"I was one of the Taliban's torturers: I
crucified people"
(Filed: 30/09/2001)
In an astonishing interview with Christina Lamb,
the Afghan leader's former bodyguard reveals the
full brutality of the fundamentalist regime
sheltering Osama bin Laden
"YOU must become so notorious for bad things that
when you come into an area people will tremble in
their sandals. Anyone can do beatings and starve
people. I want your unit to find new ways of torture
so terrible that the screams will frighten even crows
from their nests and if the person survives he will
never again have a night's sleep."
These were the instructions of the commandant of
the Afghan secret police to his new recruits. For
more than three years one of those recruits, Hafiz
Sadiqulla Hassani, ruthlessly carried out his orders.
But sickened by the atrocities that he was forced to
commit, last week he defected to Pakistan, joining a
growing number of Taliban officials who are escaping
across the border.
In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, he
reveals for the first time the full horror of what has
been happening in the name of religion in
Afghanistan. Mr Hassani has the pinched face and
restless hands of a man whose night hours are as
haunted as any of his victims. Now aged 30, he does
not, however, fit the militant Islamic stereotype
usually associated with the Taliban.
Married with a wife and one-year-old daughter, he
holds a degree in business studies, having been
educated in Pakistan, where he grew up as a
refugee while his father and elder brothers fought in
the jihad against the Russians. His family was well
off, owning land and property in Kandahar to which
they returned after the war.
"Like many people, I did not become a Talib by
choice," he explained. "In early 1998 I was working
as an accountant here in Quetta when I heard that
my grandfather - who was 85 - had been arrested
by the Taliban in Kandahar and was being badly
beaten. They would only release him if he provided a
member of his family as a conscript, so I had to go."
Mr Hassani at first was impressed by the Taliban. "It
had been a crazy situation after the Russians left,
the country was divided by warring groups all
fighting each other. In Kandahar warlords were
selling everything, kidnapping young girls and boys,
robbing people, and the Taliban seemed like good
people who brought law and order."
So he became a Taliban "volunteer", assigned to the
secret police. Many of his friends also joined up as
land owners in Kandahar were threatened that they
must either ally themselves with the Taliban or lose
their property. Others were bribed to join with
money given to the Taliban by drug smugglers, as
Afghanistan became the world's largest producer of
heroin.
At first, Mr Hassani's job was to patrol the streets at
night looking for thieves and signs of subversion.
However, as the Taliban leadership began issuing
more and more extreme edicts, his duties changed.
Instead of just searching for criminals, the night
patrols were instructed to seek out people watching
videos, playing cards or, bizarrely, keeping caged
birds. Men without long enough beards were to be
arrested, as was any woman who dared venture
outside her house. Even owning a kite became a
criminal offence.
The state of terror spread by the Taliban was so
pervasive that it began to seem as if the whole
country was spying on each other. "As we drove
around at night with our guns, local people would
come to us and say there's someone watching a
video in this house or some men playing cards in
that house," he said.
"Basically any form of pleasure was outlawed," Mr
Hassani said, "and if we found people doing any of
these things we would beat them with staves
soaked in water - like a knife cutting through meat -
until the room ran with their blood or their spines
snapped. Then we would leave them with no food or
water in rooms filled with insects until they died.
"We always tried to do different things: we would
put some of them standing on their heads to sleep,
hang others upside down with their legs tied
together. We would stretch the arms out of others
and nail them to posts like crucifixions.
"Sometimes we would throw bread to them to make
them crawl. Then I would write the report to our
commanding officer so he could see how innovative
we had been."
Here, sitting in the stillness of an orchard in Quetta
sipping tea as the sun goes down, he finds it hard
to explain how he could have done such things. "We
Afghans have grown too used to violence," is all he
can offer. "We have lost 1.5 million people. All of us
have brothers and fathers up there."
After Kandahar, he was put in charge of secret
police cells in the towns of Ghazni and then Herat, a
beautiful Persian city in western Afghanistan that
had suffered greatly during the Soviet occupation
and had been one of the last places to fall to the
Taliban.
Herat had always been a relatively liberal place
where women would dance at weddings and many
girls went to school - but the Taliban were
determined to put an end to all that. Mr Hassani and
his men were told to be particularly cruel to Heratis.
It was his experience of that cruelty that made Mr
Hassani determined to let the world know what was
happening in Afghanistan. "Maybe the worst thing I
saw," he said, "was a man beaten so much, such a
pulp of skin and blood, that it was impossible to tell
whether he had clothes on or not. Every time he fell
unconscious, we rubbed salt into his wounds to
make him scream.
"Nowhere else in the world has such barbarity and
cruelty as in Afghanistan. At that time I swore an
oath that I will devote myself to the Afghan people
and telling the world what is happening."
Before he could escape, however, because he
comes from the same tribe, he spent time as a
bodyguard for Mullah Omar, the reclusive spiritual
leader of the Taliban.
"He's medium height, slightly fat, with an artificial
green eye which doesn't move, and he would sit on
a bed issuing instructions and giving people dollars
from a tin trunk," said Mr Hassani. "He doesn't say
much, which is just as well as he's a very stupid
man. He knows only how to write his name `Omar'
and sign it.
"It is the first time in Afghanistan's history that the
lower classes are governing and by force. There are
no educated people in this administration - they are
all totally backward and illiterate.
"They have no idea of the history of the country and
although they call themselves mullahs they have no
idea of Islam. Nowhere does it say men must have
beards or women cannot be educated; in fact, the
Koran says people must seek education."
He became convinced that the Taliban were not
really in control. "We laughed when we heard the
Americans asking Mullah Omar to hand over Osama
bin Laden," he said. "The Americans are crazy. It is
Osama bin Laden who can hand over Mullah Omar -
not the other way round."
While stationed in Kandahar, he often saw bin
Laden in a convoy of Toyota Land Cruisers all with
darkened windows and festooned with radio
antennae. "They would whizz through the town,
seven or eight cars at a time. His guards were all
Arabs and very tall people, or Sudanese with curly
hair."
He was also on guard once when bin Laden joined
Mullah Omar for a bird shoot on his estate. "They
seemed to get on well," he said. "They would go
fishing together, too - with hand grenades."
The Arabs, according to Mr Hassani, have taken de
facto control of his country. "All the important places
of Kandahar are now under Arab control - the
airport, the military courts, the tank command."
Twice he attended Taliban training camps and on
both occasions they were run by Arabs as well as
Pakistanis. "The first one I went to lasted 10 days in
the Yellow Desert in Helmand province, a place
where the Saudi princes used to hunt, so it has its
own airport.
It was incredibly well guarded and there were many
Pakistanis there, both students from religious
schools and military instructors. The Taliban is full of
Pakistanis."
He was told that if he died while fighting under the
white flag of the Taliban, he and his family would go
to paradise. The soldiers were given blank marriage
certificates signed by a mullah and were encouraged
to "take wives" during battle, basically a licence to
rape.
When Mr Hassani was sent to the front line in
Bagram, north of Kabul, a few months ago, he saw a
chance to escape. "Our line was attacked by the
Northern Alliance and they almost defeated us. Many
of my friends were killed and we didn't know who
was fighting who; there was killing from behind and
in front. Our commanders fled in cars leaving us
behind.
"We left, running all night but then came to a line of
Arabs who arrested us and took us back to the front
line. One night last month I was on watch and saw a
truck full of sheep and goats, so I jumped in and
escaped.
"I got back to Kandahar but Taliban spies saw me
and I was arrested and interrogated. Luckily I have
relatives who are high ranking Taliban members so
they helped me get out and eventually I escaped to
Quetta to my wife and daughter.
"I think many in the Taliban would like to escape.
The country is starving and joining is the only way to
get food and keep your land. Otherwise there is a
lot of hatred. I hate both what it does and what it
turned me into."
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