Flight from Kabul

>> As the Taliban and their supporters flee south, the Northern Alliance are taking no prisoners

by KEN HECHTMAN

In a Taliban-held rear area of Afghanistan--Nov. 15 Two Taliban commanders (it can be difficult to tell who's who in an army where everyone from sergeant to general is simply called "commander," but these two rate something between captain and major) who retreated from Bagram through occupied Kabul say they witnessed looting and systematic murder during the sack of the city by the Northern Alliance.

Look, I know what you're thinking. You

wouldn't believe a Taliban commander if he said he witnessed the sun rising in the east, but you didn't see these guys. They hadn't slept in four days, they'd gone from bombing to battle to retreat to hiding out to being transported out of Kabul by an extremely roundabout route. The day I talked to them in the rear area where Taliban troops were regrouping, they were still much too shell-shocked to lie.

Allar Gul described heavy fighting at Bagram beginning the morning of Nov. 12 lasting until nightfall. After dark, he and fellow commander Fazal decided to pull back to Shakdara with their 600 men, link up with a Kandahar-based unit and make a stand there. The 1,200 Kandahar men never showed up and Fazal and Allar Gul later learned they had returned to Kandahar against orders. Rather than try to hold Shakdara alone, they retreated to Kabul, reaching the already abandoned city at 1 a.m.

They hid out in empty houses as Rabbani's Tajiks entered and sacked the city. Allar Gul says he saw soldiers on the street "killing anybody who looked Pushtun, soldiers and civilians." Fazal described how the occupiers vented their rage on the hated Pakistani Embassy, ransacking it before demolishing the building with rocket fire.

Of the 600 men they brought into Kabul, 350 were captured and executed by the Northern Alliance. When asked to confirm the rumour that the NAs are not accepting surrender from Pakistanis or other non-Afghanis, Allar Gul clarified, "They're not accepting surrender from anybody." Ominously, none of the thousands of Pakistanis, Arabs, Uzbeks, Chechens, Britons and others from the Bagram front are known to have made it out of hostile territory.

After collecting the survivors and taking a long and indirect route that I can't describe to a rear area sanctuary that I can't identify, they and their men are resting and recuperating while 25 senior commanders, representing all the provinces of what was the Bagram front, plan the next phase of the war.

There was some excitement at 4 p.m. when a sentry saw something he didn't like and the strategy session was quickly relocated. I now understand why American references to bombing Taliban headquarters made people laugh. As Taliban supporter Abdul Samat said a month ago, "If four commanders sit under a tree, that is a headquarters."

The other international coalition

None of the senior commanders wanted to tell me anything until everything was decided. I

didn't even get to talk to (brigadier equivalent) Anwar-e-Dangar (it's a Pushto pun, meaning both Anwar the Thin, which he is, and Anwar the Animal) about his 20-year friendship with Osama. Anwar's nephew passed along a few Osama stories. Anwar last saw his old friend during one of Osama's surprise visits to Kabul, two days before its fall. The wallpaper on Osama's laptop was a photo of the twin towers. Anwar didn't say whether they were burning in the picture and his nephew didn't ask. Anwar's nephew seemed convinced Osama would make a surprise visit somewhere in Pakistan.

I also heard that the previous night's meeting was interrupted by a telephone call from newly installed President Rabbani. Anwar had been a Northern Alliance commander before joining the Taliban in 1999 and Rabbani was offering him his old job back. Anwar suggested a creative new way in which Rabbani could violate Islamic law and returned to the war council.

Peshawar--Nov. 18 In an Observer editorial reprinted in the Pakistani daily Dawn, Robert Fisk (when I get back to the world, I'm going to get hold of every word he ever wrote; he's one of the few people here who gets it) called CNN on their practice of referring to American bombers as "coalition forces." "Hands up anybody who's seen the Luftwaffe in the sky over Kabul, or the Italian Air Force, or the French," he said. "A few British Harriers dropping a few British bombs does not a coalition make."

There is a real coalition in this war, you just need to look a little closer to the ground to find it. The Afghani front lines--I'll call them "Taliban lines" when I hear CNN talking about "Republican B-52 strikes"--looked like the United Nations, or like the Organization of Islamic Countries, anyhow. A military source from the former Bagram front said that not counting Pakistanis, whom they don't consider foreigners, or Arabs, whom nobody can keep track of, they had 23,000 Jihad Lands volunteers at Bagram. Contingents of 1,000 or more came from Kashmir, Uzbekistan, Chechnya, East Turkestan (Sianking), Tanzania, Indonesia and various Middle Eastern countries. Symbolic contingents came from other African and East Asian countries as well as Russia, France and Britain. A German-Turkish contingent was announced, but no one seems to know if they ever showed up.

For all the efforts made by the British media, from the Guardian to the BBC, to deny the existence of the British volunteers, they were very real. An intelligence source described baby-sitting the first 200 in Bajaur Agency while they were led over the border in small groups. Five were reported killed in the first bombing raids on Mazar-i-Sharif and a Bagram front commander, while unable to give an exact count, said the eastern command got "more than 200, less than the 1,000 promised."

The war's dead heroes

At some point, the Americans will honour their war heroes and George Bush will pin medals on the men who fired cruise missiles from 1,000 miles away onto what a Pakistani columnist called "the sorriest, poorest, weakest, hungriest country in this or any other universe." There were real heroes in this war too, also closer to the ground--some of them a lot closer now.

The Jihad Lands volunteers were the last ones out in every retreat from every city. Each time, they held the line at any cost for as long as it took to allow the Afghani troops to withdraw. Three thousand volunteers, mostly Arabs and Chechens, died at their posts covering the Afghani pullback from Mazar-i-Sharif. No figures are available from the Bagram front but four days later nobody from the covering force had arrived in the rear area and it's believed they're now surrounded in Kunduz. The latest stories coming out of Kunduz have the volunteers shooting themselves as their positions are overrun to avoid being taken alive.

Northern Alliance General Abdul Rashid Dostum has offered an amnesty to the Afghani fighters at Kunduz. They can just walk out if they leave the Arabs, Chechens and others behind. They're not taking the deal. U.S. Defence Secretary Rumsfeld is reported to be displeased at Dostum for offering the deal at all, saying, "We want them all to be killed."

Persian warlord Ismail Khan, in control of Herat and advancing on Kandahar, is said to be taking foreign prisoners but the Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara factions of the Northern Alliance are not. The best a captured foreigner can hope for is that he'll be castrated and fed his own genitals after being shot, rather than before. Pakistani TV ran some fairly graphic footage of the same on Friday night and ANN Peshawar Bureau Chief Ameer Wakil, trapped in Kabul during the sack, returned with some stories he wouldn't tell because his young children were in the room. "Knives," he said with a gesture, and then changed the subject.

Before someone calls me on it, I should mention that the Taliban did exactly the same thing to Communist president Najibullah when they took power in 1996. This is different. The Northern Alliance are honorary Americans. They're the forces of Light, Civilization and All Things Good. If they're doing the heavy lifting for the Americans, the Americans are responsible for how they do it. If they commit war crimes in Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif and Kunduz, it's because American daisy-cutters and cluster bombs put them there. The paper trail that convicted Osama was a lot more circumstantial than that.

In a way, the Jihad Lands volunteers, at least through their patron, brought the war here. They owed a debt to Afghanistan before, they owe a big one now, the sacrifice they're making is the least they can do and they know it. If the customs of the Tribal Areas are anything to go by, they knew it going in. Many families of the Tribal Areas held funeral services and went into mourning before their men left. When bodies come home (smuggled in, since the Pakistani government stops them at the border), it's often to a celebration.

The Pakistani groups are going to be able to replace those kinds of losses and so are the Kashmiris, who weren't fully committed anyway. The Arabs, Africans and East Asian groups will recover eventually. The Uzbeks, Uighurs and especially the Chechens are going to be gutted. The Chechens have sent 8,000 of their best men. Graduates of the famous two year "advanced course" in Afghanistan, they believe they're in the same league as the SAS and the Navy SEALs. Chechen President Zelim Khan, currently in talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, reportedly considered moving his government in exile to Kabul before Sept. 11. President Khan once said, "I presented myself in every capital in the world but the only friends I have are the Russian Mafia and Osama bin Laden."

Rumours and clarifications

These are some of the rumours currently in circulation. Some are true, others probably aren't.