'The Taleban mullah who surrendered to me on the front line'

23 Nov, 2001 09:09 AM5 mins to read

1:30 pm - By JUSTIN HUGGLER

The Taleban mullah had just walked across the front line to surrender - but he could not find anyone to surrender to. So we bundled him and his retinue of defecting Taleban into the back of our rented mini-van, and set off to find a local Northern Alliance commander.

Mullah Abdullah Hadi thought he was crossing the front line as part of the peaceful surrender of Kunduz, one of the Taleban's last two strongholds in Afghanistan, negotiated the night before. Instead, he found himself crossing the front line in the Battle of Kunduz.

As he got into the car, chaos broke out. Suddenly, everyone was scrambling for cover. Somebody started screaming that the Taleban in the hills opposite had fired a rocket at us.

Northern Alliance soldiers hurled themselves into the ditch or scrabbled their way onto moving pick-ups. Mullah Hadi and his friends might be trying to surrender, but someone was still fighting.

"Be quiet!" the driver screamed at me as he swerved onto the bridge, narrowly avoiding a fleeing soldier. One of Mullah Hadi's retainers hung out of the open door as we raced down the road.

A line of pick-ups loaded with Northern Alliance soldiers followed us. In a few minutes, the entire Northern Alliance front line had collapsed as the panicking soldiers took to the road and fled.

Mullah Hadi had already had five rockets fired at him by Northern Alliance soldiers as he crossed the front line, he told us.

We had tried to reach the front line earlier in the day, but we had to turn back when Taleban shells landed within four metres of the car in front of us.

When we finally got there, crowds of turbanned men with rifles and rocket launchers over their shoulders stood silhouetted against the evening sun.

Among them, we found streams of Taleban trying to surrender as the battle raged around them. Tank fire echoed from the hills, an American B52 circled overhead, and every so often came the apocalyptic sound of the American bombs, that we felt in our chests, and that made our ears sing.

The road to Kunduz was packed with Northern Alliance soldiers in Russian military fatigues, milling around in easy range of the Taleban who were still firing mortars.

Surrendering Taleban tried to push their way through in pick-ups and Russian Kamaz trucks that were still smeared with mud so the American jets would mistake them for Afghan mud-houses, the Taleban's strategy to avoid the bombs.

Alliance soldiers pushed back the people trying to welcome a heavily bearded Taleban defector. One of them demanded the defector's rocket-propelled-grenade launcher. He refused to hand it over, and the Alliance soldier tried to wrestle it out of his hands, screaming at him.

An Afghan clutched at my sleeve. "We have to go, they will start shooting," he hissed at me. So we retreated - towards the Taleban front line. In the middle of a battle, we were retreating from "our" line towards the enemy's, for our own safety.

Another Taleban defector in a black turban had just arrived when a Northern Alliance soldier rushed up and swore at him. The Taleban defector said he was going to shoot the Northern Alliance soldier, so we got out of the way.

That was when we found Mullah Hadi, striding with quiet dignity through the chaos. "The Taleban government is finished," he told us. "But I am not happy about surrendering to the Alliance. They have no discipline." As the soldiers squabbled around us over who should get the spoils, it was hard to disagree.

Mullah Hadi said he surrendered to avoid bloodshed in Kunduz and as he spoke, the Taleban tanks blasted at us from the distance. Plenty of Taleban were still fighting, including as many as 10,000 foreign volunteers, 1,000 of them said to be members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda group.

"If the UN gives the foreigners guarantees for a safe passage, they will come. If they will be killed or imprisoned by the Northern Alliance, they will not come," Mullah Hadi said.

But the UN is in no position to give any guarantee and the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says he would rather the foreigners were killed.

And so Mullah Hadi's trek across the front line may prove in vain - and there may yet be a bloodbath in Kunduz.

The mullah complained bitterly about the American bombing, saying the bombs had killed innocent civilians. He said the Americans had bombed a power station and, even, the burned-out wreck of a tank from an earlier war.

A little way up the road, we found a Northern Alliance tank blocking the way. "You can pass," said the soldier on top. "We're waiting for the Taleban to come with their pick-ups, so we can take the best ones off them."

Beyond, five Northern Alliance tanks were on their way to the front line. One had broken down, and was being towed by the tank in front of it.

We finally found a warlord for our Taleban mullah to surrender to in a large, rambling house without electricity. It was night when we got there, and we followed the mullah up the stairs, apprehensive of what welcome he might receive. Northern Alliance soldiers fixed torches on us in the gloom.

At the top, Alliance soldiers sat around on the floor, their faces lit by a glowing hurricane lamp. They were eating iftar, the meal that breaks the Ramadan fast. The commander, Nazir Ahmad, was at the front - but one of his deputies beckoned Mullah Hadi to join them and eat.

By that simple action, our Mullah Hadi came under the protection of the warlords, and was safe. Without it, any Alliance soldier could have picked him up off the street and flung him in jail - or shot him down where he stood.

- INDEPENDENT

Story archives: