Fighters Hide in Schools and Mosques

Taliban's Human Shields
Refugees Say Fighters Hide in Schools, Mosques

AINGARI, Afghanistan, Oct. 23 -- Taliban forces are taking cover among the civilian population of Kabul and stashing their military equipment in mosques and schools to avoid U.S. airstrikes, according to refugees who have fled the capital in recent days.

Allied planes have attacked targets in and around Kabul nearly every day since the U.S.-led airstrikes began Oct. 7. The attacks are aimed at Taliban military sites. But the refugees said today that many Taliban fighters are now hiding among civilians in the capital.

"The airstrikes destroyed some [military] sites, but now the Taliban come at night to the houses of the people and bring their equipment into civilian places," said Mohammad Ali, 50, a jobless former bus driver in Kabul who crossed the Taliban and opposition Northern Alliance front lines this morning, walking for six hours to reach this alliance-controlled village about 20 miles southeast of Jabal Saraj.

"They come at night to schools and mosques and universities where there are lots of trees," Ali said as he leaned on a cane at an alliance checkpoint here. At one mosque at Kotal-e Khairkhana, a residential area in the northern part of Kabul, the Taliban has parked 10 tanks inside the compound, he said.

"The people are very angry and worried," fearing that the tanks will attract U.S. airstrikes, he said. "For this reason, they are not going to the mosque to pray."

Many Kabul residents support the U.S. airstrikes in hopes that they will bring about the fall of the Taliban, even though the bombing campaign has caused some casualties among civilians, refugees said today. At least eight civilians were killed and 12 others wounded when U.S. bombs destroyed one house and damaged three others in the Poroja-e Jadid neighborhood of northern Kabul on Sunday, refugees said.

As Ali and other refugees were streaming into alliance-held territory, fleeing what they said were worsening conditions for Kabul's civilian population, U.S. jets bombed Taliban front-line positions north of the capital for a third straight day, and Taliban gunners fired two rockets into a crowded market in the town of Charikar, killing two civilians and injuring at least 15.

Two U.S. F-18 fighter-bombers flashed across the sky over Charikar from the northwest at about 3 p.m. and hit Taliban positions near the ruined Bagram air base, sending a large plume of smoke into the air from an undetermined target. A second wave of attacks started around 6 p.m., as the roar of jet engines announced the presence of warplanes invisible in the night sky.

About four hours before the afternoon strike, two rockets were fired from a Taliban position on a mountain west of Charikar. One landed harmlessly in an empty lot, but the other exploded at treetop level above the town's crowded bazaar.

Two people were killed by shrapnel: Agha Shirim, a tea seller who earlier had lost both legs in a land mine explosion, and Sheikh Rasul, a vegetable vendor. Friends of Shirim said he was a widower with five children.

Bismullah, 28, a car-parts vendor, said he was standing next to Shirim when the rocket hurled a piece of shrapnel into Shirim's abdomen. Bismullah showed a slight leg wound and a torn vest from the blast.

Qassem Muhazeb, a doctor at a nearby emergency clinic, said 15 civilians were wounded, including four children, one of them a 4-year-old girl who was in a coma with a head injury. He said it was the first Taliban rocket attack on Charikar in two months.

At this Northern Alliance village, in Kapisa province on the road from Dernama, a mountain pass between Taliban and alliance zones, a steady stream of refugees passed through an alliance checkpoint on foot and in dilapidated buses, trucks and jeeps. Accompanied by four guards with AK-47 assault rifles, a record keeper named Zaralam from the alliance's "committee of refugee affairs" recorded their names, number of family members and where they were heading, then issued each family a piece of paper labeled "refugee identity card."

A couple of miles farther down the road toward Jabal Saraj, the village guards included 12-year-old Mohammad Azam, carrying an AK-47 and wearing an ammunition pouch with three banana-shaped clips in it. He said he joined the armed guards three days ago, hoping to follow in the footsteps of his father, who was killed fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Standing beside the dusty road, which crosses a boulder-strewn plain bordered by steeply rising barren mountains to the north, Zaralam said the pace of the refugee exodus from Kabul has picked up in recent days, with as many as 900 people now riding to the Dernama no man's land each day, then trekking three hours on foot through the pass to alliance territory, where other vehicles wait to take them on their way.

"Most of them don't have anything to eat, and they come here to be safe," he said. "They don't have any work to do in Kabul."

Mahfuz, 40, a fruit vendor in Kabul's bazaar, said he left the city with his wife and six children "because our lives were in danger" from the Taliban, who he said are increasingly suspicious of ethnic Tajiks hailing from northern Afghanistan, like him and his family.

Tajiks hold several key leadership positions in the Northern Alliance and are heavily represented in its ranks. Accordingly, many of the refugees fleeing north share both ethnicity and hatred of the Taliban, and their feelings about the American bombing contrasts sharply with the bitterness expressed by ethnic Pashtuns fleeing southern Afghanistan. Mahfuz, for example, said: "Most of the people are supporting the American bombing because they want to be free from the Taliban."

Increasingly, Taliban members "are hiding themselves in the houses of the people," he said. "The people cannot do anything because they have the power."

Habib Khan, a turbaned 55-year-old with a gray-streaked beard, arrived at the checkpoint with his wife and seven children crammed into a wheezing Soviet-built Uaz jeep.

"The situation in Kabul is very bad," he said. The Taliban "placed their tanks and equipment near the houses of the people." Taliban fighters have not been greatly affected by the U.S. airstrikes on Kabul, he said, because "they're not in a constant place; they're in civilian places and the front line."

"The Taliban stay in mosques and schools," said a clothing salesman, 22, who gave his name only as Massoud. Such equipment as armored vehicles, he said, are hidden under trees "next to mosques."

Mohammad Ali, the unemployed bus driver, said U.S. airstrikes in Kabul had hit a military base of the Taliban's 315th Brigade, the airport, a base in the southern part of the capital containing Afghan and Arab Taliban fighters and their equipment, and a suspected missile site known to residents as Scud Hill.

"I walked all around the city, and the people are very happy about the American airstrikes," he said. But those who show satisfaction risk reprisals from the Taliban, he added. About 10 days ago, three young men who lived on his street and had expressed such sentiments were taken away in the middle of the night and have not been seen since, Ali said.

In the last two weeks, he said, many more Arab and Pakistani supporters of the Taliban have shown up in Kabul than at any time previously, possibly with the aim of waging a last-ditch fight for the capital. He said he has seen them driving around in their pickup trucks armed with assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and machine guns.

At the Pul-e Khushti mosque, Kabul's biggest, he said, "I saw 30 or 40 [pickup trucks] of the Arabs and Pakistanis."

Ali said he has never seen accused terrorist Osama bin Laden in Kabul, but he recalled watching two heavily armed motorcades in which the Saudi fugitive was rumored to be riding. The motorcades consisted of seven identical black Mitsubishi jeeps with tinted windows, accompanied by dozens of pickup trucks carrying armed men. They drove on each occasion to the former Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul.

The first time, Ali said, was about when the Taliban destroyed the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamian. The second was two days before the U.S. airstrikes began.

Since the U.S. bombing began, he said, "the Taliban have been treating the people very badly." Now, residents would welcome "anyone who comes to Kabul to take power -- American, British, Russians, anyone." Whatever happens, he said, "the Taliban should leave Kabul."



© 2001 The Washington Post Company