Bombs, bullets unleash four hours of hell

26 Nov, 2001 07:16 PM3 mins to read

When Taleban prisoners revolted, Reuters journalist NIKOLAI PAVLOV feared for his life.

MAZAR-I-SHARIF - It was bloody mayhem. Bombs were falling, grenades exploding and machinegun bullets flying all around us.

It seemed to come from nowhere on a mild and slightly hazy autumn day on the dusty steppes of northern Afghanistan.

We wanted to visit the prison outside Mazar-i-Sharif, the bastion of the region's warlord, ethnic Uzbek general Abdul Rashid Dostum and the jail for hundreds of prisoners he had taken when Taleban fighters surrendered near the besieged city of Kunduz.

With cameraman Shavkat Rakhmatullayev, I approached with a sense of excitement this folly of a 19th century fortress, whose 20m-high walls and mud-baked crenellated ramparts dominate the desert.

We entered the fort and were about to go inside the prison to interview some of the captives when we were stopped at a gate by a commander who said we needed permission from his superior.

It seemed to be the usual bureaucracy. But that red tape may have saved our lives. Because just then all hell broke loose.

We heard two grenades exploding and then rifle fire. The cameraman and I threw ourselves down under the trees.

We had no idea what was happening but we could tell that something had gone very wrong inside the prison section of the huge fort.

After a while we managed to make a dash for shelter against the thick wall of the fort, where we were pinned down for what seemed like hours by the intense firing.

The fighting was so heavy that we couldn't really move, we couldn't go anywhere.

When I tried to raise my head and see what was happening several bullets whizzed right past me and into the dusty ground nearby. When I tried to look out, some grenades landed near us. It was not pleasant.

We weren't completely alone. Northern Alliance fighters pinned down with us explained that foreign Taleban prisoners - some of the hardline Pakistanis, Arabs, Chechens and Uzbeks associated with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network - had grabbed weapons and launched a bloody rebellion.

Sharing our fear was a television crew from Germany's ARD station and a mysterious American man in plain clothes, equipped with an automatic weapon and a satellite telephone.

He refused to tell us his name. But we could hear him giving information to someone, perhaps his base command, saying one American could be dead and hundreds of the Taleban fighters killed.

It seemed that a large number of people were killed in the mayhem. From our tiny patch of cover, we saw four wounded alliance fighters.

The firefight raged for at least four hours. It felt like forever.

Finally, we plucked up our courage and with the flak-jacketed US observer and the German crew we made a run for the wall, leaving our tripod and camera batteries behind.

We leapt over the wall. Luckily it was more of an incline than a sheer drop and we slithered down amid a hail of bullets in the gathering dusk.

We ran for our lives down the road and had the good fortune to meet a Northern Alliance official, who gave us a lift back to safety in Mazar-i-Sharif about 16km away.

I can't imagine many of the prisoners survived.

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