Anti-Taleban forces charge into ambush at Tora Bora

5 Dec, 2001 11:45 PM6 mins to read

11.45 am - by RICHARD LLOYD PARRY

TORA BORA - The front lines of Afghanistan must be the most beautiful in the world, and none is more perfect than the view over the battle for Tora Bora.

From the jutting hill where we stood, the bombs were falling little more than two miles away, but the scene had the quality of a peaceful dream. The sky was blue with hazy clouds, the blue-grey mountains had a covering of fresh snow, and the smoke of the bombs and tank shells rose straight up in the motionless air. But beyond the first pine-covered mountain and below the higher, snow-capped one, men were being killed.

It is impossible to know the full extent of the casualties and last night, back in the regional capital, Jalalabad, the usually talkative pro-western commanders were mysteriously unavailable.

But eyewitnesses, who left the battle front after the convoy of journalists in which I travelled, spoke of awful scenes - pick-up trucks bearing dead soldiers, the injured being carried in convoy away from the front.

The battle for Tora Bora is only one day old, but it is already fulfilling its promise to be one of the most difficult and dangerous of the war.

From the top of our hill it looked deceptively simple. Beside us, intermittently deafening us with their shells, were three tanks of the anti-Taleban mujahedin alliance, with ten more on the road below.

Looming above them were the White Mountains, and the area called Tora Bora where this battle is being fought. In there, hidden from view by the first peak, are the men known as "the Arabs" - the Chechen, Pakistani and Saudi fighters of Osama bin-Laden's al Qaeda network, along with a few remnants of the Taleban.

How many of them there are, no one really knows - some of the mujahedin say 700, other estimates go as high as 2000. They have been holed up there for three weeks, since their Taleban allies pulled out of eastern Afghanistan to beat a strategic retreat to the south.

The Arabs could have pulled out too, to the stronghold of Kanadahar where the Taleban still hold out. But instead they chose to hole up in the White Mountains, the scene of many battles in Afghanistan's 22-year war.

And with them, the mujahedin commanders say - until a few days ago at least - is Osama bin Laden.

After the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1979, the mujahedin themselves hid out in the caves of Tora Bora, enlarging them with dynamite and successfully defending the steep approaches to the valleys.

Later came the al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, who transformed them into an underground fortress, with doors, concrete walls and water-driven electricity generators. Now the mujahedin are fighting to take them and they know, better than anyone, what a task that is going to be.

"The battle has started, and we will persevere until we have eliminated them completely," said Sohrab Qadri, a mujahedin commander loyal to Jalalabad's security minister, Hazrat Ali.

"But the resistance is very tough, they are fighting hard, and our men have not been able to go very far."

This is an ill-matched battle. Pitched one against another, there would be little to choose between the mujahedin and the Arabs. The former have tanks, while their enemies are firing nothing more powerful than Kalashnikov rifles, machine guns and short-range mortars.

But the Arabs have the tremendous advantage of the terrain, a narrow but steep mountain range covered with caves and forests up into which they can retreat at will.

The decisive ingredient is the American B-52s. The mujahedin commanders on the front line carry only walkie-talkies and they have no way of communicating with the planes above.

Yesterday, they simply watched as a single plane circled again and again, 15,000 feet up. Every fifteen minutes or so, a great muffled boom reverberated through the mountains, accompanied by an orange flash, then clouds of smoke rising from behind the hill.

And then the elderly T-56 tanks loaded and fired at the same spot. But this is a battle that will be won on the ground, and there the mujahedin had a very mixed day. One thousand of them have gathered here since Tuesday, along with their battered Russian tanks, and yesterday evening more were on the way.

The Arabs have left their cave hideaways for the forest, and to the mujahedin soldiers moving towards them, they are a faceless enemy. "We can hear them talking to one on their radios," said a soldier named Habibullah. "But they call one another by numbers instead of names. We heard them saying. 'Don't shoot at them now. Wait until they come up and then surround them, and take them.'"

And that is exactly what happened. As we admired the view from the top of the hill, a company of mujahedin were advancing up the hill. Six hours later, in a hospital bed in Jalalabad, a mujahedin commander named Jan Shah told the story. From the valley road where the tanks are lined up, it is only a few hundred metres to the Arabs, but the steep climb took three hours. The soldiers soon found a prize: forty pick up trucks, with the keys still inside, abandoned by the Arabs three weeks ago after their retreat into the mountains.

More cautious or more disciplined troops would have followed their orders and stopped there, but Commander Shah's men pressed ahead. "We were told just to secure a line," said Commander Shah, "and we met some villagers who warned us not to go on because the Arabs and Taleban were there. But when we got up there we were full of courage and so we went on."

More loot lay ahead - caves, filled with ammunition and machine guns. The mujahedin began loading up with these too, when the ambush was sprung. "We'd been there for five minutes when they suddenly sprung up and began firing," he said. "I could see their faces, and they were all the faces of Arabs, not of Afghans. They were firing machine guns, and I was hit in the left leg."

The gunbattle lasted for ten minutes before the ambushers disappeared up the slope, and the mujahedin limped away. Last night, Commander Shah lay in Jalalabad hospital by one of his injured men. "I was hurt and I was not sure about what was going on," he said. "But my men were carrying the dead bodies of our comrades upon their backs."

But the Arabs' supply lines have been cut. The villagers who were bribed and bullied into carrying them water and food are leaving the area and, the stores in their caves will give out eventually.

"I can't compare them with the Russians because there is no one left to help them now," said Halim Shah, the commander of the front line, "They are completely helpless. But they are terrorists."

- INDEPENDENT

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