Author: Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Publication: Washington Post
Date: September 24, 2001
QUETTA, Pakistan, Sept. 23 -- As
thousands of panicked Afghans continued fleeing toward the Pakistani border,
Nisar Ahmed set off in the other direction today.
Toting his possessions in a single
plastic bag, he went to the dusty bus terminal here and squeezed into a
yellow van headed northwest, toward the southern Afghan city of Kandahar,
which he left two months ago to attend a religious school in Pakistan.
Ahmed, 25, said he was dropping
out of school and forsaking a relatively prosperous life in Pakistan to
wage holy war. "I'm going back for a jihad against America," he said through
a window as his van was pulling out of the station. "They're going to attack,
so we're going to fight."
Over the past week, hundreds of
Afghan and Pakistani men are believed to have crossed into Afghanistan
to volunteer for battle, answering a call from the country's ruling Taliban
militia to defend the nation if the United States mounts a military offensive
against alleged terrorist Osama bin Laden.
Although there is no precise count
of the number of people who have crossed into Afghanistan since the Sept.
11 terror attacks in New York and Washington, bus drivers report ferrying
dozens of eager combatants from Quetta to the border crossing at Chaman,
where the passengers catch other transportation for the bone-jarring, three-hour
ride to Kandahar. One driver said he has made several trips to Chaman with
his 20-seat van filled with "people going for the jihad."
Many of those signing up for the
fight recently trudged to Pakistan with their wives and children upon hearing
from neighbors or on shortwave radios that the Taliban had rejected U.S.
demands to hand over bin Laden. After depositing their families with friends
or relatives in Pakistan, the men have been retracing their path back to
Afghanistan.
Others, like Ahmed, have lived in
Pak hey feel compelled to heed the call to arms. Yet others are hard-line
Muslim Pakistanis who say they want to assist a neighbor in need.
"It is a religious duty for anyone
who calls himself a Muslim to join the jihad," said Noor Mohammed, a top
leader of a conservative Islamic political party in Pakistan. "If infidel
forces unleash war on Muslims, the people in neighboring countries are
duty-bound to help in the defense."
For the would-be warriors, getting
to Afghanistan doesn't require much money or effort. The bus ride from
Quetta to Chaman costs $1. From there to Kandahar is an additional $1.50.
Once they're in Kandahar, they said, they simply seek out their erstwhile
commanders, who will give them a gun and assign them to a military unit.
Many Pakistanis who live along the
rugged border are members of the Pashtun ethnic group -- the largest in
Afghanistan -- which has increased the obligation to fight. "We are the
same race and the same religion," said Habib Ullah, 27, a farmer who was
loitering in the bus terminal. "We share the same blood."
Pakistani officials said they have
no evidence that aspiring fighters from other nations are traveling across
the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. In the 1980s, Muslims from Saudi Arabia,
Malaysia, Indonesia and other Islamic nations traveled to Afghanistan to
join in trying to drive out Soviet forces that had invaded the country.
The new recruits likely will provide
additional strength to the estimated 45,000 combatants in the Taliban militia,
potentially complicating U.S. efforts to strike at bin Laden's camps, which
are believed to be protected by Taliban troops. While some of the volunteers
are greenhorns, others said they have years of experience battling Soviet
forces and an anti-Taliban force called the Northern Alliance.
"We have no fear," declared Ahmed,
who said he had spent three years fighting the Northern Alliance. "We'll
fight the Americans until our last drop of blood."
Diplomats and aid workers have criticized
the Pakistani government for an estimated 15,000 Afghan refugees from entering
Pakistan. "They've closed the border in the wrong direction," said a diplomat
in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.
Pakistani officials said they do
not want to close the Chaman crossing because Pakistani businessmen and
laborers frequently make day trips across the border. The officials insisted
they have no way to identify potential fighters who enter Afghanistan.
While the fighters have the support
of militant Muslim groups in Pakistan, which have staged noisy demonstrations
to protest President Pervez Musharraf's decision to cooperate with U.S.
efforts to crack down on terrorists in Afghanistan, many other Pakistanis
dismissed the self-proclaimed holy warriors as misguided.
"Osama bin Laden helped to kill
innocent people in America," said Mohammed Yusuf, 22, a political science
student who arrived by bus in Quetta to watch his university's soccer team
play. "These jihad fighters think they are going to save Afghanistan, but
they're just going to defend a terrorist."
