'I JUST PRAY THAT AMERICA WILL DESTROY THEM'

'I just pray that America will destroy them'

TUESDAY OCTOBER 02 2001
BY CATHERINE PHILP

The survivors of Taleban massacre

WHEN he saw Taleban soldiers come marching into his neighbourhood, spraying machinegun fire in front of them, Hussein Ali knew the battle for Mazar-i Sharif was finally lost.

Finding a disused well to hide in, the opposition fighter crouched in the dark waiting for the slaughter to end. After a day and a night, he emerged to a scene shocking even to the most battlehardened veteran.

“There were bodies everywhere. I thought I was in hell,” Mr Ali said. “Their hands were tied behind their backs, their throats were cut and the skin torn from their faces. Some were decapitated and some had their hands cut off. I have been in many battlefields but these were civilians, not fighters.”

It was not until months later, when he fled to Pakistan, that the scale of the killing began to sink in. As survivors met up again and pieced together their stories, a picture emerged of a massacre on the scale of Srebrenica, all but unnoticed by the outside world.

Over four days in August 1998, more than 5,000 unarmed ethnic Hazara men in Mazar-i Sharif were systematically tortured and killed by the Taleban because their identity marked them out as tribal enemies and opponents of Taleban rule.

Hospital patients were shot in their beds. Dozens were asphyxiated after being crammed in metal containers and left in the heat of the sun.

Hundreds were marched to the grave of the opposition leader, Abdul Ali Mazari, then lined up and shot. Others were dragged from their houses to be shot or have their throats cut in the street.

“There were bodies left lying rotting in the streets for days, preyed on by dogs and vultures. Eventually the stench was so bad the Taleban forced people to carry them away for burial,” said Gul Ahad, 34, an opposition spy who was spared because he was a Pashtun, like most of the Taleban.

Mr Ahad stayed on in Mazar undetected for a year after the massacre, finally leaving after his neighbour, Jumkhan, was executed for shaving off his beard. “I could not live like that any more. In an era when people have been to the Moon, we have butchers like the Taleban,” he said, shaking his head in despair.

“God sent a curse on Afghanistan when the Taleban came,” said Fatima Syed, whose husband was marched away and shot by the Taleban as they swept through Mazar. She was one of thousands of widows left behind by the massacre, unable to feed her family under a regime that forbids the employment of women.

Now she lives as a refugee in a widows’ hostel in Quetta, relying on charity and a small income from needlework to feed her five chidren. She has not forgotten the massacre and now she sees her chance for justice.

“I pray night and day that America will take over and destroy the Taleban so all the Afghans can return in peace to their homes,” she says. “If the Taleban are still in power when my sons grow up then they will join the Northern Alliance and fight against the Taleban’s cruelty.”

Other survivors are more ambivalent about the prospect of an American strike. “I am angry because 5,000 people were massacred and nobody cared because our nation is poor. But when 5,000 people are killed in a powerful nation, then they react,” said Gul Ahad. “If America strikes Afghanistan, it must be very careful to target only the terrorists or there will be another massacre. We have enough widows already.”