The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  So Musharraf approached Dostum, a most treacherous and untrustworthy leader but an opportunist who could be expected to do a deal. Dostum was already cooperating with the United States, and he had an American special forces team at his side. Musharraf confided to Dostum that he had been wrong to support just one group in Afghanistan—the Taliban—and said he wanted to rectify that. It suited Dostum to be the dealmaker who ended the war in northern Afghanistan. It would let him emerge once again as an important power broker.

  Musharraf’s intervention came just in time for Mullah Fazel. Dostum sent Pashtun emissaries to Kunduz, men with tribal contacts who were able to approach the Taliban leaders. They offered the Taliban a straightforward way out: surrender your weapons and you will be allowed to go home. Most of the Taliban were from the south and wanted above all to get away from the north where they had vengeful enemies and feared a slaughter. The tribal leaders in Kunduz urged the Taliban to spare the town from American bombing, which was already causing heavy destruction in outlying villages.

  Yet the Taliban despised Dostum. He had been trained by the KGB and had fought on the side of the Communists during the ten-year Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. His militias were notorious for their ruthless pogroms around the country, just as he himself was notorious for repeated betrayals of alliances. Mullah Fazel ultimately had no other choice. He was receiving orders from his leaders in the southern capital, Kandahar, and from his Pakistani mentors to make a tactical retreat and conserve forces for the future.

  In testimony he later gave before a military tribunal in Guantánamo Bay, Mullah Fazel denied receiving any orders and said it was his own decision to surrender to Dostum. The deal, he said, was that his forces would give up their weapons and then be allowed to go home.3 Yet according to American military prosecutors, he received orders from the Taliban defense minister to surrender. The Taliban leadership maintained command and control throughout their retreat.

  That leadership, under the direction of Mullah Omar and his defense minister, Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, had crucial support from Pakistan. During the Kunduz siege, Pakistan began evacuating its own people on secret military flights from the airfield on the edge of town. According to Afghan intelligence officials, there were two to three thousand Pakistanis trapped there, including trained military operatives. Pakistan had long boosted the Taliban’s military campaign with its own troops and advisors but had always kept them hidden from international scrutiny, using retired officers on contract, civilians, and only occasionally active soldiers, never in uniform.

  For ten to fifteen days in the second half of November, one or two Pakistani military flights had flown into Kunduz airfield every evening, airlifting a total of approximately two thousand people as well as weapons and communications systems, according to Afghans who were monitoring Taliban radio communications.4 Two battalions of Pakistanis, including special forces, artillery units, and hundreds of snipers, had controlled the airport and strengthened the Taliban frontlines in the north. Neither they nor their equipment were found when the town was finally captured by the Northern Alliance. Not everyone was so lucky. Hundreds of Central Asian fighters were killed in the U.S. bombing or drowned trying to ford the river north into Tajikistan. Nearly a thousand low-level Pakistani fighters were left behind to fend for themselves, ending up as prisoners of Dostum’s troops. Pakistan was bowing to the superior might of the United States, pulling out of the fight in Afghanistan and advising the Taliban to change tactics to a guerrilla campaign.

  As the Taliban retreat accelerated across the country and the vise around Kunduz tightened, Mullah Fazel took up Dostum’s offer of negotiations. Dostum guaranteed Mullah Fazel safe passage from American bombs if he undertook the five-hour drive across the desert to Qala-i-Janghi. It was the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast during the daylight hours, so after breaking his fast at sunset, Mullah Fazel gathered some of his toughest commanders in a convoy of twenty vehicles and set out westward across the desert, journeying deep behind enemy lines.

  One of the thorniest issues Mullah Fazel had to negotiate was what to do with the hundreds of foreign fighters, which included some diehard al Qaeda members, under his command. Some of them were demanding safe passage overland to Pakistan. Others were vowing to fight to the death. The Taliban had already approached the United Nations to assist with the repatriation of the foreigners to their home countries, but the UN was quick to decline. Pakistan, for its part, called for the protection of the foreigners not least because there were still hundreds of Pakistanis among them. Afghan leaders wanted them expelled from Afghanistan. The United States, with only small military teams on the ground, was in no position to manage a mass surrender of foreign fighters. It would take a month for the Pentagon to send in a force to screen the prisoners and transfer them out of the country.

  The air at the meeting was redolent with hostility. Atta Mohammad distrusted Dostum and disagreed with any deal that was not complete surrender of the Taliban. The Hazara leader, Mohammad Mohaqiq, did not speak during the two hours of discussions. “I was there to bear witness because I hate them because they killed so many Hazaras,” Mohaqiq told me later. “I was not happy to be there. Looking at their faces they were a strange type of species,” he said. The American bombing had forced them to surrender, he said. “They looked tired and humbled. They were almost finished.”5

  The talk focused on arranging a ceasefire and guarantees for the Taliban to surrender peacefully and give up their weapons. Close to midnight, General Dostum called in the reporters who had been waiting outside to hear Mullah Fazel announce his surrender. As we crowded in, I had to climb onto a sofa for a view. The elders and commanders were ranged on sofas and armchairs, Dostum and Mullah Fazel at the center. I recognized two of the mediators, Pashtun tribal commanders, wearing stiffly tied, long-tailed silk turbans to honor the occasion, on a couch between the two parties. One or two of the American special forces team stood against the wall, watching. Dostum prompted the camera-shy mullah to answer questions for the cameras. Mullah Fazel said they had reached an agreement to end the fighting, and the two men shook hands. The settlement included all foreign fighters. “They are all under my command and they will all surrender,” he said. “They will accept my word.”

  Dostum spoke of the twenty-five years of war that had pitted men against each other in every village, city, province, and tribe. “We should not wash blood with blood, we should wash blood with water,” Dostum said. “We must stop the interference of foreign people in our country. We must rebuild our country after so much strife.” That was a reference to both al Qaeda and Pakistan.

  The journalists were dismissed, and the discussions among the leaders continued until dawn. The stakes were high. One of Dostum’s rivals claimed that Mullah Fazel had offered Dostum half a million dollars to help him and his closest commanders get away safely. For his troops Mullah Fazel wanted an amnesty, and in return for surrendering their weapons and vehicles, safe passage to southern Afghanistan. He was also pragmatic enough to offer to cooperate with the Americans. According to one of the mediators, he agreed to help catch bin Laden if he was given his freedom to return to southern Afghanistan. Mullah Fazel said he knew two of bin Laden’s aides well and could track him down through them. He swore he would catch the “rat” for destroying Afghanistan. He also offered to negotiate a peaceful surrender of the last southern provinces.6 Distrust ran high. No one took him up on the offer.

  As dawn broke, Mullah Fazel drove back across the desert to Kunduz and did as he had promised. He made a speech to his followers and told them the fight was over. They were to hand over their weapons and would be allowed to go home. A group of Arabs refused to accept Mullah Fazel’s orders and began to argue. Some of the foreign fighters, Muslims from Central Asia, Russia, and China, were escaping persecution or arrest and did not want to risk being captured and deported back to their home countries. The Pakistanis feared retribution from Dostum’s militias and the North
ern Alliance. The Arabs, from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen, and Iraq, were the most ideologically committed jihadists and wanted to fight to the death. Above all, they did not want to be handed over to the Americans. The argument escalated, and as they leveled threats at Mullah Fazel, his bodyguards drew their weapons and shot some of the Arabs dead.7

  That ended the discussion. In the days that followed, Mullah Fazel kept his word and delivered thousands of Taliban and foreign fighters into the hands of the United Front. The mechanics of the surrender, the logistics of disarming and transporting a force of thousands of fighters, proved fatefully difficult and dangerous.

  Two days after the meeting, a colleague and I were driving out of Mazar-i-Sharif when we ran into a mass of black turbans. Hundreds of armed fighters were sitting on their haunches in the desert, at the city gates. They were foreign fighters: Arabs, Pakistanis, and Central Asians, dressed like the Taliban, with heavy black silk turbans and eyes ringed with kohl. Their eyes followed us as we turned around and beat a retreat. They had pitched up at dawn on foot, without warning, the Northern Alliance guards told us. They said they had walked through the night and had come to give themselves up to the chief mediator, the Pashtun tribal elder Amir Jan Naseri. They had been told to hand in their weapons and that they would be allowed to continue on to Kandahar, so they sat down in ranks in the desert to wait. The fighters’ arrival caught the United Front by surprise and made them and their American allies suspect a plot to retake the city.

  Just a day earlier, the United Front had received intelligence that Mullah Omar had announced his forces would soon retake one of Afghanistan’s cities. One of the most powerful Taliban commanders, Mullah Dadullah, had already split away from Mullah Fazel’s convoy and was lodging at Amir Jan’s home northwest of the city. The United Front was on alert for an attack.

  The fighters sat silent in the desert most of the day as Dostum’s forces worked out what to do with them. Extra troops arrived to stand guard. An American special forces team came to watch. It was midafternoon when Dostum turned up, and his guards began disarming the foreign fighters and taking them off in trucks to the fort of Qala-i-Janghi, the only place nearby secure enough to hold so many people. At this point, it became clear to the foreigners that they were being treated as prisoners. As Dostum’s men searched the foreign fighters, they found and confiscated large sums of money, credit cards, and cell phones. The fighters gave up their weapons and climbed into cattle trucks, but their faces were sullen as they looked out at a growing crowd of northern fighters.

  I approached one of the trucks and talked to a Pakistani Talib, looking down unhappily at the crowd. “We did not come to surrender,” he said to me in English. They had been told they would be sent home, he said. It was nearing the end of the day by the time the last ones were loaded and driven away. Everyone was weary from fasting all day.

  When they arrived at the fort, one of the prisoners rushed at the police chief supervising the operation and set off a grenade in a suicide attack, killing the police chief and two others. Then a group of Arabs blew themselves up in an outbuilding. It was growing dark, and the police were rushing to finish the job, so they locked the prisoners in the basement of a concrete building for the night. The next morning they began a more thorough search of the prisoners, bringing them up one by one from the basement, removing their black turbans, and tying their arms with the long material of the turbans. An intelligence official filmed the process as the police placed the prisoners on their knees in rows, in the grassy area of the inner courtyard. Several hundred Taliban prisoners—Pakistanis, Arabs, North Africans, and some with embroidered caps from Central Asia—were led out. An American agent, Johnny Micheal Spann, and his tall colleague Dave crouched on the grass over to one side, interviewing a prisoner. The cameraman was filming General Dostum’s officials questioning prisoners at the entrance to the building when several prisoners burst up the stairs and charged the guards. Within seconds, they had seized weapons and gunned down several guards, along with Agent Spann. His colleague Dave fought off his attackers, shooting one man who jumped on him, and fell back with Dostum’s guards as they sprayed automatic gunfire across the yard.

  A running battle spread. Prisoners rushed the gatehouse and headquarters building where Red Cross officials were meeting with Dostum’s officials. Dave burst onto the roof of the building and borrowed a German journalist’s satellite telephone to call for help. In those first moments, Dostum’s men nearly lost control of the fort as prisoners ransacked the arsenal and took up firing positions on rooftops and walls. Over thirty prisoners were killed where they knelt in the grass. Several days later we found them lying on the open ground, their arms still tied behind their backs.

  The battle raged for five days and left hundreds dead. Every day, we reporters would drive out to the fort and dash across the fields to the base of the mud walls where we hunkered down with Dostum’s soldiers listening to bullets zinging overhead. Dostum rushed in reinforcements. British and American special forces joined in the fight, pumping machine-gun fire down from the battlements into the inner courtyards where the Taliban fighters took cover in ditches and outbuildings. The Taliban fired mortars and rockets over the fortress walls into the surrounding fields. American troops called in airstrikes—hitting their own side, killing two American soldiers and a number of Afghans and leaving a gaping hole in the fortress wall. The Taliban dug foxholes and hid in basements and stables, while Dostum’s men, cut off from their arms store, ran out of ammunition and had to beg other commanders in the United Front to come to their aid.

  A steady stream of dead and wounded United Front soldiers were carried away from the fort. During a lull, Dostum’s soldiers ventured over the walls and down a sloping ramp into the inner courtyard, only to get caught and nearly surrounded by Taliban fighters in foxholes. “They are fighting with every kind of weapon,” said one soldier. “When we shouted at them, they would not listen. They said, ‘You are Americans, and we will not surrender to you.’”

  On the fifth day, Dostum’s men drove their only tank into the fort, blasted several buildings at point-blank range, and claimed victory. As they cleared the buildings, they let journalists in to see the damage. The shell-pocked fort was still smoldering from the battle. The air smelt of brick dust, cordite, and decomposing bodies. Dead and wounded horses, part of Dostum’s cavalry, created a scene of medieval carnage. Afghans were stepping over dozens of unexploded mortars. I counted 150 Taliban lying dead inside the compound. A large number seemed to be Pakistanis, poorly dressed in the national attire of baggy pants and long shirts, cheap jackets and tennis shoes. They were young and bearded, their faces blank in death. Soldiers searched their pockets—one had a small plastic bag of rice. A dozen foreigners with wispy beards and smooth cheeks lay dead near the bombed-out kitchen buildings. They wore military fatigues under their Pakistani baggy pants, and good quality fleeces and sweatshirts. One had a Dolce & Gabbana black fleece top, another a San Francisco 49ers sweatshirt. Some had bullets in their pockets and small cotton sachets of gunpowder filings.

  Another group of fighters, probably killed in one of the American airstrikes, lay hurled around a crater in the ground. Trees were splintered by shrapnel, and several more dead lay beside a battery of rockets. Inside an outbuilding, which turned out to be a stable, I found a group of Arabs dead in a circle. It looked like the group suicide bombing that happened the first night. Others had died by the gatehouse, trying to escape. They carried books in Arabic. “Trust in Islam and there will be life after death,” read one small pocket prayer book. “There was no way to make them surrender,” said a plainclothes policeman as he walked through the wreckage. “And if we could have made them surrender, they would have started another fight.”

  Dostum arrived to survey the battle damage that afternoon. He explained the high number of dead in his usual monosyllabic growl: “It was war.” At his headquarters, sitting on the balcony amid rubble and brick dust, he said he had lost thr
ee of his best commanders and thirty men in the five days of fighting. Three of the dead came from one family. More than two hundred United Front soldiers were wounded. “We tried to treat the prisoners humanely, and they took advantage,” he said. “I gave orders for them to be allowed to wash and pray, but they attacked us.” Later he brought along the two Taliban leaders, Mullah Fazel and Mullah Noori, who had negotiated surrender. The two men made no comment as they looked upon the carnage. Mullah Noori moved his lips in prayer. Mullah Fazel’s face was impassive under his heavy black turban.

  Yet even then, after nearly a week, the battle was not over. There were survivors still alive in the basement, shooting at anyone who ventured down the stairs. The commander at the scene, Haji Din Mohammad, said he thought there were maybe just one or two left alive down there, so he tried to smoke them out. Then he fired rockets into the basement. Finally, he diverted icy water from an irrigation channel down upon them. As the water crept up to their waists and the dead floated among them, some of the remaining fighters realized they would not survive the cold if they stayed in the flooded bunker. Others still argued against surrendering, but at 10 o’clock that night, a dozen Pakistanis and one Afghan crept up the stairs and called out to Dostum’s guards, who let the group out and locked them in a metal container for the night.