Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

Qala mgi, west of Mazar.

“Some prisoners appear to have risen in revohiken their guards’ weapons and are putting up a fight. I think I should have a look.“ Sii Marines were chosen, and two Land Rovers allocated and fueled-they were about to leave, Martin asked, “Mind if I tag along. You might be able to use an interpreter.”

CO of the small SBS unit was a Marine captain. Martin was a Colonel. There was no objection. Martin boarded the second vehia.ieside the driver. Behind him, two Marines crouched over the calibre machine gun. They headed north on the six-hour drive trough the Salang Pass, to the northern plains and the city of Mazrind the fort of Qala-i-Jangi.

Tkaact incident that triggered the massacre of the prisoners at Qala angi was disputed at the time, and will remain so. But there are cccpelling clues. The Western media, never shy of getting something completely wrong persistently called the prisoners “Taliban.” They were the oppe-‘i. They were, in fact, with the exception of the six Afghans included by accident, the defeated army of Al Qaeda. As such, they had come to Afghanistan specifically to pursue jihad-to fight and to die. What were trucked west from Kunduz were the six hundred most dangerous men in Asia.

You met them at Qala were one hundred partly trained Uzbeks unde::desperately incompetent commander. Rashid Dostum himself k-away; in charge was his deputy, Sayid Kamel.

Among the six hundred were about sixty of three non-Arab categories. There were Chechens, who, suspecting back at Kunduz that being selected for shipment to the Russians was a recipe for death, avoided the cull. There were anti-Tashkent Uzbeks who had also figured out that only a miserable death awaited them back in Uzbekistan and hid themselves. And there were Pakistanis who wrongly avoided repatriation to Pakistan, where they would have been set free. The rest were Arabs. They were, unlike many of the Taliban left i behind at Kunduz, volunteers, not pressed men. They were all ultra-fanatical. They had all been through the AQ training camps; they knew how to fight with ferocity and skill. And they had little desire to live. All they asked of Allah was the chance to take a few Westerners or friends of Westerners with them and thus die a shahid, a martyr.

The fort of Qala is not constructed like a Western fort. It is a huge, ten-acre compound with open spaces, trees and one-story buildings. The whole area is enclosed by a fifty-foot wall, but each side is sloped so that a climber can scramble up the ramp and peer over the parapet at the top. This thick wall plays host to a labyrinth of barracks, stores and passages, with another maze of tunnels and cellars beneath them. The Uzbeks had only captured it ten days earlier and seemed not to know that there was a Taliban armory and magazine stored at the southern end. That was where they shooed the prisoners. At Kunduz, the captives had been relieved of their rifles and RPGs, but no one had done a body search. Had the prisoners been frisked, the captors would have realized almost every man had a grenade or two hidden inside his robes. That was how they arrived in the motorcade at Qala-i-Jangi. The first hint came on the Saturday night of their arrival. Izmat Khan was in the fifth truck, and heard the boom from a hundred yards away. One of the Arabs, gathering several Uzbeks around him, detonated his grenade, blowing himself and five Uzbeks to pemmi-can. Night was coming on. There were no lights. Dostum’s men decided to do body searches the next morning. They herded the prisoners into the compound without food or water and left them, squatting on the ground, surrounded by armed, already-nervous guards.

At dawn, the searches began. The prisoners, still docile in their battle fatigue, allowed their hands to be tied behind them. As there were no ropes, the Uzbeks used the prisoners’ turbans. But turbans are not ropes. One by one the prisoners were hauled upright to be frisked. Out came handguns, grenades-and money. As the money piled up, it was taken away to a side room by Sayid Kamel and his deputy. An Uzbek soldier, peering through the window a little later, saw the two men pocketing the lot. The soldier entered to protest, and was told in no uncertain terms to get lost. But he came back with a rifle. There were two prisoners who saw this and had worked their hands free. They entered the room after the soldier, seized the rifle and used its butt to beat all three Uzbeks to death. As there had been no shooting, nothing was noticed, but the compound was becoming a powder keg.

The Americans from the CIA, Johnny “Mike” Spann and Dave Tyson, had entered the area, and Spann began a series of interrogations right out in the open. He was surrounded by six hundred fanatics whose only ambition before going to Allah was to kill an American. Then some Uzbek guard saw the armed Arab and yelled a warning. The Arab fired and killed him. The powder keg went off. Izmat Khan was squatting on the dirt waiting for his turn. Like the others, he had worked his hands free. As the shot Uzbek soldier fell, others atop the walls opened up with machine guns. The slaughter had begun. Over a hundred prisoners died in the dirt with bound hands, and were found that way when it was finally safe for the UN observers to enter. Others untied their neighbors’ hands so that they could fight. Izmat Khan led a group of others, including his five fellow Afghans, in a dodging, weaving run through the trees to the south wall, where he knew the armory was from a previous visit when the fort was in Taliban hands.

Twenty Arabs nearest to Mike Spann fell on him and beat him to death with fists and feet. Dave Tyson emptied his handgun into the mob, killed three, heard the click of hammer on empty chamber and was lucky to make the main gate just in time.

Within ten minutes, the open compound was empty except for the corpses, or the wounded who cried out until they died. The Uzbeks were now outside the wall, the main gate was slammed and the prisoners were inside. The siege had begun; it would last six days, and no one was even interested in taking prisoners. Each side was convinced the other had broken the terms of surrender, but by then it did not matter anymore.

The armory door was quickly shattered and the treasure trove distributed. There was enough for a small army and masses of re-supply for only five hundred men. They had rifles, grenades, launchers, RPGs and mortars. Taking what they could, they fanned out through the tunnels and passages until they owned the fortress. Every time an Uzbek outside put his head over the parapet, an Arab, firing through a slit from across the compound, took a shot. Dostum’s men had no choice but to call for help, urgently. It came in the form of hundreds more Uzbeks sent by General Dostum, who hurried toward Qala-i-Jangi. Also on their way were American Green Berets, four men from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, one U.S. Air Force man to assist in air coordination and six from the ioth Mountain Division. Basically, their job was to observe, report and call in air strikes to break the resistance.

By midmorning, coming up from Bagram base north of the recently captured capital of Kabul were two long-base Land Rovers bearing six British Special Forces from the Special Boat Squadron (SBS) and an interpreter, Lieutenant Colonel Mike Martin of the SAS.

Tuesday saw the Uzbek counterattack taking shape. Shielded by their simple tank, they reentered the compound and began to pound the rebel positions. Izmat Khan had been recognized as a senior commander and given charge of one wing of the south face. When the tank opened up, he ordered his men into the cellars. When the bombardment stopped, they came back up again. He knew it was only a matter of time. There was no way out, and no chance for mercy. Not that he wanted it. He had finally, at the age of twenty-nine, found the place he was going to die, and it was as good as any other. Tuesday also saw the arrival of the U.S. strike aircraft. The four Green Berets and the airman were lying just outside the parapet at the top of the external ramp, plotting targets for the fighter-bombers. Thirty strikes took place that day, and twenty-eight of them slammed into the masonry inside which the rebels were hiding, killing about a hundred of them, largely by rockfalls. Two bombs were not so good. Mike Martin was down the wall from the Green Berets, about a hundred yards from them, when the first bomb went amiss. It landed right in the middle of the circle formed by the five Americans. If it had been a contact-fused antipersonnel bomb, they would have been shredded. The fact that all survived with shattered eardrums and some bone breaks was in itself a miracle.