Greek aid worker held by Taliban

ISTANBUL, Turkey — The intensifying conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan has claimed considerable collateral damage, including the kidnapping of Greek teacher and aid worker Thanassis Lerounis.

Lerounis was the only Westerner living in a series of lush interconnected valleys inhabited by a lost pre-Islamic tribe on Pakistan’s mountainous frontier.

The Greek national thought the valley’s isolation and his 15-year presence there ensured him safety, but he was kidnapped by a Taliban group in a violent dawn raid in September on the valleys of the Kalasha, the last remaining pagans of Central and Southeast Asia.

On Sept. 8, Taliban gunmen swarmed into the sparsely defended compound where Lerounis lived among 3,000 non-Muslim tribesmen called the Kalasha. They hauled him off, forcing a local shepherd to carry him on his back. Before leaving, they reportedly shot to death one of the two guards the Pakistani government assigned Lerounis and heavily wounded a servant and another guard.

Lerounis is now held captive in an unknown location in southeastern Afghanistan’s Nuristan Province. As ransom, his captors are demanding the release from a Pakistani jail of several comrades, 2 million dollars and/or his conversion to Islam.

Lerounis, a schoolteacher from Athens, stumbled across the Kalasha tribes while mountain climbing in Pakistan in the mid-1980s. Fascinated by the myth that the fair-skinned Kalash are the genetic descendants of Macedonian settlers who arrived with the ranks of Alexander the Great’s armies, Lerounis raised funds in Greece to build a school. Since then he lived in the Kalash valleys for up to six months every year and continued to raise funds for infrastructure projects.

For centuries the Kalash have lived in Chitral, an independent kingdom that upon the creation of Pakistan became its northwestern corner. Even then, Chitral remained an isolated mountain redoubt, closer to Afghanistan than the country of which it is a part. Visitors still ask passengers arriving on the shaky twin-engined airplanes that fly in from nearby Peshawar: “What is the news from Pakistan?”

In the eighth year of the war on terror, Pakistan has emerged as its pre-eminent battlefield and it has spread to the remote Kalash vallies. Now Lerounis, too, has fallen victim to the tensions suffusing the valley.

Lerounis’ greatest failing, in the eyes of the local Islamists, was to build a school designed exclusively for the Kalash community. Aimed at nurturing Kalash pride in their heritage through teaching their language and customs to an all Kalash student body, the three-floor stone-and-wood building raised the ire of local Muslim organizations. To add insult to injury, the Greek Foreign Ministry-funded building, which includes a hospital and museum alongside the school, has been so successful since its opening that several Muslim families have sought to enroll their children in it.