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December 18, 2001
TORA BORA, Afghanistan -- The band of terrorists who had survived the battle for Tora Bora came down the mountain on donkeys Monday, dazed and sick and wounded, hands tied behind their backs with red nylon, their eyes to the ground.
There were 18 of them, nine Arabs and nine Afghans. They were young and bearded and caked in dirt. They rode with slumped shoulders. Some cried. Village men and boys lined the dirt track along the way but said nothing as the nameless faces of Osama bin Laden's shattered army passed by.
Their captors put the prisoners in a small mud-walled building in the foothills of the White Mountains and bandaged their wounds. Most appeared shellshocked, many limped. One flashed a "V" sign as two guards led him into a courtyard where foreign photographers waited.
The others followed in ones and twos, sat quietly, as directed, with heads bowed for a few minutes, then were brought back to their makeshift cell to await another cold, dark night and an unknown fate.
Not one uttered a word.
There were unconfirmed reports that some of them begged not to be turned over to the Americans.
Their Afghan captors did not goad them. If anything, they seemed almost gentle, at least in front of the media.
Unlike 300 or so of their colleagues, these men -- some of whom were from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates -- had survived the battle for Tora Bora, the last organized stronghold of bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network. It was overrun Sunday after nine weeks of U.S. air attacks and two weeks of ground fighting in which several hundred American and British commandos played a prominent role.
"Al-Qaida has been a problem not only for Afghanistan but for the whole world," said Afghan militia commander Haji Zahir, who spent four years in prison under the ruling Taliban regime that hosted the terrorist network. "It is the duty of every Afghan to search for the rest of the al-Qaida people."
The fiery-eyed, trim-bearded Zahir held a rare news conference for foreign journalists near the POW compound. He said that al-Qaida was finished on Tora Bora -- "they have lost their ammunition, food, confidence" -- and noted that his men and those of two other militia commanders had taken over all the fighters' positions.
Like other military leaders in Afghanistan, Zahir all but denied the presence of U.S. and British forces on the ground, saying he had received no help from any foreign country, and he dodged questions about the whereabouts of bin Laden, whose fate is of less concern to the Afghans than to the Americans.
Militia fighters returning from the front said they had not seen bin Laden in Tora Bora for about a month, although U.S. intelligence operatives were reported to have intercepted radio traffic from him in the region last week. Afghan observers say that although bin Laden trains others for martyrdom, there is no indication he seeks it for himself, and they find it unlikely that he wouldn't have formulated an escape plan to Pakistan when it became apparent Tora Bora would be attacked.
"Bin Laden killed my brother, my nephew," said Zahir's father, Haji Abdul Qadeer. "He knows his enemy, and he is not a child. He understood what was coming. He knew he was fighting a superpower. He knew our forces were coming to fight him in Tora Bora.
"If he had strength, I believe he would have stayed in the mountains. But if he did not have adequate supplies and soldiers, I believe he would have made a plan to leave."
-- Information from Cox News Service was used in this report.