Published Nov 15 2001
KHOJA GHAAR, AFGHANISTAN -- Land mines and ruins greeted refugees returning Wednesday to villages that had been held by the Taliban. Houses were in rubble, orchards were hacked to stumps and streams were diverted from fields. Mines killed at least two returning refugees, villagers and soldiers said.
Farm families coming back to the devastated northeastern landscape of Takhar Province accused the Taliban of laying waste to homes and property of ethnic minority Uzbeks and Tajiks during the months that its forces held the area.
"My home is destroyed. Everything is destroyed," said Halimah Wasaill, nursing a toddler while huddled atop bundled goods heaped in front of what had been her family's house, of which only the mud compound walls remained.
Fields belonging to Pashtuns, of the same ethnic group as most Taliban forces, provided the only green in brown steppes sweeping to the horizon south of the provincial capital of Taloqan.
Taloqan went over to the Northern Alliance early this week, and former front-line towns such as Khoja Ghaar began to see civilians once again as Taliban forces retreated to neighboring Kunduz Province.
The people of Khoja Ghaar streamed back home Wednesday on foot, in trucks and on donkeys; their goods were loaded on donkeys and even strapped to goats. Children ran to keep up with parents in what for many refugees would be a two-or three-day journey home -- 30 miles from refugee camps outside the former alliance military headquarters of Khawja Bahuaddin.
The U.N. Mine Action Program for Afghanistan estimates thousands of acres of land east of Taloqan have been mined.
