FROM AGONY TO ANXIETY, THEN FREEDOM

From Agony To Anxiety, Then Freedom
Aid Workers Describe Rescue From Taliban

By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 16, 2001; Page A01

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 15 – The eight foreign aid workers who were rescued from Afghanistan before dawn this morning endured a 48-hour ordeal that began with the Taliban's terrifying retreat from Kabul and ended in a dark field where they desperately set clothing on fire to guide U.S. helicopters to them, according to accounts by the former detainees and diplomats here.

Some of the aid workers in the group, which included two American women, described their escape amid the chaos of war as "horrifying." As events became more frightening for the workers, who were jailed for more than three months on charges of spreading Christianity in the world's strictest Islamic regime, some believed they would die.

At 2 a.m., the eight men and women huddled in a field outside the southeastern city of Ghazni, listening to the whump-whump of distant helicopters that could not find them. Panic-stricken, the women set fire to their headscarves; everyone then ripped off pieces of outerwear to fuel the blaze that led the choppers to them.

"It's like a miracle," said Georg Taubmann, the leader in Kabul of Shelter Now International, the organization that employed the aid workers, including Heather Mercer, 24, a native of Vienna, Va. and Dayna Curry, 30, of Thompson's Station, Tenn. "Just before Kabul fell, we were so excited to get out. We heard already troops were coming in.

"Then the Taliban came in and took us away," Taubmann said minutes after the disheveled group arrived in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, this morning. "We knew if we ended up in Kandahar, we would probably not survive."

Although full details have not yet emerged, the four German aid workers and the U.S. and Australian ambassadors provided preliminary accounts today of two days that sent the detainees' hopes alternately soaring at the prospect of escape and plunging with the fear of imminent death. The two Americans and two Australians remained in seclusion at their embassies and said they would not comment until a news conference Friday.

Late Monday night, the Taliban began fleeing Kabul as opposition Northern Alliance troops advanced on the capital. Taliban fighters moved the eight detainees from their cells at a boys' reform school, loaded them in cars and joined a convoy of Taliban tanks, pickup trucks and other vehicles racing southward toward Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold.

But as the convoy neared the city of Ghazni, local militiamen began firing, forcing the vehicles to stop and the escorts to scramble to secure the aid workers.

"They put us all into a steel container that was terribly cold," said Taubmann, referring to the metal shipping containers used throughout Afghanistan for storage, shops and makeshift housing. "We were locked up in there with no blankets. It was freezing the whole night through."

Tuesday morning, the Taliban herded the aid workers into a prison in Ghazni, which Taubmann described as "a terrible place," the worst of the five jails in which the group had been housed since being arrested Aug. 3.

When Taubmann, who worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan for 17 years and speaks the Taliban's Pashto language, complained about the filth and overflowing toilets, a Taliban fighter sneered, "This is not your country, it's Afghanistan."

The fighters slammed shut the steel doors and left.

"That was a horrifying experience," Taubmann said. "We thought if nobody comes to take care of us, we might not come out alive."

A short time later, at 9 a.m., U.S. aircraft dropped bombs or fired missiles so close to the jail that its walls rattled. The aid workers, most of whom are members of evangelical churches, crouched in a corner of their cell and prayed the bombs would not kill them.

At 10 a.m., the city erupted in firefights.

"It was the uprising," Taubmann said. The group heard shouts and the crack of weapons fire as residents apparently turned against the Taliban and began driving its forces from the city. Slowly, the tone of the shouts changed. The anger and the fear subsided.

The aid workers heard the voices of children. The sporadic rattle of Kalashnikov rifles sounded more like traditional Afghan celebratory gunfire than the staccato of pitched firefights. But then came the sounds of metal doors being thrust open as men broke into the prison.

"We were afraid the Taliban were coming to take us to Kandahar," Taubmann said. "We were really scared."

The door to their cell burst open, and an armed man stood in the doorway. The aid workers stared in terror. The man stared back – in amazement.

"They didn't expect to find foreigners," Taubmann said.

"Azad! Azad!" the man shouted. "Free! Free!"

"They opened the prison," Taubmann said. "We were free. When we got out of the prison, people came out of their houses and hugged us and greeted us. They were all clapping. It was like a big celebration for all these people."

Although the people who stormed the prison and released all of its inmates – including the aid workers – identified themselves as members of the Northern Alliance, they appear to have been led by a local tribal leader who had turned against the Taliban.

In addition to Taubmann and the two Americans, the other aid workers are Germans Margrit Stebner, Katrin Jelinek and Silke Durrkopf, and Australians Diana Thomas and Peter Bunch.

The eight foreigners probably would have been expelled from Afghanistan if they had been convicted of promoting Christianity, but the 16 Afghan employees of their organization who also were arrested in August probably would have faced the death penalty.

The Afghans reportedly were released from a prison on the outskirts of Kabul after the Northern Alliance took control of the city.

According to Haron Amin, spokesman for the Northern Alliance in Washington, forces opposed to the Taliban had received information about the aid workers when they were taken from Kabul, and had tracked them as they were driven south.

"Through infiltration and intelligence, we located the site of the aid workers," he said. "We helped arrange for them to be secured, and for special forces to take them out."

Taliban authorities have said they released the group.

But the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlin, said the aid workers "were released not by the Taliban, but by the people of Afghanistan who have broken away in Ghazni from the Taliban. . . . They encountered a number of very good-hearted and generous Afghan citizens who showed courage in helping them, and who helped arrange through our embassy and the U.S. military for a daring midnight rescue."

It took more than 30 hours to arrange that mission.

On Tuesday afternoon, the local commander who ordered the release of the aid workers called the Ghazni office of the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to Bernard Barrett, a spokesman for the ICRC Afghanistan delegation here.

"He relayed the message to us in Islamabad" that the local commander had requested the organization's assistance to "set up communication with [the workers' governments] and facilitate transfers," Barrett said. "We immediately got in touch with the three embassies."

With the foreign aid workers sheltered under the auspices of the local commander, the embassies, U.S. military and the workers began plotting a rescue.

"Early on Wednesday, it was decided the safest and fastest way would be an air evacuation made by the governments involved," Barrett said.

U.S. Special Forces based in Pakistan began planning the operation,

Meanwhile, the aid workers reportedly learned that a group of townspeople believed they should not be released without their governments paying ransom, according to Taubmann.

As the hours dragged, the rumblings from the townspeople grew.

"We were very nervous through the whole thing and wanted to get them out as quickly as possible and ensure their safety," said Barrett, adding the ICRC had no role in the rescue operation.

"It was not all that secure, there was an element of risk all the time," said Howard Brown, an official at the Australian Embassy in Islamabad. Just after midnight, with the city under a black-out curfew and occasional skirmishes between retreating Taliban and defecting commanders underway, the six women and two men slipped into the open field designated as the pickup zone. Because of the curfew, they carried only lanterns.

The lanterns were too dim for the helicopters to spot. With the choppers thumping in distance, ransom-seeking villagers reportedly heading toward them, and fearful that hostile Taliban troops were still in the area, the increasingly panicked women tore off their headscarves and set them on fire. Everyone then began ripping off outer clothing to add to the blaze.

"We burned everything we had – clothes, everything – to make a big fire," Taubmann said. Special Forces teams snatched the eight, lifted off and returned to Pakistan.

At 8:15 a.m., they landed at an airport near Islamabad. The Americans, Mercer and Curry, were greeted by their sobbing parents and U.S. diplomats, and the Australians and Germans were met by ambassadors and diplomats from their embassies.

"It was a very emotional and joyous reunion," Chamberlin said, adding that "we were all crying, everyone was weeping. It was fun."

Mercer's parents, John Mercer, an Army retiree from Vienna, Va. and her mother, Deborah Oddy, of New York, and Curry's mother, Nancy Cassell, have been in Islamabad since they were evacuated from Kabul two days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. All three had been in Kabul to attend their daughters' trial.

The aid workers were driven to the residences of their ambassadors.

"I can speak for the Americans because they are in my home," Chamberlin said. "They've been hugging their parents. They've been taking a hot bath. They've been eating their favorite meals. They've been to a beauty parlor and had their hair done and they've been sharing a totally wonderful, joyous day."

President Bush said he spoke to the Americans this morning and that "their spirits were high."

"It was very dramatic, right until the end," Taubmann said at a news conference. He was wearing a new pair of pants that still sported the store tags, and he had sheared the scraggly beard and long hair he had when he had arrived in Islamabad.

"I am a Christian – I have forgiven them [the Taliban] for what they have done," he said. "But as a human being, I hate what they did to us."