Alliance fighters find gruesome residue of torture

18 Nov, 2001 08:26 AM3 mins to read

SHINDAND - Abdolsalam and Nurahmad - father and son - returned from Iran together six months ago to join the mujahideen and fight harsh Taleban rule in their homeland, Afghanistan.

Now their semi-decomposed bodies lie side by side, their hands bound behind them, ears cut off and the backs of their skulls smashed by bullets fired into their mouths.

Abdolsalam's brother sits on the ground, his head bent, weeping over the heaps of bones, rotting flesh and rags that were once his family.

Nearby are the bodies of two more men captured by the Taleban, tortured, killed and buried in a ditch about four months ago, say local officials.

Soon after forces loyal to anti-Taleban warlord Ismail Khan overran the huge Shindand airbase on Thursday, they began to uncover gruesome evidence of apparent atrocities.

The remains of 26 prisoners have already been exhumed and the mujahideen, helped by locals, say they expect to find more.

Local mujahideen commander Golamresul Shehidzadeh said the Taleban executed many prisoners: "We are trying to find the bodies and hold a ceremony for them."

Beyond them stretched a vast scrapyard of Soviet military hardware - jet fighters, transport planes and tanks, the rusty legacy of an earlier conflict.

Large craters scarred the runway where US bombs had hit.

The fighters displayed two thick posts about 2m long they said they had found in a building used by the Taleban intelligence forces.

The posts had a series of short metal bars sticking out of them, each with a small hole in the end through which a long bar could be passed, trapping the feet of up to 10 prisoners.

One former prisoner said his Taleban captors had repeatedly beaten him across his feet with a length of cable, a punishment known as the falaka.

"I received the falaka five to 10 times a day," said Golahmad, a truck driver the Taleban arrested a month ago on suspicion of spying for Ismail Khan. "Any guard who felt like it would come along and beat us."

Golahmad was lucky. Imprisoned in the nearby town of Shindand, he and about 35 others were freed when local people rose up against the Taleban as Khan's forces took the airbase and began to bear down on the town's dusty streets.

Dozens of heavily armed Taleban militiamen in the town joined more fleeing from the city of Herat to the north, driving in four-wheel-drive pick-up trucks to nearby mountains.

Shindand marks a boundary between the Persian-speaking northwest of Afghanistan and the Pashto-speaking south, the heartland of the Taleban with its capital in Kandahar.

Mujahideen commanders say that although they no longer face any organised opposition, bands of desperate Taleban fighters are in the territory beyond, preying on passing travellers.

- REUTERS

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