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September
27, 2001
Inside
Afghanistan:
'Old As I Am, I Would Like to
Cut Off The Heads of All Those Taliban'
By Patrick Cockburn
The
Independent
in the Panjshir Valley, Afghanistan
Jawid smiles nervously as he recounts
his escape from a Taliban jail and his flight across the front
line to safety in territory held by the Afghan opposition.
A taxi driver in Kabul, Jawid,
21, was arrested two weeks ago at a Taliban checkpoint in the
city. His crime, he says, was being a Tajik, a minority that
makes up a quarter of Afghanistan's population. Possibly he was
caught up in a Taliban sweep to find men avoiding military service.
He spent 10 days in Kabul's
notorious Day Mazang prison, where his salvation may have been
the overcrowding, as well as the Taliban's determination that
prisoners should fulfil their religious obligations.
Early every morning they were
sent to bath houses at the rear of the jail for ritual washing
before prayers. But, because so many people had been arrested,
not enough guards were on hand to keep watch.
"I climbed on to the roof
of the bath house with three friends," Jawid recalled yesterday.
"We jumped from that on to the top of the prison wall, which
is about four metres high. We were able to climb down on the
other side without anybody seeing us." He went home and
then immediately left Kabul with his parents, three brothers
and a sister.
Their destination was the territory
just north of Kabul controlled by the opposition Northern Alliance,
which is mainly Tajik. They reached it by taking the safest route
across the front line ? a 150-mile drive north-east of Kabul
to a bleak mountain called Giawa, which they crossed on foot.
Jawid and his family have joined
a growing army of refugees, but they are luckier than most. We
met him in a grove of trees beside an irrigation channel in an
attractive village called Bagram, where he was surrounded by
his relatives. His white-bearded uncle made a scything motion
and said: "Old as I am, I would like to cut off the heads
of all those Taliban."
If war starts, a flood of refugees
will probably try to escape to safety. But, at least on the roads
north from Kabul, the outflow is still only a trickle. This may
be because it is a difficult and dangerous route. More direct
roads are said to be impassable unless refugees have friends
among the Taliban who let them through.
A feeling is growing among
the refugees, and Afghans of all ethnicities, that the Taliban
are finished because the forces arrayed against them are too
great. Mohammed Shaqer, a policeman in Bagram, said: "It's
simple. Because the Americans are so strong, the Taliban will
be defeated by the US."
So far, however, there is little
fighting, according to Dr Abdullah Abdullah, the Northern Alliance's
foreign minister. He said the Taliban had launched a counter-attack
near Mazar-i-Sharif, the biggest city of the north, and had used
two jets for bombing. But the scale of the fighting seems limited,
with few casualties on either side.
Dr Abdullah did hint at talks
going on with tribes and groups allied to the Taliban about changing
sides. If there is a successful offensive by the Northern Alliance,
it will probably be in association with defections from the Taliban.
Nobody here likes to back a loser.
Dr Abdullah fears that Pakistan
will retain its predominance over Afghanistan by helping the
US to get rid of the Taliban. He suspects it wants to install
a new government as dependent on Pakistani wishes as the Taliban
are. "My fear would be that the Pakistanis would divide
the terrorists into the good and the bad, and keep the good terrorists
for use later," he said. CP
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