Another version, indicating reporters and Red Cross witnessed the events. Sounds realistic:
The Castle of Death
What really happened in Qalai Janghi on Sunday, and in the bloody days that followed? Justin Huggler tells the full, harrowing story
30 November 2001
news.independent.co.uk
They were still carrying the bodies out yesterday. So many of them were strewn around the old fortress. We saw one go past whose foot had been half-torn off and was hanging from his leg by a shred of flesh. The expression on the face of the dead man was so clear that it was hard to believe he was dead until you saw the gaping red hole in the side of his forehead. The stench of rotting human flesh had become overpowering; at times, it was hard to breathe. But questions remained as they cleared away the bodies of slaughtered foreign Taliban fighters believed to be loyal to Osama bin Laden.
How did US and British special forces come to be involved in the massacre of at least 150 prisoners of war – and maybe as many as 400 – who should have been protected under the Geneva Convention? In terms of numbers, Qalai Janghi could be the worst massacre to have come to light in Afghanistan since the US bombing began. Why did the US quell a prison revolt by bombing the prison from the air? Did American and British special forces call in those air strikes from the ground? And why were the Taliban prisoners allowed to get their hands on an arsenal of weapons large enough to defend the fortress for three days?
Amid the stench of death yesterday, Ghaisuddin, one of the soldiers involved in the massacre at Qalai Janghi, told the story of how the fighting began.
From his first-hand account, those of the International Red Cross workers who were present at the fort when the fighting started, and other sources who asked not to be identified, it is now possible to piece together how the massacre came about. It was, if we are to believe those accounts, an extraordinary series of blunders.
The 400 or so prisoners, among them a large number of Arabs, Pakistanis and Chechens, had surrendered after the fall of the city of Kunduz. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Taliban forces accepted the terms of a surrender apparently brokered by Mullah Fazil, the Taliban commander inside Kunduz, and gave themselves up to General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the feared Uzbek warlord, whose men marched on Kunduz from the west. Bound to one another, the prisoners were taken in pick-up trucks to Qalai Janghi, the 19th-century mud-walled fortress that Dostum had used as his headquarters after the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif to his Northern Alliance forces three weeks previously.
It was on Saturday that what started as the relatively peaceful surrender of the northern Afghan Taliban stronghold of Kunduz suddenly started to go out of control inside the fort. Before the eyes of Western reporters, two foreign Taliban prisoners, in the process of being registered by the Red Cross, detonated hand grenades, killing themselves and two senior aides to General Dostum and slightly injuring the ITN news reporter Andrea Catherwood.
It was not the first time that we had heard of bin Laden's "foreigners" committing suicide rather than be taken alive. The Northern Alliance claimed that a group of around 60 of them jumped into a river and drowned themselves. Another group were found kneeling in positions of prayer, each with a single bullet wound from behind. A Northern Alliance commander alleged that one of them had killed all of the others in a suicide pact before turning the gun on himself.
But there were always fears that the stories might have been invented to cover up Northern Alliance massacres of the foreign fighters. Nor was it the first time that surrendering Taliban had not been properly disarmed. Over the past few weeks, journalists in Afghanistan have watched repeatedly as Taliban who had surrendered were allowed to head into Northern Alliance-held towns, waving their Kalashnikovs and rocket-launchers triumphantly in the air. This time, however, defiance grew into mayhem, culminating in the scenes of trucks piled high with human bodies that we saw heading out of Qalai Janghi yesterday.
The next day, Sunday, the prisoners – many of them with their arms tied behind their backs – were being herded into a room for interrogation before two CIA agents. Did they fear retribution for the previous day's murder of the two Northern Alliance commanders? Or was it, as another account suggests, the mere sight of two Americans – from the foreign fighters' point of view, sworn enemies of bin Laden – that provoked the bloodbath that was to follow?
The incompetence of the Northern Alliance soldiers – who, guided by the US and British special forces, failed to search the prisoners properly and thus allowed them to smuggle in knives and grenades hidden in their clothes – must be seen as a key factor in the disaster. The men were also housed next to the fortress's well-stocked armoury.
Ghaisuddin says that after the two men killed themselves, the commanders in the fortress decided to search all the prisoners thoroughly. Here, two further disastrous errors of judgement came into play.
First, it appears that General Dostum, who had departed for the Kunduz front with most of his troops, had left only a small garrison to guard the prisoners in Qalai Janghi. Some sources said yesterday that there were as few as 50 men guarding up to 400 dangerous prisoners. Second, Qalai Janghi is not only a prison. The 100-year-old fort is General Dostum's main military base outside the key northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. It was, literally, an arsenal bristling with heavy-duty armaments.
On Sunday morning, a meeting at the fortress between the International Red Cross and local leaders got under way, while the prisoners were being processed. And then shots rang out. Ghaisuddin was on sentry duty at the gate to the inner courtyard when the revolt began. He says the soldiers had brought the prisoners out of the basement of the prison building, which lay in the centre of the courtyard, and into the open light in order to search them. Ghaisuddin says prisoners who had been searched and were found to be clean had their arms tied behind their backs above the elbow with their own black turbans – the state in which some of the bodies were found. "Suddenly the prisoners waiting to be searched attacked our men,'' says Ghaisuddin. "They had knives hidden in their clothes and they killed 14 of our men. We fought back, but even with a gun one man cannot fight off 40, and they just kept coming." This took place at about 11.15am local time.
Another Northern Alliance account suggests that the prisoners launched the battle when an Alliance general went to reassure the prisoners that they would be well treated.
"We tried to treat the prisoners humanely and they took advantage," General Dostum said on Wednesday as he surveyed the carnage. "I gave orders for them to be allowed to wash and pray, but they attacked us."
Another explanation is that the prisoners feared that they were about to be executed.
At this point, elsewhere in the fortress, Olivier Martin of the International Red Cross was in a meeting with General Dostum's deputy, General Fauzi, about gaining access to the prisoners. He describes hearing a few shots, but at first was not unduly alarmed. Gunfire is an almost continuous background noise in Afghanistan. Down in the courtyard, Ghaisuddin continues: "They took the Kalashnikovs from the soldiers they had killed and started firing. We had to flee." Next, Martin describes hearing rocket fire coming from the courtyard where the prisoners were being held. "General Fauzi left the room looking concerned and did not return,'' he says. "We decided we had to find somewhere to hide. We tried the basement but it had no exit route so we went up on the roof. There was incoming fire from the prisoners up there and we had to take shelter with some soldiers who were firing back at them."
Olivier Martin was not the only Westerner inside the fortress that day. At least one member of British Special Forces was already inside, along with the two CIA agents who were interrogating the
Taliban prisoners.
A persistent explanation from a number of sources is that a handful of the prisoners were provoked into launching the rebellion by the sight of the two Americans questioning selected prisoners, possibly for information on the whereabouts of members of bin Laden's al Qaida organisation.
Whatever the reason, it is now clear that one of the CIA agents was beaten to death. A German TV crew at the fort filmed an American man in the compound speaking into a satellite phone borrowed from their reporter. He was saying: "I have seen hundreds of wounded and dead... I think one of us has fallen."
The German crew reported on Sunday that one US "adviser" was killed. Another eyewitness said: "There were two American soldiers inside the fort, one of whom was disarmed and killed and another who was also in trouble. He was out of ammunition." This other man was called Dave. He is said to have shot dead three Taliban before escaping. It would be Wednesday before the CIA spokesman Bill Harlow named the dead agent as 32-year-old Johnnie "Mike" Spann.
What then ensued appears to be something of a shambles. British SAS troops and American Special Forces were deployed to the fortress in large numbers to help the Afghan soldiers who were being overwhelmed by the Taliban, but though the fighting broke out at 11.15am, it was no until well into the afternoon that the Special Forces arrived. In the meantime the Taliban prisoners of war were busy helping themselves to General Dostum's arms stash. They felt able to spurn several shipping containers full of old Second World War Russian machine-guns and stuck to the more up-to-date stuff. They got their hands on scores of rocket launchers, mortars, grenades and Kalashnikovs. The floor of Qalai Janghi is now littered with unexploded mortar shells and grenades that could go off at any moment. According to a source who asked not to be identified, when the Special Forces arrived it was clear that they had not been briefed at all on the conditions under which the prisoners were being held. Up to 400 highly dangerous prisoners were being held in hopelessly insecure conditions and SAS troops based in the same town did not even know the layout of the fortress where the prisoners were being held.
On Sunday, at about 3.30pm, the roar of US fighter jets could be heard, and at least four bombs were dropped from the air on the southern part of the fort. That night, a Pentagon spokesman told reporters in Washington that the prison was in the grip of "an uprising" started when "300 hard-core Taliban" prisoners "smuggled weapons into the prison".
Washington also confirmed that US forces had mounted air strikes on the fort using AC-130 gunships. Alex Perry, a reporter for Time magazine, told his editors from the scene on Sunday night he had seen 12 American and British SAS "running the show" co-ordinating the air strikes from positions inside the fort. "They are also directing the commanders inside where to tell their men to attack"
The Special Forces had been with General Dostum for more than a month just before he captured Mazar-i-Sharif, triggering the collapse of the Taliban across Afghanistan. General Dostum boasted to another Northern Alliance commander down the satellite phone that he had Western military advisers with him who could get him any equipment or assistance from the US that he needed. It now seems certain that the Special Forces quickly provided the co-ordinates for US air strikes on the fortress that went on for about an hour. The Northern Alliance were meanwhile bringing in reinforcements
Later on Sunday night, the Pentagon confirmed that five US personnel had been injured in a "friendly fire" incident when a 500lb bomb went off course and ploughed into the fort's battlements, where Northern Alliance troops were posted, killing at least six of them. The injured Americans were airlifted out to a US military hospital in Germany. A gaping hole in the fort's 20ft outer walls showed where the bomb landed.
On Monday morning, those prisoners not killed by air strikes or by the pounding of the Northern Alliance, were reported to be holding out. A hard core of 100, 30 of them armed with rocket launchers, were holed up inside a crumbling tower. American bombing continued throughout the day and into the night. One hit the armoury and the ammunition store exploded in a burst of fireworks visible eight miles away in Mazar-i-Sharif. Surviving Taliban prisoners made at least two attempts to escape, but were killed as they fled.
Early on Tuesday morning, low-flying American AC-130 gunships pounded the citadel within the fort, but by dawn the Northern Alliance forces on the ground were still taking casualties. It seems that Taliban survivors of the air strikes were able to launch a small counterattack at 8am, despite continuing mortar rocket and gunfire from the Northern Alliance.
The bodies of 10 Northern Alliance soldiers were carried out on stretchers. By now the Alliance had lost at least 50 men with another 100 wounded.
At this stage, some 16 American and British special forces were on the scene again. The British arrived in the compound in two white Land Rovers. The SAS were wearing jeans, jumpers and Afghan-style head dress. The Americans were in khaki fatigues, black fleeces and some in black woolly hats or balaclavas. Some wore dark sunglasses. They took positions just outside the fort's main entrance although, according to one source, "they did not appear to be joining the action to put down the rebellion themselves". Instead, it seems that they were calling in air strikes.
By mid-afternoon on Tuesday, only three of the prisoners armed with a machine-gun and a Kalashnikov were still alive. Asked to surrender, they shouted: "You are American people. We won't surrender to you."
The Northern Alliance on the advice of the US Special Forces and the SAS poured oil into the basement of the building and set fire to it, forcing those remaining prisoners holed up in the lower parts of the fort to move upstairs. The Northern Alliance troops then drove a huge Russian-made tank through the gates of the fortress, crushing the corpses of Pakistani and Arab fighters lying in the courtyard. The tank fired off four rounds aimed at the small building where the remaining Taliban fighters were holding out. The distance was no more than 20 metres, and the building was reduced to rubble in seconds. The three prisoners were dead.
During the three-day stand-off, General Dostum's men repeatedly claimed that the battle was over only to venture into the cauldron of death that the fort's inner courtyard had become and be greeted with a hail of bullets.
Even yesterday, as the Red Cross cleared away the bodies, re-captured Taliban survivors, still armed with concealed weapons, were firing out of the basement and killed one of those trying to recover the bodies. British and US special forces were in action in the fortress again.
Perhaps, even now, the extraordinary, terrible drama of the bloodbath at Qalai Janghi is not yet quite completed. But the end must be very near indeed.
Meanwhile, it will be a long time before the world fully takes in what it all means. When the war in Afghanistan began, we were told the foreign Taliban intended to fight to the death, and many feared a massacre or a bloodbath in Kunduz. But, in the end, bin Laden's warriors staged their last battle in the fortress at Qalai Janghi. If the accounts of the Northern Alliance soldiers are to be believed, 400 defeated men managed to force the United States into taking part in the massacre of prisoners of war. |
