Murdered Taleban left to rot in streets

Horrific and heartrending scenes greeted JUSTIN HUGGLER in Kunduz.

KUNDUZ - When we reached the centre of the city, the Taleban soldiers were still lying in the streets where they had been shot.

A tall, bearded man lay near the main roundabout with his arms and legs twisted in his death agony. A trail of blood snaked down his forehead, glistening in the sun.

A crowd of people gathered to watch one of the Taleban die. He lay there, shivering despite the warmth. At least 50 men stood and watched, but not one tried to help him. They did not have words of comfort to offer him. He died there, under their unforgiving stare.

They brought a heavy-set Taleb into the crowd, and the Northern Alliance soldiers beat him with their rifles, holding them by the barrel and swinging the butts into him. He was screaming, and blood was pouring from his mouth, but they kept on beating.

The local people joined in, many of them probably faithful Taleban supporters until yesterday, kicking him in the head where he lay on the ground. Eventually the soldiers dumped him in a truck, which sped away. Nobody expected to see him alive again.

This was the long-awaited fall of Kunduz, the Taleban's last stronghold in the north. Some said the battered man was a Pakistani, but otherwise there was no sign of the thousands of Osama bin Laden's foreign volunteers that the alliance said were ready to fight to the death in the city.

People here spoke of street-to-street fighting when the alliance troops, led by General Mohammed Daud, advanced into town. They said the Taleban had been killed in the fighting. But some of the bodies lying on the streets had their big toes tied together so they could not run. They had not died in fighting. They had been executed.

As the afternoon wore on, the bodies started to smell, but still nobody moved them. But the crowds hung around all day, as if waiting for another chance to try to beat a Taleb to death.

The majority of the population of Kunduz are ethnic Pashtuns and very few of those were on the streets. "By the help of God, all of Kunduz is now secured," the loudspeakers in the centre of town announced. "Soldiers, do not loot. Keep good discipline and order."

All around the soldiers' feet lay the Taleban they had massacred. The soldiers were busy looting. They drove past, towing their new pick-ups behind them. Some were towing two or even three cars behind a single labouring Russian truck.

The people told us there was little left to loot. The soldiers of the Uzbek warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum had come into the town and helped themselves to the best spoils at 10 pm local time the day before. They had fought the Taleban until 3 am, then withdrawn before Daud arrived. After all, Dostum promised the Alliance leadership he would not to enter Kunduz before their man, Daud.

We walked to the end of town, where the foreigners were supposed to be holding out in the village. "Don't go any further," the Northern Alliance soldiers warned us. "The Taleban will shoot you."

But here on the edge of town where the fields began, all was quiet. The Northern Alliance claims Pakistani military planes have been landing at Kunduz airport, and flying the foreigners out. One commander said he had seen foreign fighters queuing to get on a waiting plane.

The Americans insist they are not letting any foreigners fly out of Kunduz.

At Khanabad in Kunduz province, we were picking our way through the bombed-out ruins when we heard an explosion. When we got there, an old man sat in his blood, shaking his head in bewilderment. Beside him, a 15-year-old boy lay bleeding and unconscious.

They had trodden on one of the American cluster bombs that litter the fields and roadside around Khanabad.

The Americans killed more than 100 civilians in Khanabad in the last two weeks, relentlessly bombing heavily populated residential areas in the town, one of the last under Taleban control.

In the suburb of Charikari, we found giant craters and piles of rubble where houses used to be.

Juma Khan was poking around the crater where most of his family died when the American bomb struck: 15 people.

A child's black gumboot lay in the rubble. It could have belonged to Khan's 5-year-old son, Hakimullah, or his 3-year-old daughter, Hamza.

The bomb fell at 8 am, when the whole family were inside the house. "I was just sitting there. The next thing I knew, people were digging me out of the rubble," Khan said.

He saw them dig out his 11-year-old daughter, Gulshan, the only other survivor. She has severe head injuries. Everyone else in the rubble was dead.

Daud claimed only 13 people were killed in Khanabad when one bomb went astray. That was patently untrue.

The cluster bombs, innocuous-looking yellow tubes, littered the fields and roads around the town, and you had to look carefully before every step.

"Are they dangerous?" a returning refugee asked us about the cluster bombs.

The answer lay bleeding by the roadside: 15-year-old Habibullah with his stomach torn open, Nur Mohammed, the old man, moaning in agony. There were two other men lying injured beside them. They were returning refugees who tried to take a short cut through a field full of cluster bombs.

There was no clue as to why the Americans decided to bomb residential areas of Khanabad - and to use cluster bombs, designed to kill and maim. A Taleban barracks was nearby, but the Americans had not hit that.

Khan stood in the sun, his wife and six of his children dead by an American bomb. "What do I do now?" he asked. "I just don't know."

- INDEPENDENT

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