Author:
Publication: The Daily Telegraph
Date: February 11, 2002
Christina Lamb in Baluchistan, meets
senior members of the regime who escaped the American armed forces and
are now living relatively comfortably across the border in Pakistan. They
tell her of their plans to regain power.
(Note from Hindu Vivek Kendra:
We hope that at least now both Pakistan and the USA will stop pretending
that Pakistan is part of the war against terrorism.)
The telephone call came shortly
after breakfast. "The carpet has arrived," said a voice. "It's a very valuable
one and we can't keep it here long for security reasons."
It was the strangest feeling. For
most of the past five months since September 11, I have been in Pakistan
and Afghanistan writing about the evil Taliban regime and meeting one after
another of its victims, from Hazara women whose husbands were burnt to
death in front of their eyes, to a Kandahar footballer whose hand was cut
off in a public amputation at which officials then discussed whether to
also chop off a foot.
Now this coded telephone message
meant that I would soon be meeting some of the regime's key members in
their hiding places in Pakistan.
Four hours later I was taken down
a rubbish-strewn alley where I entered a house through the women's quarters.
Finally a bearded old man in a swan-white turban summoned me through the
curtain into a room where two former Taliban ministers were sitting on
floor cushions along with our go-between.
For a moment I was taken aback.
For the past few months the combined might of the American armed forces
have been hunting the former leaders of the Taliban regime who presided
over a reign of terror in Afghanistan. Those Taliban leaders that have
been caught have been shipped off to Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
for interrogation about their links with the al-Qaeda network.
Yesterday Mullah Abdul Wakil Muttawakil,
the Taliban's foreign minister, surrendered to Afghan officials and was
turned over to US forces, becoming one of the highest ranking members of
the deposed rulers to be detained in the war in Afghanistan, the US military
said.
Muttawakil was being held in the
former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar for questioning that the United States
hopes will yield intelligence about fleeing leaders of the Taliban and
the allied al-Qa'eda guerrilla network.
But as The Telegraph can reveal
today, a large number of Taliban leaders have managed to escape and are
now hiding out in the Pakistan province of Baluchistan, apparently unhindered
by the attentions of the Pakistani security authorities.
It took me a few moments to come
to terms with the fact that I was sitting cross-legged in front of some
of the world's most wanted men.
With their beards trimmed short,
they looked surprisingly young. I knew the Taliban leadership were mostly
in their thirties, but somehow I had thought of them as bigger and older
- and more malevolent.
One of the two men, Maulana Abdullah
Sahadi, the former deputy defence minister, was only 28 and looked vulnerable
and slightly scared, greeting me with a wonky Johnny Depp-like smile. It
was the first time he had ventured out of his hiding place since escaping
Afghanistan after the fall of Kandahar two months ago.
The other minister, a burly man
in his mid-thirties who agreed to meet only on condition of anonymity and
is responsible for some of the acts that have most horrified the Western
world, looked defiant.
Later that day I would also meet
the director-general of the passport office who had issued Afghan visas
to some of the Arab fighters who are now on America's most-wanted list.
The news that at least two prominent
former Taliban ministers are safely hiding in Pakistan, while American
troops continue to hunt for them just across the nearby Afghan border,
will severely embarrass President Pervez Musharraf, who makes an official
visit to Washington this week at which he will have talks with Vice-President
Dick Cheney and lunch with President George W. Bush at the White House.
"If these are senior Taliban officials,
maybe the Pakistani authorities should be arresting them," said one US
official.
My interviews took place in Baluchistan,
a vast smugglers' land of desert, mountains and earth tremors, much of
which is governed by tribal law, where women are kept locked away and federal
government officials fear to tread.
It was here in the madrassas, or
religious schools, that the Taliban originated and, perhaps not surprisingly,
it is where they have taken refuge after surrendering their last stronghold
of Kandahar on December 7.
"We shaved off our beards, changed
our turbans from white Taliban to Kandahari [green or black with thin white
stripes], got in cars and drove on the road across the border," says Maulana
Sahadi, adding, "My beard was as long as this." He gestured down to his
chest.
The Pakistani authorities, he claims,
turned a blind eye. While US special forces based in Kandahar continue
to go on daily operations in the Afghan mountains searching for al-Qaeda
and Taliban, just across the border it is an open secret that senior Taliban
ministers are sheltering in madrassas and houses.
Among those are Turabi, the Justice
Minister, Abdul Razzak, the Interior Minister, Qadratuallah Jamal, the
Culture Minister, and the spokesman for Mullah Omar.
According to Sahadi, bin Laden was
still in Afghanistan when the Taliban fell at the end of last year, and
he laughed at the Americans' failure to catch him. "I spoke to him on the
telephone the day we surrendered Kandahar and he was in Paktia and he was
fine.
"I briefed him and he wished me
Godspeed. Now we think he is in Saudi or Yemen."
"The last time I actually met him
was in November during the bombing in Herat. We met there to talk about
finances. He was helping us to buy cars. He may have gone to Iran at that
time."
"He seemed well. A couple of years
ago, he had some health problems linked to his kidney but now he seemed
better.
"The Americans were bombing the
military installations while we had lunch in the Mowaffaq Hotel [in the
centre of Herat which overlooks the traffic island where public hangings
used to take place]. He was taking anti-anxiety pills, some kind of sedatives,
but he was not hiding."
Mr Sahadi said that bin Laden spent
much of his time in Afghanistan travelling around in Toyota Landcruisers
with darkened windows like those favoured by Afghan warlords, with just
one other car of armed Arab bodyguards from his elite 55 Brigade accompanying
him.
He suggests that bin Laden might
have fled through the tribal areas of Pakistan. "I have had no direct contact
with him since December but my information is that he is definitely alive.
We think he is in Yemen or Saudi."
The only reason I was able to arrange
this extraordinary meeting with the Taliban leaders now hiding in Pakistan
is because 13 years ago, during the jihad they waged to drive the Russians
out of Afghanistan, I had travelled on the back of motorcycles in Kandahar
for three weeks with a group of young fighters known as the Mullahs Front,
many of whom later helped to found the Taliban.
"You see, we don't have two horns,"
says one of the ministers with a smile as he poured me tea and offered
me boiled sweets in place of sugar.
"Now anyone can say anything about
us and the world will believe it. People have been saying we skinned their
husbands alive and ate babies and you people print it."
We started off talking about how
they had joined the Taliban. Maulana Sahadi's story is typical. His family
moved to a refugee camp in Quetta when he was just five after his father,
a mujahid with Hezb-i-Islami, was killed fighting the Russians.
The family was very poor, surviving
much of the time on bread begged or bought with money earnt from sewing
carpets, and were pleased when he got a place at a madrassa at the age
of eight. His food, board and books were all provided.
At some point, he learnt to use
a Kalashnikov, though he would not say when, claiming, "A gun is such a
thing, one day you use it, the next day you master it."
In mid-1994, a delegation of elders
and ulema, or religious scholars, from Pakistan came to the madrassa. "They
issued a fatwa telling us we must join the Taliban and fight jihad.
"I joined with a group of friends
from the madrassa so we were there right at the very beginning in the first
attack on Spin Boldak [a town just over the Afghan border on the way to
Kandahar] that October. At that time, we were only about 100 people."
"We were killing men and many of
our companions were martyred, but we were happy because we were doing it
for Islam. We were the soldiers of God."
Sahadi went on to fight in battles
all over Afghanistan, including Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz and Bamiyan,
commanding 500 people, then 2,500 people, then becoming director of defence.
"I would motivate my troops before fighting by telling them that if they
were martyred they would go to paradise and could take with them 72 of
their family members."
He got on well with Mullah Omar,
whom he describes as "a very nice, good-natured person with good morals.
He treated me like a son. Whoever came to him, he treated with respect."
Two years ago, Sahadi became deputy
defence minister and as such says he had frequent personal contact with
Osama bin Laden, though he insisted that "the Arabs were not controlling
things".
"Anyone who supports Islam was welcome
in our country - we had British, Americans, Australians," he adds.
Although Sahadi admits that, during
the American bombing offensive, he and his colleagues were required continually
to change houses in Kandahar to avoid being hit, he says the Taliban never
contemplated handing over bin Laden to save themselves.
"He was a guest in our country and
we gave him refuge because hospitality is an important part of our code
of behaviour. Besides, he was supporting us, giving us money, when no one
else was.
"The Taliban leadership do not believe
the Twin Towers attack was carried out by al-Qaeda," he continued. "According
to my own opinion, the attack was wrong. It is not Islamic to kill innocent
people like that."
How did they explain the videos
in which bin Laden talks of the attack. "We do not believe those videos.
They were fake," he replied.
The other minister interjected.
"What this war really is about is a clash between Islam and infidels. America
wants to implement its own kafir religion in Afghanistan.
"We are the real defenders of Islam,
not people like Gul Agha [the governor of Kandahar] and Hamid Karzai [the
interim leader of Afghanistan]. They are puppets of America."
But why, then, did the Taliban collapse
so easily? "We're not broken, we're whole," insists Sahadi. "We weren't
defeated, we agreed to hand over rather than fight and spill blood. Our
people went back to their tribes or left the country. Now we are just waiting.
"The fighting for power has begun
in Gardez, Mazar, and different provinces. The presidential palace is being
guarded by foreign troops. We are regrouping. We still have arms and many
supporters inside, and when the time is right we will be back."
"Thank God this war happened because
now we really know who is with us and who is against us," Sahadi adds.
"Karzai went to the other camp. Once he pretended he was with us, but now
we see he just wanted power. They will all be brought before justice and
punished according to Islamic law."
Mullah Obaid Ullah, Sahadi's boss,
is one of the few Taliban ministers who was caught and is undergoing interrogation
at Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, but Sahadi insists that the "Americans
have failed".
"They have not caught bin Laden
or Mullah Omar. All they have done is oust our government. We never did
anything to them. Mullah Omar is still in Afghanistan and will stay there
making contact with those commanders unhappy with the new government.
"You will see Islam will win out
and we will break the Americans into pieces as we did with the Russians
and bring back the name of the Taliban."
