Taliban prisoners glory in attacks

Defiant Taliban prisoners glory in Islamist attacks. In a remote jail, Arab fighters tell how they joined a war far from home
The only access to the remote mountain prison of Borak is along a serpentine dirt track teetering perilously above the rushing waters of the river Panjsheer.

The river needs to be forded and a corrugated iron bridge scaled and crossed, before a slight climb leads to the squat fortress - perched between forbidding mountains - where 300 Taliban fighters are imprisoned.

In a scene that could have been witnessed a millennium ago, the shuffling column of prisoners yesterday loaded huge logs on to their shoulders, clambered, bent double, on to the bridge, and carried the firewood up to the jail, built four months ago to house the PoWs.

Clamped in leg irons, forced to spend his days standing in a stuffy mud-and-straw prison room, one young prisoner described the journey that brought him to this Northern Alliance jail, in the mountains north-east of Kabul. As a teenager in the northern Yemeni town of Saada, Abdurahman yearned to fight for Islam. At 17 he ran away from home in search of lessons in warfare and terrorism, an odyssey that would take him to war for the Taliban in Afghanistan.

His parents had no idea where he had got to. From his home town near the Saudi border, he headed up the Gulf into Pakistan, then across the border to join hundreds of militants at a training camp in Khost in south-east Afghanistan.

He spent a few months there undergoing training in what another graduate of the Khost camp described as "terrorism, partisan, intelligence, and actions".

"We were trained by Arabs from Saudi," Abdurahman said. Deemed fit for the holy war, he was sent to the frontlines of the Kabul region where the ascendant Taliban warriors were consolidating their grip on the Afghan capital in 1997 and expelling opposition forces. "I came for war," Abdurahman said with a serene smile.

But his career as a warrior lasted a mere three months before he was captured by the retreating forces of the Northern Alliance. "Three of us were captured. Two from Yemen and one from Sudan."

Yesterday the slight 22-year-old with a wispy beard and an angel face remained confined in a two-man cell in the Panjsheer Valley jail, alongside another 299 Taliban prisoners of war.

"I don't know why I'm in this cell," he shrugged after 10 days of sharing the seven feet by four feet space with Ala, a 23-year-old Iraqi from Baghdad who was caught reconnoitring Northern Alliance arms stockpiles three months ago.

One of his jailers, Amin, explained that the Yemeni and three Iraqis - two of them Kurds - were clapped in irons and confined to the two-man cells in the days that followed the atrocities in New York and Washington on September 11.

"They might belong to Osama bin Laden," said Amin.

Abdurahman was less than upset by the speculation.

"Maybe our leader is connected with Osama," he said. "Osama is an Islamic hero for us."

Of the 300 Taliban prisoners held here, 21 of them are non-Afghans from Pakistan, the Arab world, China and Burma - confirming the opposition leadership in their conviction that the Afghan civil war is not homegrown, but fanned by Islamist fanatics in Pakistan and Arabs in the Gulf.

The foreign prisoners do not disagree with their jailers, asserting that theirs is a pan-Islamist movement, and that Afghanistan has to be conquered totally in order to advance the cause into the fragile Muslim states of post-Soviet central Asia.

Squatting on the carpets of a room crammed with around 40 captives, shoes, bags, and canisters hanging from the wooden ceiling, Salahuddin Khaled lucidly explained why he was in a foreign country.

"We want to make an Islamic government and an Islamic centre in Afghanistan," said the bearded 27-year-old from Baluchistan province in Pakistan. "We will fight till this war ends. First we will make Afghanistan an Islamic centre and then if central Asia wants it, we will help them."

Also captured in Kabul five years ago, the bespectacled fighter spends his days seeking absolution and praying "morning, noon, and night". There were no complaints of mistreatment. If Abdurahman had irons around his ankles, he still sported a chronograph watch on his right wrist. And if the conditions are spartan, they are considerably better than those at the tent camps of refugees from Taliban territory which have sprouted up along the valley floor.

For the inmates, the years in jail have done nothing to dull their missionary zeal. Nor are they in the dark about the world outside, despite the remote location and their isolation.

Asked about New York, Salahuddin Khaled instantly retorted: "You mean the World Trade Centre?"

His studious features broke into a broad smile. His eyes gleamed. And he proclaimed his dedication to terrorism even if it meant suicide.

"Death is not a danger. There is no pain in death," he said quietly. "When I go for a terrorist action, if there's no other way for me to die, I'll do that. I'm not afraid of it."

"Our target was political men and professors and military men," he said of the US attacks. "That action is very big, important for America government. Therefore we did that action ... America is our enemy but we can't fight with America face-by-face. So we fight a terrorist and a guerrilla war."

He, too, trained for several months in Khost in south-east Afghanistan and then conducted training for new recruits himself as a proud devotee of the Herakat-ul-Mujahideen fundamentalist organisation based in Pakistan. "My organisation helps the Taliban, fights for the Taliban."

He said 400 fighters had entered Afghanistan from Pakistan in 1996, the year the Taliban took Kabul.

Now the Islamabad-based organisation has 4,000 men in Afghanistan, with headquarters in Kandahar in the south which is also the Taliban headquarters, and with many men in Kabul and in Kunduz in the north.

"Ours is a big organisation," he added. "We have links with Osama. We help al-Qaida with all means ... If the Americans come to Afghanistan, we will fight them. I go to fight wherever my commander tells me."

Ala, by contrast, was not fighting but spying.

The baby-faced 23-year-old from Baghdad was following orders from his guerrilla leader, Abdullah, an Iraqi fundamentalist currently based in the Taliban stronghold of Mazar-i-Sharif in the north, before being captured a few months ago.

"I came to Panjsheer to spy near the airport, to see the weapons stocks. And when we're finished here, we are moving on to Tajikistan and central Asia."

After years of no family contact, the International Red Cross recently located Abdurahman at the Borak jail and brought him a letter from his parents in Yemen.

"They are unhappy I'm in jail," he said. "But they're happy I'm fighting for Islam."

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