First shell-shocked al Qaeda prisoners paraded

17 Dec, 2001 10:39 PM5 mins to read

By RICHARD LLOYD PARRY

AGAM, Afghanistan - As the first two or three prisoners were lead out, I paid careful attention, to their clothes, their injuries, the expressions on their faces. Number one wore a striped smock and green camouflage trousers; number two was an older man with a grey beard; number three wore laceless training shoes and kept his eyes fixed on the ground.

But the mujahedin guards - one on either side, grasping an arm each - marched them out and back in again so quickly that it was difficult to keep up.

Number four had blood stains on his thin cotton shirt; number five
was limping heavily on a bandaged left foot, and number seven could hardly walk at all. But by the end, they had become indistinguishable.

These were the "Arabs", the al Qaeda fighters who had kept thousands of mujahedin militia men, scores of American and British commandos, and the world's mightiest air force tied up for two weeks in the White Mountains of eastern Afghanistan.

A week ago, an encounter with them was a terrifying prospect.
But here, exhausted, dirty and in pain, the most one could feel was a
confused pity.

The battle of Tora Bora came to an end barely two days ago, and the
reckoning of the defeated enemy has hardly begun. The nineteen prisoners
who were put on show by their captors yesterday (there were six more
inside, too badly wounded to be moved) represent just a part of the total -
and on the mountainsides, three hours' walk from the nearest road, 200 or
more dead bodies are still lying out in the cold.

But even at this note-taking stage in the history of the Afghanistan war - and however evil and misguided their motives - it is clear that the al Qaeda fighters in Tora Bora have put endured remarkable suffering.

Scowling mujahedin gunmen formed a line between the prisoners and
the gawping journalists yesterday, and not a single question was allowed.
But the accounts of mujahedin returned from the front line told the story
of the frantic last battle played out in Tora Bora between last Friday and
Monday.

Like every other battle in this war, it was won almost entirely by
overwhelming American air power. For at least three weeks, the slopes of
Tora Bora have been scoured by the most powerful conventional weapons in the world.

Cluster bombs, which split open to release 202 parachute born
individual bomblets. 226 kg bombs, 453 kg bombs,
"bunker busters", and the 6800 kg "daisy cutter" which explodes like a giant petrol bomb and sucks the air out of the enemy's lungs.

The great strategic advantage of Tora Bora was its underground caves, many of them dug and extended by the Arabs, but even these could not resist the massive poundage of explosives which fell upon them.

"Most of the caves are destroyed by the bombardment," said Halim Shah, a mujahedin commander yesterday. "It is difficult to tell how big they were."

The battle fields are still off-limits to journalists, but by all
accounts the scenes there is appalling.

"The dead are lying on the ground all over," said Commander Shah. "There are five in one place ten in another, so many all in different places."

Another mujahedin, named Hazo Belah, described seeing the intestines of the dead, spilled across the ground.

The mujahedin may be untrained, poorly equipped and dressed only in
thin cotton, but with such air support this was a fight which they could
not have lost. Nonetheless, there was a ground battle as the mujahedin
moved up the hills over the weekend and began to flush out the surviving
caves.

By this time, the groups of individual al Qaeda fighters were isolated from one another by the bombardment, able to keep in touch only by radio contact. "We surrounded the Arabs in the caves," said Hazo Belah.

"Some of the were crying, some of them were yelling in Arabic. We couldn't
understand them."

Two days of surrender negotiations last week lead nowhere, and the mujahedin were in no mood to take prisoners. Based on yesterday's reports, the dead far outnumber those captured.

"Two of them committed suicide as we went in," said Commander Shah,
although the incident sounds less like an act of despair than a suicidal
display of defiance.

"The Arabs had no escape," he continues. "Two of them took grenades and pulled out the pins. We didn't know whether they wanted
to kill themselves or kill us, so we shot them."

The Arabs are not completely finished - a remnant of them, as many
as a few hundred, fled even higher, towards the snow line of the White
Mountains which gets lower with every freezing night. Mujahedin units are
still pursuing them there.

Yesterday, there were American bombers overhead again, but the sound of the explosions was distant and muffled. Every few hours, a few more of the al Qaeda will be killed, a few will escape into Pakistan and a few will be captured and brought down to the makeshift jail in the village of Agam, where I saw them yesterday.

The mujahedin say that their fate is not yet determined, but it is
likely that many of them will end up in Camp Rhino, the American base near Kandahar where the interrogation and intelligence-gathering effort is
based. How does a holy warrior reconcile himself to capture?

From yesterday's glimpse it was impossible to tell. Only one of them, number four, gave a hint of emotion or individual personality.

As he was lead away, he raised his index and middle-fingers, outward-turned in the Winston Churchill gesture. Was it the symbol of peace? Or was it an obscure claim to victory?

- INDEPENDENT

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