Streams of refugees leave Kandahar

26 Nov, 2001 02:56 AM6 mins to read

3.15 pm - ROBERT FISK, the only western journalist in Taleban-controlled territory, reports from the road to Takhta-Pul, Kandahar Province.

"You'll never get through," the Taleban man shouted at me.

"The Northern Alliance are shooting into Takhta-Pul and the Americans are bombing the centre of the town."

Impossible, I said, Takhta-Pul is only 24 miles away, a few minutes ride from the Afghan border town of Spin Boldak. But then a refugee with a cracked face and white hair matting the brow below his brown turban - he looked 70 but said he was only 36 - stumbled up to us. "The Americans just destroyed our homes," he cried. "I saw my house disappear. It was a big plane that spat smoke and soaked the ground with fire."

For a man who couldn't read and had never left Kandahar province in all his long, short life, it was a chilling enough description of the Spectre, the American "Bumble Bee" aircraft that picks off militia men and civilians with equal ferocity.

And down the tree-lined road came hundreds more refugees - old women with dark faces and babies carried in the arms of young women in burqas and boys with tears on their faces - all telling the same stories.

Mullah Abdul Rahman slumped down beside me, passed his hand over the sweat on his face and told me how his brother - a fighter in the same town - had just escaped.

"There was a plane that shot rockets out of its side," he said, shaking his head. "It almost killed my brother today. It hit many people."

So this is what it's like to be on the losing side in the American-Afghan bloodbath. Everywhere it was that same story of desperation and terror and courage.

"You'll never get to Kandahar, they've cut the road," another Taleban gunman shouted at me.

An American F-18 soared through the imperial blue heaven above us as a middle-aged man approached me with angry eyes. "This is what you wanted isn't it?" he screamed. "Sheikh Osama is an excuse to do this to the Islamic people."

I pleaded with yet another Taleban fighter - a 35-year-old father of five called Jamaldan - to honour his government's promise to get me to Kandahar. He looked at me pityingly. "How can I get you there," he asked, "when we can hardly protect ourselves?"

The implications are astonishing. The road from the Iranian border town of Zabul to Kandahar has been cut by mysterious Afghan gunmen and US special forces. The Americans were bombing the civilian traffic - and the Taleban - on the road to Spin Boldak, and the Northern Alliance were firing across the highway.

Takhta-Pul was under fire from American gunships and Kandahar was being surrounded. No wonder I found the local Taleban commander, the thoughtful and intelligent Mullah Haqqani, preparing to cross the Pakistani border to Quetta - for "medical reasons".

Kandahar may not be the Taleban Stalingrad - not yet - but tragedy was the word that came to mind. Out of a dust-storm came a woman cowled in a grey shawl. "I lost my daughter two days ago," she wailed. "The Americans bombed our home in Kandahar and the roof fell on her."

Amid the chaos and shouting, I did what reporters do. Out came my notebook and pen. Name? "Muzlifa." Age? "She was two." I turn away. "Then there was my other daughter." She nods when I ask if this girl died too. "At the same moment. Her name was Farigha. She was three." I turn away. "There wasn't much left of my son." Notebook out for the third time. "When the roof hit him, he was turned to meat and all I could see were bones. His name was Sherif. He was a year and a half old."

They came out of a blizzard of sand, these people, each with their story of blood. Shukria Gul told her story more calmly. Beneath her burqa, she sounded a teenager. "My husband Mazjid was a labourer. We have two children, our daughter Rahima and our son Talib. Five days ago, the Americans hit a munitions dump in Kandahar and the bullets came through our house. My husband was killed by them in the bedroom. He was 25."

At the Akhtar Trust refugee camp, I find Dr Ismael Moussa, just up from Karachi - a doctor of theology, dispensing religion along with money for widows. "The Americans have created an evil for themselves," he says, "and it will pay for this. The Almighty Lord allows a respite to an oppressor - enough rope to hang itself - until He seizes him and never lets go."

Seizing, it seems, was also on the mind of the British Foreign Office, earnestly warning reporters that Taleban invitations to Kandahar were a trap to kidnap foreign journalists. Given the politeness of even the most desperate Taleban yesterday, this may fit into the 'interesting-if-true' file.

Dr Moussa provided a much more disturbing reason: the desire to prevent foreign correspondents witnessing in Kandahar the kind of war crimes committed by Britain's friends in the Northern Alliance at the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif.

As for Mullah Najibullah, the Taleban's only foreign ministry representative this side of Kandahar, he looked a tired and deeply depressed man, admitting he had left Spin Boldak the previous night and had not slept since. But Kandahar was calm, he claimed. The Taleban's Islamic Elders continued to stay there. Later, however, he admitted that all Taleban men had been ordered to leave Spin Boldak on Saturday night for fear that Northern Alliance gunmen would penetrate the camps disguised as refugees.

"Only God Almighty has allowed the Moslems to continue to fight the great armed might of the United States," he added. If he had looked out the window, he would have seen the contrails of the bomber streams heading for Kandahar.

It was an eerie phenomenon. Outside a refugee tent a group of Taleban men - rifles over their shoulders - stared into the sun, up high into the burning light through which four thick white columns of smoke burned from jet engines across the sky. I stood behind them and wondered at the battle I had been watching for 20 years: a swaying host of 8th-century black turbans and, just behind them, the contrails of a B-52 heading in from Diego Garcia. Religion against technology.

- INDEPENDENT

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