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PAS : KE ARAH PEMERINTAHAN ISLAM YANG ADIL
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Blood, tears, terror and tragedy behind the lines
Reported by: Robert Fisk
11/26/2001 (The Independent) :: Robert Fisk, the only Western journalist
in
Taliban-held Kandahar province
"You'll never get through,'' the Taliban man shouted at me. "The
Northern
Alliance are shooting into Takhta-Pul and the Americans are bombing the
centre of the town.''
"Impossible," I said. Takhta-Pul is only 24 miles away, a few minutes
ride from
the Afghan border town of Spin Boldak. But then a refugee with a cracked
face
and white hair matting the brow below his brown turban he looked 70
but said
he was only 36 stumbled up to us. "The Americans just destroyed our
homes,'' he cried. "I saw my house disappear. It was a big plane that
spat
smoke and soaked the ground with fire.''
For a man who couldn't read and had never left Kandahar province in all
his
life, it was a chilling enough description of the Spectre, the American
"bumble
bee'' aircraft that picks off militiamen and civilians with equal
ferocity. And
down the tree-lined road came hundreds more refugees old women with
dark
faces and babies carried in the arms of young women in burqas and boys
with
tears on their faces all telling the same stories.
Mullah Abdul Rahman slumped down beside me, passed his hand over the
sweat on his face and told me how his brother a fighter in the same
town
had just escaped. "There was a plane that shot rockets out of its
side,'' he
said, shaking his head. "It almost killed my brother today. It hit many
people.''
So this is what it's like to be on the losing side in the
American-Afghan
bloodbath. Everywhere it was the same story of desperation and terror
and
courage. An American F-18 soared above us as a middle-aged man
approached me with angry eyes. "This is what you wanted, isn't it?'' he
screamed. "Sheikh Osama is an excuse to do this to the Islamic people.''
I pleaded with yet another Taliban fighter a 35-year-old man with five
children
called Jamaldan to honour his government's promise to get me to
Kandahar.
He looked at me pityingly. "How can I get you there,'' he asked, "when
we can
hardly protect ourselves?''
The implications are astonishing. The road from the Iranian border town
of
Zabul to Kandahar has been cut by Afghan gunmen and US special forces.
The Americans were bombing civilian traffic and the Taliban on the road
to
Spin Boldak, and Northern Alliance troops were firing across the
highway.
Takhta-Pul was under fire from American guns and besieged by the
Alliance.
Kandahar was being surrounded.
No wonder I found the local Taliban commander, the thoughtful and
intelligent
Mullah Haqqani, preparing to cross the Pakistani border to Quetta for
"medical reasons''.
Kandahar may not be the Taliban Stalingrad not yet but tragedy was
the
word that came to mind. Out of a dust-storm came a woman in a grey
shawl.
"I lost my daughter two days ago,'' she wailed. "The Americans bombed
our
home in Kandahar and the roof fell on her.'' Amid the chaos and
shouting, I did
what reporters do. Out came my notebook and pen. Name? "Muzlifa.'' Age?
"She was two.'' I turn away. "Then there was my other daughter.'' She
nods
when I ask if this girl died too. "At the same moment. Her name was
Farigha.
She was three.'' I turn away. "There wasn't much left of my son.''
Notebook out
for the third time. "When the roof hit him, he was turned to meat and
all I could
see were bones. His name was Sherif. He was a year and a half old.''
They came out of a blizzard of sand, these people, each with their story
of
blood. Shukria Gul told her story more calmly. Beneath her burqa, she
sounded like a teenager. "My husband Mazjid was a labourer. We have two
children, our daughter Rahima and our son Talib. Five days ago, the
Americans hit a munitions dump in Kandahar and the bullets came through
our house. My husband was killed. He was 25.''
At the Akhtar Trust refugee camp, I found Dr Ismael Moussa, just up from
Karachi, a doctor of theology dispensing religion along with money for
widows.
"The Americans have created an evil for themselves," he said. "And it
will pay
for this. The Almighty Lord allows a respite to an oppressor, enough
rope to
hang itself, until He seizes him and never lets go.''
Seizing, it seems, was also on the mind of the Foreign Office, earnestly
warning reporters that Taliban invitations to Kandahar were a trap to
kidnap
foreign journalists. Given the politeness of even the most desperate
Taliban
yesterday, this may fit into the "interesting-if-true" file. Dr Moussa
suggested a
more disturbing reason: the desire to prevent foreign correspondents
witnessing in Kandahar the kind of war crimes committed by Britain's
friends
in the Northern Alliance at the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif.
As for Mullah Najibullah, the Taliban's only foreign ministry
representative this
side of Kandahar, he looked tired and deeply depressed, admitting he had
left
Spin Boldak the previous night and had not slept since. But Kandahar was
calm, he claimed. The Taliban's Islamic elders continued to stay there.
Later,
he admitted that all Taliban men had been ordered to leave Spin Boldak
on
Saturday night for fear that Alliance gunmen would invade the camps
disguised as refugees.
"Only God Almighty has allowed the Muslims to continue to fight the
great
armed might of the United States,'' he added. If he had looked out the
window,
he would have seen the contrails of the bomber streams heading for
Kandahar.
It was an eerie phenomenon. Taliban men rifles over their shoulders
stared
into the sun, up high into the burning light through which four white
columns of
smoke burnt from jet engines across the sky. I stood behind them and
wondered at the battle I had watched for 20 years: a swaying host of
eighth-century black turbans and, just behind them, the contrails of a
B-52
heading in from Diego Garcia. God against technology.
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