, overwhelmed and hurting himself. Lin leads him back to camp, where Khaled Ansari helps tend to him. The episode exposes the anguish beneath Habib’s fearsome reputation, but it does not ease the danger his companions have already identified: grief has narrowed his sense of who counts as an enemy and what means are acceptable.

That danger becomes decisive when the group reaches a mountain plateau. While the others are occupied with the cargo, Habib takes the unconscious Siddiqi away and kills him. Khaled and Lin arrive moments later; Habib faces their horror with a grin. The killing confirms that his violence is no longer confined to imagined threats or precautions against capture. It also makes the rupture concrete: two months after leaving the group, Habib is operating alone in the Shar-i-Safa mountains.

At a later meeting, reports describe the consequences. Habib has attacked Russian officers, Afghan soldiers aligned with the Russians, and even resistance fighters he considers insufficiently committed. His reprisals have transformed a comparatively quiet corridor into a place of fear, with soldiers and fighters seeking him. The resistance’s cause does not restrain him: unable to distinguish between Afghan opponents and potential Afghan allies, he treats suspicion as sufficient grounds for punishment. His campaign thus reproduces the indiscriminate loss that formed his grief, while making him feared by former comrades as well as enemies.

Habib returns to the group at midnight, after Juma has failed to come back. Seven guns are raised toward the approaching figure before the men recognize him. He says the opposing forces cannot see him until he is close enough to attack, presenting himself as beyond their notice. He has come, he explains, to show the group how to save themselves, but makes his assistance conditional: those who survive the next day and are not killed by the group are to be handed over to him. The offer joins practical knowledge to a demand for further violence. Habib remains useful as a guide, yet his own account of the war has become so absolute that help and vengeance are inseparable.

Narrative Significance

Habib’s breakdown is revealed in stages: Abdel Khader Khan first explains the loss that reshaped him, then Lin and Khaled Ansari encounter the consequences in the present, and later reports show how far the violence has spread beyond the original group. This movement from explanation to witnessed conduct to wider aftermath makes Habib’s grief legible without treating it as an excuse. The same knowledge that makes him valuable as a guide cannot contain the danger created by his inability to distinguish among those he regards as enemies, and the unit’s growing fear marks the collapse of trust around him.