Canada’s Little Mosque on the Prairie

Access to the Luxembourg-sized military training ground of BATUS, on the great plains of Canada is normally fairly restricted. It’s a place every single British soldier must go before being sent to Afghanistan. In short, it is a vast training facility where soldiers undergo long periods in the wilderness, live fire training and even come into contact with genuine Afghans, posing as either insurgents or civilians.  

Somewhere out in the unending vastness of the great plains, is a very small village called Hettar which is situated in the fictional country of Pokharistan. It is a place which has been made to look and feel almost exactly like a small Afghan settlement, complete with a Mosque, Bazaar and fresh-water well. Each summer a group of about 20 or 30 Afghan ex-pats are employed to fill the settlement and live there during the period of time it takes to train a battle group. It a job which pays well, though it comes with its drawbacks; often they are woken in the twilight hours, by large, heavily armed men, crashing into their houses to perform routine searches. Merely one aspect of the high-tempo, highly realistic training exercises.

Today, the head brass decided to let a large group of military families into BATUS. The group was to dress up and pose as Afghans for the day. The small population of resident Afghan ex-pats needed to be bulked out to make the trainees’ experience of patrolling  the village seem more realistic.

We were initially briefed by several echelons of military staff, who prepared us for what seemed like a very robust experience. The 24 men and women comprising our group, piled into a car park which lay in front of the open prairie. The men were given a selection of hats, scarves, breeches, shirts and waistcoats and the women, a single, black, nylon Burka. (Two of our group can be seen below.)

The clothes were extremely unwieldy and uncomfortable in the hot summer sun. Once dressed, we all piled onto a big yellow bus and embarked to Hettar.

We arrived about half a kilometer away from the village, from where a domed Mosque was clearly visible. Some of the group was herded into a smaller vehicle, which had been dubbed the 'Jingly Bus' (below). The rest of us trudged into the village on foot.

Inside the village It was difficult to believe we were still in Canada; our surroundings were extremely realistic. As we walked into the village we passed  concrete fortifications, foreign looking detritus and arabic graffiti daubed upon mud houses. Before long we were in the village square, where the bustling market place was situated. The stalls had a mixture of arabic and english signs above them. Some retailer names I can recall were 'Farouk's Fancy Department' selling unappetising looking plastic vegetables, 'Ahmed's Appliances' selling knackered lawnmowers, power-tools and bicycles and one stall called 'Al Malik and Sons Electrics ltd.', (below) 

One stall in particular was packed full of Afghan ex-pats and British posers alike, due to the fact it was the only stall selling real food instead the plastic toy meat and veg in all the others. Several Afghans were cooking up a storm of naan breads and kebabs and handing them around, proudly showing off samples of their native cuisine.

Three of the older Afghans stopped my mother in her tracks for some reason, probably because she was walking in front of her husband, a calamitous faux pas in Kabul. It took me a while to realise it was actually her under the feature-obliterating burka, but when I did I took the opportunity to go over and engage the the Afghans in conversation. 

It was interesting to hear that they remembered Afghanistan in the 1980s when the Russians were there. One of them claimed to have gone to University in Moscow and had spent 10 years there. He had been a communist ally to the Russians fighting against the Mujahedin. At any rate I was able to converse in Russian with them for a while. For some of them it seemed to come easier to them than English, however conversation topics were fairly limited; Russian girls seemed to be their main area of expertise.

This was the day a British general was coming to have a look at the village; as close to Afghanistan as the British military probably puts a general. When he arrived all of the Afghanis suddenly snapped into action and put their best acting skills into play, quickly manning all the market stalls, yelling and selling their pretend wears. 

The British pretend-Afghans merely shuffled around the market, shopping for mock-foodstuffs with the mock-currency they had been given. An Afghan woman tried to give me an impromptu language lesson in Parsi. She told me the names for the various synthetic root vegetables on display, but told me that I was a bad boy for not being able to understand her when she gabbled quickly at me in her native language. I politely handed her some of the Pokharistani dollars, took a plastic melon out of her basket and moved away awkwardly, trying to escape, only to be confronted by man even more loquacious than the woman had been. He forced me to haggle with him over some artichokes, a vegetable, which he and all of his friends admitted to me they did not recognise. 

Meanwhile a young man was herding eight or so chickens through the Bazaar, but struggled to coax them away from a mud bath which they seemed to be enjoying. He told us that he had tried to sharpen their talons to try and get them to fight, but it hadn't worked because they were 'Canadian' chickens and were therefore far too friendly to each other to fight to the death. Illegal as cock-fighting is in Canada, I don't exactly know what influence the Canadian Mounties had here.

I had wondered if we were going to be mock-attacked by one of the battle groups and although we weren't, there was a great deal of military activity; tanks rolled noisily around the settlement and troops skulked menacingly past from time to time. Soldiers could be seen surveying the village from the tops of buildings and every now and again the mock-police force would stroll over and harass some of the vendors in the market place. I couldn't help but feel a little on edge, despite the obvious lack of danger.

The general didn't stay for long and we too were soon taken back to the bus, for another long and uncomfortable journey home.

For us, Hettar was kind of like 'War Zoo'. It all looked real but came without any of the nasty high-risk-of-death factor which is a compulsory garnish to any journey to the war-torn Islamic republic of Afghanistan. Meeting the Afghans was a truly fascinating experience. It gave a tiny glimpse into a part of the world which our governments have decided to treat as collateral in the mission to rid the west of terror. Shaking hands and discussing lighthearted subjects with people, most of my fellow countrymen might write-off as 'the enemy' had a sort of pathos to it, the likes of which I rarely experience.