Are these two stories disinformation? Read on:
nationalpost.com
'Foreign Legion' of Muslims Taliban's toughest fighters
Estimated 12,000 from around world on Afghan front lines
Stewart Bell
National Post
DASHT-E QALA, AFGHANISTAN - At night on the front, when the shelling subsides and the temperature drops, the Northern Alliance soldiers leave their trenches to eat rice and beans and lay their sleeping bags in caves dug out of the hillsides. They switch on their radios and listen to the Taliban across the valley talking among themselves.
But often the Taliban radio chatter is in languages the rebels don't recognize -- Arabic, Urdu or Russian.
"I talk with them, but suddenly they start using their own language and I cannot understand," said a teenage rebel at the hilltop command post at Puza Pulkhumry, a heavy machine gun slung over his shoulder and a walkie-talkie in his hand.
The troops opposite are the Taliban "Foreign Legion" -- Muslims from surrounding Central Asian countries fighting what they believe is a holy war in defence of their radical religious beliefs.
About one-quarter of the soldiers protecting the ruling Taliban regime are non-Afghans. Most are Pakistani. But there are also brigades of Saudis, Chechens and Islamic guerrillas from western China and the neighbouring former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Filipinos and Indonesians are said to have joined the Taliban ranks, and a British citizen of Pakistani origin was captured by the Northern Alliance rebels. Pakistanis are among the prisoners of war being held in the military jail in Khojabhuddin, about 25 kilometres from the combat zone.
"They are the people of Osama bin Laden," complained Mullah Nazamudeen, a Muslim priest from the village of Imamsahib, overrun by the Taliban last year. He now lives in a crowded refugee camp where people sleep in tents made of sticks and yellow plastic bags that once contained food aid dropped by U.S. planes.
After the Taliban captured his village, Mr. Nazamudeen said, they burned homes, shot children and raped and killed women. He was beaten with a cable for telling his followers to resist the Taliban, but escaped with several women widowed in the killing spree. "A lot" of the invaders were Pakistanis and Arabs, he said. "They want to get Afghanistan."
U.S. B-52s returned to the skies over the front lines yesterday, targeting troops commanded by Juma Namangani, leader of an Islamic terrorist group from neighbouring Uzbekistan. His front-line bunkers are said to be manned by 2,000 Pakistanis and Arabs.
"The positions the Americans bombed, they are all foreign Taliban," said Baryali Khan, vice-minister of defence for the Northern Alliance. Foreign militants began converging in Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviets, who seized the country in 1979. Viewing Moscow's actions as an attack on Islam, the outsiders helped native mujahedeen guerrillas fight what they considered a jihad, or holy war.
Thousands of idealistic young Muslims from such countries as Egypt, Algeria and Saudi Arabia fought alongside the Afghan mujahedeen and succeeded in expelling the Russians by 1989.
Many of the foreigners returned home to ignite radical Islamic terrorist movements in their own countries.
The foreign presence began to grow again in 1995, when the fundamentalist Taliban seized power in Kabul, making up what is sometimes called the "jihadi foreign legion." There are now 8,000 to 12,000 foreign combatants protecting the Taliban. The Taliban have an estimated 40,000 to 45,000 troops altogether.
"Today's foreign combatants are more numerous than before," according to a report published by Jane's World Armies. "They are also better organized, and in many cases better equipped with heavier weaponry ... Operating at the centre of a global network of radical Islamists, they are evidently ideologically more focused than their counterparts in the 1980s."
About 5,000 to 7,000 of the Taliban troops are Pakistanis, many of them ethnic Pashtuns, like the Taliban leadership.
They include youths recruited from religious schools in Pakistan and volunteers from militant Pakistani groups such as the Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen.
The U.S.-led campaign to unseat the Taliban for safeguarding bin Laden, whose organization is blamed for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, may have swelled those numbers.
Thousands of armed Pakistanis were stopped at the border recently as they tried to enter Afghanistan to join the Taliban army.
Arabs account for up to 3,000 members of the Taliban armed forces, and that figure is said to have grown in recent months. Most are loyal to, and financed by, bin Laden, a Saudi. "Generally, Arab units are deployed in an infantry role armed with nothing heavier than rocket-propelled grenades, PK machine guns and mortars," the Jane's report said. "They are, however, widely recognized as currently the most aggressive and committed fighters in Taliban ranks."
Afghanistan has granted sanctuary not only to bin Laden but to virtually every radical Islamic terrorist movement in the world. There is at least one unit of Chechens -- veterans of the war against Russian forces in Chechnya -- said to be fighting near Mazar-e Sharif.
Northern Alliance rebels here like to point out that the United States is a newcomer to the war on terrorism declared in September by George W. Bush, the U.S. President. The rebels have been fighting terrorists in the Afghan hills for more than five years.
Because of their devotion to the cause, the foreigners often occupy the front-line Taliban positions. They are considered less likely than the Afghans to defect to the rebels and are frequently employed as battle police, ensuring that the less fanatical native Afghans do not desert.
But the tactic of employing foreign soldiers may yet backfire.
Rebel commanders said native Afghans within the Taliban have vowed that, once the Northern Alliance attacks, they will attack the Pakistanis and Arabs from the rear and defect to the rebels.
______________________________
Taliban turns doctors into killers
Atrocities in Afghanistan: Opponents of regime are used as human blood banks, army surgeon says
Stewart Bell
National Post
DASHT-E QALA, AFGHANISTAN - The Taliban has committed so many atrocities during its five-year reign in Kabul that Afghans seem almost resigned, but even veteran military surgeon Mohammad Atiq was shocked to discover government opponents were being used as human blood banks.
Dr. Atiq, an army surgeon who runs the Dasht-e Qala field hospital -- a dirty canvas tent surrounded by mud walls -- says he has examined the bodies of civilians and prisoners of war who had died after Taliban doctors removed large quantities of blood from their bodies.
This brutal method of execution serves the dual purpose of killing government foes while keeping hospitals stocked with the blood needed to treat soldiers wounded in action.
"I saw four or five people like this," says Dr. Atiq, whose mobile clinic treats critically injured civilians and Northern Alliance rebels wounded by the daily shelling and gunfire at the front line a few kilometres away.
The Taliban keeps its victims alive for days, drawing their blood with a syringe every 24 hours until they succumb, he says. The blood is extracted by doctors on the orders of Taliban military officers. "They are army doctors and they make them do this by force," he says.
Dr. Atiq says further evidence came from a patient who had witnessed the practice and a prisoner who escaped from the city of Mazar-e Sharif. He was flown to Iran for treatment but died.
Locals have similar stories, including that of Khalil Abdul Jamil, a rebel soldier being held prisoner in the capital, Kabul. In a desperate letter to friends, Mr. Jamil told of having blood extracted and begged them to find a Taliban prisoner who could be exchanged for him.
A healthy body contains five litres of blood. One litre can be safely withdrawn, but taking two litres or more, especially in Afghanistan's harsh climate, is almost certainly fatal.
Dr. Atiq said the Taliban also has "doctor-terrorists," physicians so committed to the Taliban they willingly impose pain. He blames the Taliban's ranks of "foreigners" -- Arab and Pakistani religious zealots who see Afghanistan as the purest expression of Islam and are willing to fight to defend it. He says they give the orders.
The Taliban, which fought its way to power in 1996, is a group of radical religious students, or "talibs," who govern according to their strict interpretation of the Islamic faith. But the movement's claim to religious purity is undermined by the abuses committed by its leaders and soldiers in the name of Islam.
The regime has allowed terrorist groups to operate training camps in Afghanistan and continues to give safe haven to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization, believed to have staged the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
As well as providing a base to launch atrocities abroad, the Taliban has committed atrocities against Afghans for more than five years. Information gleaned from refugees flowing north to this rebel outpost of mud houses, battered Jeeps and camel caravans paints a chilling panorama of the horror of life under Taliban rule.
The camps are filled with women whose husbands have been killed by the Taliban. Villagers tell of girls as young as 10 being rounded up and taken away by Taliban troops. There are stories of rapes, torture, amputations and executions.
Dr. Atiq knows first-hand what it is like to live under the Taliban. He studied medicine in Kabul and was working at the military hospital there when the Talibs left their refugee camps in Pakistan, where they had developed their hardline philosophy, and overran the city, ousting the mujahedeen government.
His female boss, Dr. Suhella, with whom he had worked as chief of medicine, was forced out when the new regime confined women to their homes, banning them from going to school or working.
It imposed harsh sentences on those who violated its obscure laws, ordering their hands or feet cut off. The severed limbs were hung from trees in Kabul parks to remind people to behave, turning public gathering places into gruesome displays of amputated body parts.
After six months, Dr. Atiq slipped out of the city under the cover of darkness and walked across the front line to territory held by the Northern Alliance rebels. His wife, Adala, a teacher, and their daughter Katayoon and son Kambez joined him later. They now live in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, 100 kilometres north of this desolate post.
There are nine cots and an operating table inside his clinic, currently all empty, although that will soon change if the rebels launch their long-threatened offensive.
Dr. Atiq's bedroom nearby is made of mud, with a metal army cot and a desk, upon which sits a kerosene lantern and an antique television set powered by a car battery. A map of Afghanistan hangs on the wall, along with two photographs of the murdered rebel commander Shah Ahmed Massood.
A fluorescent tube hanging from the roof provides the only light. His stethoscope lies on his bed and his camouflage jackets hang from a nail driven into the wall.
Last year, Dr. Atiq says, he treated 1,200 patients here, injured by land mines, shelling and gunfire. He does not often see the victims of Taliban atrocities because they are almost always killed.
As the doctor explains this, a boom interrupts him. It is a rocket-launcher at the front line blasting at the Taliban troops hidden in their bunkers in the Kalalatah Hills.
"We are sure the Taliban will be finished and you will see a good future for Afghanistan," he says.
Whatever happens, his future does not lie in this wasteland of a country. He is hoping to move his family to Britain to join his brother Shafiq.
But first there is the war, and the mounting flow of sick refugees whose tents, made of sticks and grain sacks, pop up like mushrooms each morning in the camp down the road.
nationalpost.com |
