The Afghan

  The balance of 2,400 remained behind in Tajik hands and have not been heard of since. Izmat Khan was spoken to by one of the selectors in Arabic. He replied in Arabic and was thought to be an Arab for that reason. He bore no badges of rank, was filthy, matted, hungry and exhausted. When he was pushed in a certain direction he was too tired to protest. Thus he ended up one of the six Afghans in the group destined to be sent west to Mazar-e-Sharif and into the hands of Dostum and his Uzbeks. By this time the western media were watching and the prisoners were given a guarantee of safe conduct by the newly arrived United Nations.

  Trucks were found from somewhere and the six hundred were loaded aboard for the journey west along the pitted track to Mazar. But their final destination would not be the city itself but a huge prison fortress ten miles further west.

  So they came to the mouth of hell, but it was called the fort of Qala-i-Jangi.

  The conquest of Afghanistan, if measured from the first bomb to the fall of Kabul to the Northern Alliance, took about fifty days, but special forces from both allied countries were operational inside Afghanistan well before that. Mike Martin yearned to go with them but the British High Commission in Islamabad was adamant it needed him on the spot to liaise with the Pakistani army brass.

  Until Bagram. This vast ex-Soviet air base north of Kabul was clearly going to be a major allied base during the eventual occupation. Taliban aircraft based there were gutted wrecks and the control tower was a ruin. But the sheer size of the runway, the numerous huge hangars and the living quarters where the Soviet garrison had once lived were all restorable with time and money.

  It was captured in the third week of November and a team of Special Boat Squadron men moved in to stake the British claim. Mike Martin used the news as a first-rate excuse to hitch a lift from the Americans at Rawalpindi airfield to go and have a look at the place, as he put it.

  It was bleak and comfortless but the SBS had ‘liberated’ a hangar all of their own before the Americans took the lot and were hunkered down at the back, as far from the icy wind as possible.

  Soldiers have a remarkable talent for making a kind of home out of the weirdest places and the special forces are the aces because they seem to find themselves in places weirder than most. The SBS unit of twenty had gone foraging with their long-base Land-Rovers and seized a series of steel freight containers which had been dragged inside.

  With drums, planks and a bit of ingenuity these were being turned into billets with beds, sofas, tables, electric lights and, supremely important, a power point to plug in the kettle and brew up mugs of tea.

  It was on the morning of 26 November that the unit CO told his men: ‘There seems to be something going on at a place called Qala-i-Jangi, east of Mazar. Some prisoners appear to have risen in revolt, taken their guards’ weapons, and are putting up a fight. I think we should have a look.’

  Six Marines were chosen and two Land-Rovers allocated and fuelled. As they were about to leave, Martin asked: ‘Mind if I tag along? You might be able to use an interpreter.’

  The CO of the small SBS unit was a Marine captain. Martin was a Para colonel. There was no objection. Martin boarded the second vehicle beside the driver. Behind him two Marines crouched over the .50-calibre M2 machine gun. They headed north on the six-hour drive, through the Salang Pass to the northern plains, the city of Mazar and the fort of Qala-i-Jangi.

  The exact incident that triggered the massacre of the prisoners at Qala-i-Jangi was disputed at the time and will remain so. But there are compelling clues.

  The western media, never shy of getting something completely wrong, persistently called the prisoners Taliban. They were the opposite. 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.

  What met them at Qala were one hundred partly trained Uzbeks under a desperately incompetent commander. Rashid Dostum himself was 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 to be selected for shipment to the Russians was a recipe for death, avoided the cull. There were anti-Tashkent Uzbeks who had also worked out that only a miserable death awaited them back in Uzbekistan and hidden 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 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 to die shahid, or martyr.

  The fort of Qala is not constructed as a western fort. It is a huge, ten-acre compound containing open spaces, trees and one-storey buildings. The whole space 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, beneath them, another maze of tunnels and cellars. The Uzbeks had only captured it ten days earlier and seemed not to know that there was a Taliban armoury 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 did a body search. Had they 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.

  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 pemmican. Night was coming down. 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 but 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 Mike 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 up.

  Izmat Khan was squatting on the dirt waiting for his turn. Like 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 neighbours’ hands so that they could fight. Izmat Khan led a group of others, including his eleven fellow Afghans, in a dodging, weaving run through the trees to the south wall where he knew the armoury was from a previous visit when t
he 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 and the wounded, who lay and 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 any more.

  The armoury door was quickly shattered and the treasure trove distributed. There was enough for a small army and masses of resupply 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 towards Qala-i-Jangi. Also on their way were American Green Berets in the form of four men from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, one US Air Force man to assist in air-coordination and six from the 10th Mountain Division. Basically their job was to observe, report and call in air strikes to break the resistance.

  By mid-morning, 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 counter-attack taking shape. Shielded by their single tank, they re-entered 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 of 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 US 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 anti-personnel bomb they would have been shredded. The fact all survived with shattered eardrums and some bone-breaks was itself a miracle.

  The bomb was a JDAM, 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 mis-hit 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 wipe-out 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 and seeking escape across country. Every one was caught by the peasantry – the Hazaras who recalled the Taliban butchery of their people three years before – and lynched.

  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 film makers. The seven British preferred anonymity. All wore the shemagh, the cotton wraparound head-dress that keeps out flies, sand, dust and gawpers. By Wednesday it served another purpose, a filter against 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 gave 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 practised and practised by both SAS and SBS until it is second nature. At Hereford the SAS have ‘the death house’ for little else but; 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. Dave 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 above ground 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 below ground but to die under the sky. They staged a suicidal counter-attack which succeeded for a hundred yards, killing a number of unwary Uzbeks of short reaction time. 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 towards 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 icy.

  By midnight the remaining men were waist deep. 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 its 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 towards the stairs. Others followed. Defeated at last, Izmat Khan, with the six other Afghans 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 among 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 do not 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 shemagh from his head and wiped the grime-smeared face. Something vaguely familiar.

  When he took out his K-Bar, a watching Uzbek grinned. If the foreigner wanted to have some fun, why not? Martin cut into the pants leg of the right thigh.

  It was still there, puckered by 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 the sign of the United Nations on it.