By JUSTON HUGGLER
TALOQAN - We saw them march out of town, laughing columns of men, a victorious army on its way to liberate the Taleban's last stronghold in the north. And we saw them return, pitiful bands of broken men, some with legs blown away, others riddled with machinegun fire.
The war in Afghanistan is not over yet.
Northern Alliance soldiers were cut down as they tried to march on Kunduz, the last Taleban town holding out in the north.
The troops had been led into a trap, but not by the true Afghan Taleban. It was the volunteers who came from Arab countries, Pakistan and Chechnya to fight the jihad in Afghanistan - the so-called "Afghan Arabs" - led by Osama bin Laden.
The liberators drove in 38 Russian trucks, on a narrow road between two rows of houses where the Taleban soldiers stood on the roofs.
Alliance troops made no attempt to defend themselves, the Taleban commander in Kunduz was supposed to have defected and Kunduz and the whole of northern Afghanistan were there for the taking. And then the Taleban opened fire on them with guns and rockets.
"They were so close I could hear them speaking to each other," said Abdul Mawlood, a 24-year-old with the bones in his leg shattered by machinegun fire.
He lay in the hospital, amid the stench of old blood. The dark bloodstains were everywhere, and in the background you could hear the howling of a man just brought in after he drove over a landmine. "Allah," he cried, and the howl rose into an inhuman yelp.
Mawlood fell from the truck when they shot him, crawled into a ditch and hid. "I could see one of my comrades, lying wounded in the road. Some of the foreigners [volunteers] came up to him and shot him dead where he lay. They didn't see me."
He lay there bleeding until Northern Alliance relief forces came and dragged him from the slaughter.
Three hundred soldiers drove into that village. Fifty of them died, said a commander. Several were injured by trucks desperately trying to reverse.
Similar stories are emerging from all over Afghanistan. We heard of a village further north where the foreign volunteers, overwhelmed by Northern Alliance forces, waited until the alliance troops were upon them and then killed themselves with grenades. Like the pilots who flew the planes into the World Trade Center, they are not afraid to die.
But the foreigners are about the only ones fighting now. Across the country, the Afghan Taleban are defecting or surrendering.
It is not hard to find out why the once all-powerful Taleban are melting away like snow.
On a ridge next to an old graveyard, just outside Taloqan, we found a compelling reason. Twisted metal littered the ground - the remains of five tanks destroyed by an American bomb. Scattered around were strange little burned fragments, with the springy texture of cooked meat. It took a while to realise they were bits of the bodies of Taleban soldiers.
"It was terrible when the planes came," said Sakhi Mohammed, a Taleban soldier taken prisoner.
"There were hands flying in the air. Lots of my friends died. Sometimes they bombed the jeeps, and the bits of jeep were thrown hundreds of metres away. How do you find the bodies if jeeps are blown apart like that?"
The Taleban endured weeks of that bombing before they succumbed to the Northern Alliance. But bin Laden's "Afghan Arabs" are still fighting tooth and claw.
We found three who had been captured. One had gone completely mad. He crouched on the dirt floor, gesturing wildly with his hands and crying out in a high, unearthly voice, "I am god! I am god! Bin Laden is god! Bin Laden is god!"
At times he became frantic and acted out a grotesque death. He ran his finger across his throat and rolled his tongue out like a dying man. He imitated a man with his eyes popping out. What horror had he seen to make him act like that?
The guards said he was feigning insanity in order to be released.
Nobody knew his name, or his nationality, but he was not Afghan.
Saleh Jan, a volunteer from Pakistan, sat smiling disconcertingly in the corner.
"I came to Afghanistan to fight for Islam," he said. "If they release me, I will go and kill the Northern Alliance and Americans again."
He carried no pretence. And for a man who could yet be executed - stories of Northern Alliance soldiers killing foreign volunteers are pouring out - he was disarmingly calm, smiling in the corner where the sun creeped into the cell.
He had the slightly crazed air of a mystic, like some dervish of death.
A third foreign volunteer, Maqsood Ali, also from Pakistan, sat quietly on the other side of the room. He was pleading ignorance.
But not Jan. He knew all about the September 11 attacks - most Afghan Taleban prisoners say they know nothing about them.
"What happened in New York was good," said Jan. "America suddenly felt on itself what it has inflicted on the rest of the world."
And what of the fact that it was innocent civilians who died in New York and Washington? "Where were you with your concern for innocent civilians when Muslim civilians were dying in Palestine? Innocent civilians have been dying here in Afghanistan."
Jan told how he travelled to Saudi Arabia "to study Islam" before coming to Afghanistan.
"Bin Laden? I don't know anything about him. I don't even know if bin Laden is Afghan or Arab. I want to liberate the other countries of the world, and make one Muslim nation."
The Northern Alliance says it has Kunduz surrounded now. But "Afghan Arabs" like Jan are believed to be all over Afghanistan and bin Laden's dervishes of death say they will fight to the end.
- INDEPENDENT
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Bloodbath on road to victory
By JUSTON HUGGLER
TALOQAN - We saw them march out of town, laughing columns of men, a victorious army on its way to liberate the Taleban's last stronghold in the north. And we saw them return, pitiful bands of broken men, some with legs blown away, others riddled with machinegun fire.
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