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Taliban gets strength from foreign volunteers
©New York Times
© St. Petersburg Times, DUAWO, Afghanistan -- In this desolate corner of Afghanistan, where barren cliffs rise steeply from a narrow river bend in the Panjshir Valley, the opposition alliance fighting the Taliban holds some 300 prisoners of its long and losing war in a fly-infested, mud-brick building. Nearly all are in their early or mid 20s, poorly educated and former students at Islamic schools in Pakistan or Afghanistan, where they were instructed of their duty to defend Islam and the Taliban. At least 17 prisoners here come from foreign countries, some as distant as China or Yemen, volunteers who got only a few weeks of rudimentary training before being sent to the front lines. Within weeks, they were captured by the opposition forces of the Northern Alliance, who make them available to journalists in their effort to gain international support and to show just how varied and far-reaching a threat they, and the world, face in radical Islam. Indeed, the new commander of the alliance, Gen. Muhammed Fahim, said Thursday that the ranks of the Taliban included tens of thousands of foreign fighters, including many Pakistanis, though the alliance has a reputation for exaggerating its claims. Two prisoners here, the more educated and the seemingly more determined, who say they have been interviewed scores of times, claim to have been schooled in hijacking and bombmaking at the training camps of Osama bin Laden, the wanted terrorist. Their loyalty to bin Laden and their willingness to kill Americans has no limits, they boast. "If bin Laden tells me to kill myself in a suicide attack, I will do it," said Obeid Rahman, a Yemeni prisoner. Three are Pakistanis of Burmese descent who vow to liberate their homeland for Islam, though they acknowledge they have never set eyes on it. "I have a target," said one of them, Mohammad Sale Hayat, 25. "My target is freedom for Burma." Two others, Abdul Jalil and Nur Muhammad, are Muslims from an autonomous region of western China, Xinjiang, who say their goal is to return home and set up an independent Islamic state there. The sons of retired government bureaucrats, both men said they came to Kabul in 1999 with two other members of the Uighur minority to study to become Islamic preachers. Their families, religious and middle class, supported them. Once they arrived, however, their teachers urged them to fight alongside the Taliban militia, which has fought its way to control over about 90 percent of Afghanistan since overrunning the capital in 1996. After two months, they did. With only two weeks of basic training at a Taliban-run camp, they departed for the front line. They were captured after a single night. Both men said their devotion to Islam was fueled by the repression of the Chinese government, which has long feared a Muslim secessionist movement in western China -- and its potential links to the Taliban. "The Chinese don't allow people to study at madrasas," Jalil said, referring to the Islamic schools. "They don't allow people to grow beards." But both men criticized the attacks on the World Trade Center, saying it was wrong to kill civilians. They hoped that the United States would help them set up an independent homeland in China, a cause even they acknowledged was a long shot. "Yes, I want an independent Xinjiang," Jalil said. "But we can't do it alone. There are only two of us. My people are very weak compared to the Chinese government." Years of imprisonment had steeled devotion in some of the prisoners from Pakistan and eroded it in others. "In Pakistan I will start a jihad," Ali Akbar, a 25-year-old Pakistani, said. "Because our government is helping the enemies of Islam." Another, Muhammed Israr, a 26-year-old with a sixth-grade education, said he believed in Islamic rule but had had enough. Asked what he would do if freed, he said, simply, "I would go back home." Yet another, a 25-year-old with no education who gave his name as Nasrullah, vowed in front of his jailers to take up arms if released. "I will fight again," he said. Asked as a group whether they supported the attack on the World Trade Center, most of the foreign volunteers said yes. Abdurrahman, the Yemeni trained in a camp with ties to bin Laden, said that Palestinians have been dying for 50 years and argued that American sanctions are killing Iraqi children. Asked if there would be a war, the men said that depended on whether the United States attacks Afghanistan. Asked who would win, they said Muslims would. "God willing, we will win," they said in unison. "God willing, we will win."
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From the Times wire desk
From the AP |
