Jihad: Young Pakistani men hoped to fight Americans but found
confusion, retreat and abandonment by the Taliban
Sun Journal
December 8, 2001
TALASH, Pakistan - Mohammed Youssef tried to stop it, first calling the
local religious leader on the phone, then following his convoy of young
jihad recruits into Afghanistan and confronting him in person. Don't
take them, he said. They're just boys. They don't know how to fight. If
it gets bad, they don't know how to run.
"I personally talked to Sufi Mohammed twice and requested him not to go
to Afghanistan with the large number of young people, all untrained,"
Youssef, a 55-year-old veteran of the Afghan war with the Soviets, says.
"'Don't kill them,' I asked him. But he did not listen to me, and he
refused."
After the U.S.-led bombing campaign in Afghanistan began eight weeks
ago, young Pakistani men from all over the deeply religious border region
were clamoring for the chance to fight with the Taliban. In this
farming village, more than 60 youths joined thousands of others who followed
Sufi Mohammed, charismatic founder of the fundamentalist Movement for
the Enforcement of the Laws of Muhammad, across the rugged frontier to
take up arms.
A few weeks later, the Taliban were in substantial retreat, reports of
Pakistani fighters being slaughtered were emerging, and Mohammed
slipped quietly back across the border. Of the 60 jihadis who left with him
from Talash, fewer than 25 have returned.
"It's a tragedy," says Shansur Rehman, whose 23-year-old son was
confirmed dead near Jalalabad, Afghanistan.
The battle fervor that swept this region at the beginning of the war
quickly evaporated, as thousands of foreign volunteer fighters - many of
them Pakistani - were left in the gun sights while the Taliban slipped
back into their villages.
In these frontier communities, where the mullahs have always had more
pull than the government, there is a deepening resentment of the
religious leaders who called away so many young men to a certain death.
"They went to Afghanistan to fight Americans, and they ended up
fighting their fellow Muslims," says Sher Zameen, whose uncle, a farmer
with
six children, left for Afghanistan without a gun. He hoped he'd get one
when he arrived, Zameen said. Now he is missing.
"In the initial stages, people were emotional, and everyone wanted to
go to Afghanistan to fight. But then when people heard about the fall of Mazar-e Sharif, people started feeling sick," says Faizal Hassan, whose
father is missing in Afghanistan. More than 1,500 Taliban fighters were
killed in the Northern Alliance's siege of the city and, two weeks
later, during a prison revolt.
"Now, people are criticizing Sufi Mohammed," Hassan says. "He
ordered
his followers to go to Afghanistan without any long-term planning.
Without planning, without strategy, they sent laymen to Afghanistan to fight
the Americans, and the result now is people are missing."
The intra-Muslim fighting that has occurred over the past several weeks
in Afghanistan now threatens to spill into Pakistan. Limited clashes
have already broken out between tribes that faced each other in
Afghanistan, and several border communities have for the first time evicted
Afghan refugees.
Recriminations are spreading across the country. Commentators
alternately blame the government, for allowing thousands of its citizens to take
up weapons and cross the border, and the Islamic political parties,
whose call for jihad, or holy war, represented a direct challenge to
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
"The romanticization of jihad was the gift of small minds to
Pakistan,"
newspaper columnist Muhammad Ali Siddiqi says. "Lacking any real
understanding of the intricacies of a modern war, these parties presented to
the raw minds of Pakistani boys a jihad that was fun."
The Pakistani government has arrested Sufi Mohammed on charges of
possessing illegal weapons. But it has denied reports that it sent planes to
evacuate Pakistani fighters from Afghanistan. Those rumors may have
been wishful thinking more than anything. The reality, say analysts in
Islamabad, is that Pakistan, facing years of sectarian violence at the
hands of Islamic extremists, was probably no more eager than the United
States to see volunteer jihadis return from Afghanistan.
In Talash, returning fighters gave dispiriting accounts of a war in
which they expected to encounter American troops, but instead encountered confusion, retreat and the gun barrels of fellow Muslims.
Sardar Daud, 20, said he decided to join the fight after listening to
appeals from the local mosques. "The religious leaders were giving
sermons in the mosques to condemn the [U.S.] attacks and urging people to go
to Afghanistan," he says.
Daud says he entered Afghanistan with 700 other Pakistanis and camped
for a few days at the border with Mohammed. "He issued some directives.
He recited a few verses of the holy Quran to highlight the importance
of jihad for Muslims. Then we started moving toward Jalalabad."
But by the time they got there, U.S. airstrikes were hitting the area
fiercely, and the Taliban arranged transport the next morning to Kabul.
From there, Daud and 1,500 other fighters were taken to the Panjshir
Valley.
"We took positions. Somebody told me on the front line there is a
trench where the Northern Alliance and some foreign troops have taken
positions. We planned to attack this position. For one thing, we wanted to
kill those foreign troops. For another, we wanted to get some food,
because we were short of food."
The Taliban commander switched sides, and a new commander ordered them
to abandon their positions only minutes before U.S. planes started
hitting them, Daud says. He and his comrades walked five straight days back
to the Pakistan border, and eventually home. Now, he wonders what he
accomplished.
"We had an idea that some foreign troops, some American troops and
British troops, were in Afghanistan. We wanted to capture some American
troops - it would be a great honor for us to capture a U.S. Army man. But
when we entered the area, we never saw any foreigners. They were all
Muslims. They were all Afghans. And nobody told us about the airstrikes,
this carpet bombing."
In the town of Rustam, also along Pakistan's North-West Frontier,
28-year-old Pir Mohammed said he and nine others joined Sufi Mohammed and
were outfitted with Kalashnikov rifles, rocket launchers, hand grenades
and other light and heavy machine guns.
"We had some missiles also, and small cannons, but due to logistical
problems, we couldn't transport them," he says.
The weapons were leftover American supplies from the war with the
Soviets, said his friend, Hafez Izhar Ahmed, 20.
Once they got to Jalalabad, those with military training went on to Mazar-e Sharif, while those who didn't stayed behind to learn how to load,
unload and fire a weapon. Pir Mohammed stayed on for training but was
evacuated to Kabul when the Americans started bombing Jalalabad.
"When we reached Kabul, the Taliban informed us they were conducting a
strategic retreat. The Northern Alliance was on the way," he says.
"For every 500 or 600 Pakistanis, there was only one Taliban who gave
us information on what we should do," he says. "People were still
determined to defend Kabul, but we never saw any Taliban; we had no
information on where to go, whether we should retreat, or where we should
retreat to. Thousands of people were there."
Still, Mohammed says, no one despaired. "We left Pakistan to sacrifice
our life. Our aim was that. So whatever happened was up to God. We never expected that we would come back alive to our homes."
Kim Murphy is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune
Publishing newspaper.
Copyright (c) 2001, The Baltimore Sun
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