"The Afghan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Forsyth Frederick)

CHAPTER 7

Izmat Khan was still commanding in the north, on the Badakhshan front, when the bombs rained on Kabul. As the world studied Kabul and diversionary tactics in the south, the U.S. Special Forces slipped into Badakhshan to help General Fahim, who had taken over Massoud’s army. This was where the real fighting would be; the rest was window dressing for the media. The key would be Northern Alliance ground forces and American airpower.

Without ever taking off, Afghanistan ’s puny air force was vaporized. Its tanks and artillery, if they could be spotted, were “taken out.” The Uzbek, Rashid Dostum, who had spent years in safety across the border, was persuaded to come back and open a second front in the northwest to match Fahim’s front in the northeast. And in November, the great breakout began. The key was target marking, the technology that has quietly revolutionized warfare since the first Gulf War of 1991.

Hidden invisible among the allied forces. Special Forces personnel squint through long-range binoculars to identify the enemy’s dug-in positions, guns, tanks, ammunition dumps, reserves, supplies and command bunkers. Each is marked, or “painted,” with an infrared dot from a shoulder-held projector. Via radio, an air strike is called up.

In the destruction of the Taliban army facing the Northern Alliance, these strikes either came from far away in the south, where U.S. Navy carriers hovered off the coast, or with A-io tank busters flying out of well-rewarded Uzbekistan. Unit by unit, with bombs and rockets that could not miss as they followed the infrared beam, the Taliban army was blown away and the Tajiks charged in in triumph.

Izmat Khan retreated and retreated as position after position was devastated and lost. The Taliban army of the north started at over thirty thousand soldiers, but were losing a thousand a day. There was no medication, no evacuation, no doctors. The wounded said their prayers and died like flies. They screamed “Allahu-akhbar” and charged into walls of bullets. The original volunteers for the Taliban army had long been used up. Few were left. Taliban recruiting squads had pressed tens of thousands more into the ranks, but many did not want to fight. The true fanatics were dwindling away. And still Izmat Khan had to pull them back, each time convinced that, being in the front of every combat, he could not last another day. By November 18, they had reached the town of Kunduz.

By a fluke of history, Kunduz is a small enclave of Gilzai southerners, all Pashtun, in a sea of Tajiks and Hazaras. Thus, the Taliban army could take refuge there. And it was there they agreed to surrender. Among Afghans there is nothing dishonorable in a negotiated surrender, and, once agreed, its terms are always honored. The entire Taliban army surrendered to General Fahim, and Fahim accepted.

Inside the Taliban were two non-Afghan groups. There were six hundred Arabs, all devoted to Osama bin Laden, who had sent them there. Well over three thousand Arabs had already died, and the American attitude was that they would not weep salt tears if the rest went to Allah as well.

There were also about two thousand Pakistanis who were clearly going to be a thundering embarrassment to Islamabad if they were discovered. The Pakistani ruler. General Musharraf, had been left in not a shred of doubt after 9/11 that he had a choice: become a dedicated ally of the USA, with billions and billions of dollars in aid; or continue to support, via the ISI, the Taliban, and thus bin Laden, and pay the direct consequences. He chose the USA. But the ISI still had a small army of agents inside Afghanistan, and the Pakistani volunteers fighting with the Taliban would not stint from revealing the encouragement they had once been given to go north. Over three nights, a secret air bridge exfiltrated most of them back to Pakistan. In another covert deal, some four thousand prisoners were sold for varying sums, according to desirability, to the USA and Russia. The Russians wanted any Chechens, and, as a favor to Tashkent, any anti-Tashkent Uzbeks. The original army that surrendered was over fourteen thousand, but their numbers were coming down. Finally, the Northern Alliance announced to the world media, streaming north to cover the real war story, that it had only eight thousand prisoners.

Then it was decided to hand over a further five thousand to the Uzbek commander, General Dostum. He wished to take them far to the west, to Sheberghan, inside his own territory. They were packed into steel freight containers without food or water, and so compressed they could only stand, straining upward for the air pocket.

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.

The bomb was a J-DAM, a bunker buster, designed to penetrate deep into masonry before exploding. Landing nose down in gravel, it shot forty feet down before going off. The Americans found themselves on top of an earthquake, were hurled around, but survived.

The second mishit was even more unfortunate. It took out the Uzbek tank, and their command post behind it.

By Wednesday, the Western media had arrived and were swarming all over the fort, or at least the outside of it. They may not have realized it, but their presence was the only factor that would eventually inhibit the Uzbeks from achieving a total wipeout of the rebels to the last man.

In the course of the six days, twenty rebels tried to take their chances by escaping under cover of night cross-country. Every one of them was caught by the peasantry and lynched. These were the Hazaras, who recalled the Taliban butchery of their people three years before.

Mike Martin lay on top of the ramp, peering through the parapet and down into the open compound. The bodies from the first days still lay there, and the stench was appalling. The Americans, with their black woolly hats, had uncovered faces and had already been well photographed by cameramen and TV filmmakers. The seven British preferred anonymity. All wore the shemagh, the cotton wraparound headdress that keeps out sand, dust, flies and gawkers. By Wednesday it served another purpose: to filter the stink.

Just before sundown, the surviving CIA man, Dave Tyson, who had come back after a day in Mazar-e- Sharif, was bold enough to enter the compound with a TV crew desperate for an award-winning movie. Martin watched them creeping along the far wall. Marine J was lying beside him. As they watched, a snatch squad of rebels came out of an unseen door in the wall, seized the four Westerners and dragged them inside.

“Someone ought to get them out of there,” remarked Marine J in a conversational tone. He looked round. Six pairs of eyes were staring at him without a sound. He uttered two intensely sincere words-“Oh, shit”-vaulted the wall, went down the inner ramp and raced across the open space. Three SBS men went with him. The other two and Martin provided sniper cover. The rebels were by now confined to the south wall only. The sheer daftness of what the four Marines had done caught the rebels by surprise. There were no shots until they reached the door in the far wall.

Marine J was first in. Hostage recovery is practiced and practiced by both SAS and SBS until it is second nature. At Hereford, the SAS have “the death house” for little else; at their Poole HQ_ the SBS have the same. The four SBS men came through the door without ceremony, identified the three rebels by their clothes and beards and fired. The procedure is called “double tap”: two bullets straight in the face. The three Arabs did not get off a shot; anyway, they were facing in the wrong direction. David Tyson and the British TV crew agreed then and there never to mention the incident, and they never have. By Wednesday evening. Izmat Khan realized he and his men could not stay aboveground any longer. Artillery had arrived, and down the length of the compound it was beginning to reduce the south face to rubble. The cellars were the last resort. The surviving rebels were down to under three hundred. Some of these decided not to go belowground but to die under the sky. They staged a suicidal counterattack that succeeded for a hundred yards, killing a number of unwary Uzbeks with short reaction times. But then the machine gun on the Uzbeks’ replacement tank opened up and cut the Arabs to pieces. They were mostly Yemenis with some Chechens.

On Thursday, on American advice, the Uzbeks took barrels of diesel fuel brought for their tank and poured it down conduits into the cellars below. Then they set fire to it.

Izmat Khan was not in that section of the cellars, and the stench of the bodies overrode the smell of the diesel, but he heard the whoomf and felt the heat. More died, but the survivors came staggering out of the smoke toward him. They were all choking and gagging. In the last cellar, with about a hundred and fifty men around him, Izmat Khan slammed and bolted the door to keep out the smoke. Beyond the door, the hammering of the dying became fainter and finally stopped.

Above them, the shells slammed into the empty rooms. The last cellar led to a passage and at the far end the men could smell fresh air. They tried to see if there was a way out, but it was only a gutter from above. That night, the new Uzbek commander, Din Muhammad, hit upon the idea of diverting an irrigation ditch into that pipe. After the November rains, the ditch was full and the water in it icy. By midnight, the remaining men were waist-deep in water. Weakened by hunger and exhaustion, they began to slip beneath the surface and drown.

Up on the surface, the United Nations was in charge, surrounded by media, and their instructions were to take prisoners. Through the rubble of the collapsed buildings above them, the last rebels could hear the bullhorn ordering them to come out, unarmed and with hands up. After twenty hours, the first began to stagger toward the stairs. Others followed. Defeated at last, Izmat Khan, the last Afghan left alive, went with them.

Up on the surface, stumbling over the broken stone blocks that had once been the south face, the last eighty-six rebels found themselves facing a forest of pointed guns and rockets. In the daylight of Saturday dawn, they looked like scarecrows from a horror film. Filthy, stinking, black from cordite soot, ragged, matted, bearded and hypothermic, they tottered and some fell. One of these was Izmat Khan.

Coming down a rock pile, he slipped, reached out to steady himself and grabbed a rock. A chunk came away in his hand. Thinking he was being attacked, a nervous young Uzbek fired his RPG.

The fiery grenade went past the Afghan’s ear into a boulder behind him. The stone splintered, and a piece the size of a baseball hit him with devastating force in the back of the head.

He was wearing no turban. It had been used to bind his hands six days earlier and never recovered. The rock would have pulped the skull if it had hit at ninety degrees. But it ricocheted off, slicing the scalp and knocking him into a near coma. He fell in the rubble, blood gushing from the gash. The rest were marched away to trucks waiting outside.

An hour later, the seven British soldiers were moving through the compound, taking notes. Mike Martin, as senior officer, although technically the unit interpreter, would have a long report to make. He was counting the dead, though he knew there were scores-maybe up to two hundred-still underground. One body interested him. It was still bleeding. Corpses don’t bleed. He turned the scarecrow over. The clothing was wrong. This was Pashtun dress. There were not supposed to be any Pashtun present. He took his shebagh from his head and wiped the grime-smeared face. Something vaguely familiar. When he took out his Ka-bar, a watching Uzbek grinned. If the foreigner wanted to have some fun, why not? Martin cut into the pant leg of the right thigh. It was still there, puckered with the six stitches, the scar where the Soviet shell fragment had gone in over thirteen years before. For the second time in his life, he hoisted Izmat Khan over one shoulder in a fireman’s lift and carried him. At the main gate, he found a white Land Rover with a United Nations insignia on it.

“This man is alive but injured,” he said. “He has a bad head wound.”

Duty done, he boarded the SBS Land Rover for the drive back to Bagram. The American trawl team found the Afghan in Mazar Hospital three days later and claimed him for interrogation. They trucked him to Bagram, but to their own side of this vast air base, and there he came to two days after that, slowly and groggily on the floor of a makeshift cell, cold and shackled but just alive. On the fourteenth of January 2002, the first detainees arrived at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from Kandahar. They were blindfolded, shackled, hungry, thirsty and soiled. Izmat Khan was one of them.

Colonel Mike Martin returned to London in the spring of 2002 to spend three years as deputy chief of staff, HQ_Directorate of Special Forces, Duke of York Barracks, Chelsea. He retired in December 2005 after a party at which a group of friends including Jonathan Shaw, Mark Carleton-Smith, Jim Davidson and Mike Jackson tried and failed-to drink him under the table. In January 2006, he bought a listed barn in the Meon Valley, Hampshire, and started in the late summer to restore it into a country home.

United Nations records later showed that 514 Al Qaeda fanatics died at Qala-i-Jangi and eighty-six survived, all injured. All went to Guantanamo Bay. Sixty Uzbek guards also died. General Rashid Dostum became defense minister in the new Afghan government.