Alliance ride into Kabul as Taleban flee
thetimes.co.uk
“THE lines are breaking. They’re fleeing. Don’t let them escape,” yelled General Gul Haider into a handset as mortar bombs were launched from behind him and attack jets screamed in overhead.
From the breach at Mashine Aab a desperate, panting voice called back: “I need another 50 Mujahidin here now . . .”
The general, his wooden right leg stuck out stiffly before him, turned and waved on a group held in reserve behind him. In no time nearly 100 Mujahidin, screaming and yelling with jubilation, raced forward to the breach in the line. “See you at the gates of Kabul,” one turned back and shouted.
By dawn today, they were there. The last Taleban forces had deserted the capital and the first Northern Alliance troops had defied pleas not to take the city and ridden into the city in their Jeeps and 4x4s.
The routed Taleban fighters had been forced back by a series of stunning opposition victories and at Karabach yesterday afternoon, their defences finally melted. Most ran; some surrendered and lived; others tried to surrender and died. Some fought on and died among the wilted vines of abandoned farms.
As the Mujahidin vanguard consolidated their breach, thousands more troops followed them through the gap. They moved by whatever means they could: hanging from tanks, trucks and Jeeps, or running forward in jubilant columns.
They entered a wilderness matched by few battlefields in the past century; a wilderness that has been fought over continuously for six years and is still littered with debris from the Soviet occupation; a wilderness where American airstrikes have left lunar-sized craters amid the shattered trees, gutted villages and drought-bleached desolation.
As the tanks and men poured through, the roadside images were fittingly bleak: a one-legged Mujahidin hopping desperately to keep up with his comrades; a wounded soldier kneeling immobile in the dirt, where his friends had left him, a spreading scarlet stain seeping through the fingers clutching his belly; Taleban dead being mauled and looted; prisoners being slapped and abused; two soldiers praying.
It was not glorious, nor was it unusually ugly. It was no more, no less, than a spectre of men in war. |
