Eight Pieces of Empire (33 page)

Accordingly, after crossing the Amu Darya we boarded our bus headed for Mazar-e-Sharif and the desolately flat, boulder- and sand-strewn landscape that lay between the river and the city, said to be the burial place of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the son-in-law of Muhammad and his first follower, and thus a place of lively pilgrimage in better times.

These were not better times, and the best hotel in town was a filthy five-story wreck with intermittent running water. We checked in, which meant journalists fighting for keys from an old man holding a ring of them. My room was a closet with a rusty spring for a bed—no mattress, sheets, or anything else, for that matter; at least there was a kind of balcony nearby, overlooking Mazar’s blue-tiled mosque.

An odd quiet had descended over the city, so I asked Bahuladin what was happening. After conferring with some locals for a few moments, he returned with news: The day before, following an eleven-day siege by General Dostum’s horseback forces (accompanied by devastating US Air Force bombings) of a place called Kunduz, thousands of Taliban and their foreign associates had surrendered to the Northern Alliance and been herded into a massive earthen fortress called Qala i-Jongi just outside Mazar-e-Sharif, where they were being interrogated by Dostum’s expert handlers. The Americans, meanwhile, wanted the prisoners brought to an old airfield, possibly to make it easier to fly any big foreign fish that might be found out to Guantánamo Bay and other locations.

But the volatile General Dostum had overruled them; after all, these were his prisoners, and he would deal with them in a traditional way. First, Afghan fighters were allowed to hand in their weapons and go free; Dostum considered this an act of national reconciliation. Less explicably,
the Northern Alliance troops had not disarmed all of the several hundred foreign Taliban (mainly Pakistani Pashtuns) who had been brought to the fortress. This group of four hundred or so was told that if they surrendered, they were going to be set free. But once inside the fortress, it was evident they were prisoners and that they’d been duped. On the preceding afternoon, one had pulled the pin from a grenade, killing himself and some of Dostum’s fighters, and tensions were rising and spilling out of the prison and into Mazar-e-Sharif City itself.

The melee involved two very special men, who had apparently just arrived at Mazar-e-Sharif hours ahead of us.

One was Johnny Micheal Spann, a retired Marine and an agent with the ultrasecretive CIA Special Activities Division. With Spann was another CIA man, Dave Tyson. Both were tasked with weeding out the “real” foreigners from among the mass of prisoners, meaning non-Afghanstanis and Pakistanis. You might say they were looking for al-Qaeda–connected Arabs but also found the odd Turk, Uzbek, Uyghur, and Indonesian of interest too. According to accounts provided by the Northern Alliance and Taliban in attendance, Spann took a special interest in a young man who didn’t seem to speak Arabic or any “Muslim” language. He was lighter skinned and stood out from the rest of the Kunduz captives and finally admitted that he was neither Arab nor Afghani, but Irish. His Taliban cohorts had told him to employ this tactic to “avoid trouble.” Spann responded by asking the young man if he was a member of the Irish Republican Army and was once again met with stony silence. To intimidate the boy into talking, Tyson at one point told Spann (in the prisoner’s presence) that the “Irishman” would have to decide on his own whether to live or die. Still he didn’t talk.

This was John Walker Lindh, the twenty-year-old Californian convert to Islam who trekked to Afghanistan to join the Taliban after having undergone training in various Arab countries. He would eventually be spirited back to the United States and convicted. But that was later. Some of the foreign Taliban prisoners, enraged at Spann’s presence and at having bought the line that they would be freed, drew out their concealed
weapons. At least one threw a grenade. They quickly gained the upper hand and availed themselves of one of the many arms and ammo depots spread around the south side of the enormous fortress. They killed at least several dozen of their Northern Alliance guards and then turned on the two CIA men.

We heard shots ring out from the fortress, just a few miles away from our dumpy hotel. The shots mounted into a sustained roar and subsided sporadically. A few journalists already in the city who had entered Afghanistan via Tajikistan were already returning from the fortress, confirming that a savage battle was under way at Qala i-Jongi. We headed the other way; Bahuladin grabbed a taxi, and we set out for the fortress.

The Kabul actor-turned-war-front-translator sat in the front and extracted some opium paste wrapped in cellophane from a pocket, preparing to smoke it. He seemed entirely unconcerned about the dangers of heading toward the scene of the battle, and the continuing sounds of mortar rounds and explosions coming from that direction. He just smiled and smiled.

We soon closed on the Qala i-Jongi but were forced to stop by Northern Alliance troops, as outgoing mortar rounds were landing not far away. “Outgoing,” that is, from the fortress toward us. Exercising caution, I thought it best to study the edifice from a ditch. The dimensions of the nineteenth-century mud-brick structure were still impressive. The walls were pitched at a seventy-degree angle, and the fortress seemed to be several football fields long and at least one wide. Yes, it was an impressive, if Spartan-looking, structure—and one about to be blown into rubble.

Inside the fort, according to witnesses from both sides, Spann and Tyson tried to fight off the mob with near fanaticism. Tyson fired off clip after clip from an AK-47. Spann emptied his pistol before the prisoners tore him to pieces. He thus became the first American to die in Afghanistan.

Spann’s hopeless attempt to take on the hundreds of Taliban prisoners
had bought Tyson time enough to run along a wall and into the northern section of the prison, where he found a German television team. “Mind if I use your satellite telephone for a moment?” said Tyson, or something to that effect. Then, on camera—how could he ask the Germans not to film him while using their phone?—Tyson dialed up someone at the US embassy in Tashkent, gave the exact coordinates of the Qala i-Jongi, and begged for reinforcements.

Bahuladin and I were oblivious to this as we huddled in our ditch along the side of the road, listening to explosions coming from the fortress and the occasional mortar round landing outside, a few dozen yards away from us. The Northern Alliance fighters chuckled at my self-preservation efforts; explosions never fazed them after so many years of war.

Whatever had happened inside the fort seemed to be dying down, anyway. Now there were only short bursts of occasional fire, and I was starting to think it was time to take a closer look when a blinding flash lit up and a shock blast shook the ground we were standing on as an explosion went off in the southern section, which the Taliban had overrun, followed by a loud whooshing noise—likely a US guided bomb or a missile of some sort.

US helicopter gunships buzzed the fort all that night, as well as central Mazar. It was difficult to make out what they were up to, as the city was pitch black and there was no electricity. But our balcony faced westward, in the direction of Qala i-Jongi. We heard occasional explosions and saw flashes of light, but so far nothing like the all-out onslaught that had been rumored to be in the offing.

The next day, we headed to the fortress again to see what truths there were to report. Not surprisingly, we found perhaps a couple dozen US and UK Special Forces in place around it, evidently there to help direct the fighting against the Taliban and to coordinate air strikes. They had made a respectable attempt to blend in with the Afghans, dressing up in traditional robes and having grown beards. But while the “purdah” had a nice style element, it was patently obvious who was who—the Americans and British had been staying at safe houses in the city, were obviously
getting daily showers, and their air of cleanliness made then stand out from their unbathed Northern Alliance allies.

Northern Alliance troops perched upon the upper walls with automatic weapons and extra ammunition, shooting down into the southern area of the compound. What the cameras could not capture was the Taliban returning fire with small arms, shooting up. All other action was sporadic, such as a mortar round landing in the field next to the fortress where I was standing, doing an interview with NPR host Bob Edwards for
Morning Edition
. Then an Alliance commander stepped over to me and tapped at his watch, strongly suggesting I move myself and my equipment. Another air strike was on the way. I didn’t question his authority.

We vacated the area, and bombs were soon shaking the ground as we drove back into Mazar-e-Sharif, Bahuladin laughing about the guile of the escaped Taliban prisoners all the way.
“Blyad”
(“Fuck”), he cursed in Russian. “Man, but those Chechens have balls!” The Afghans, it turned out, were referring to any Russian-speaking Taliban volunteers as “Chechens,” a mistake that was to get into the vernacular of many foreign correspondents over those few days. It was a matter of confusion, not intentional. But it was wrong. Uzbeks and men from Russia’s various Muslim republics were the main fighters among the Russian speakers who had joined up with the Taliban. Chechens were still busy with their own war at home, and few, if any, were ever conclusively documented as having fought in Afghanistan.

When we returned to the fortress later, we learned that one of the US air strikes had missed its target by a few dozen meters, slamming into Dostum’s part of the fortress and killing more than a dozen Northern Alliance guys. An enormous part of one of the mud walls had collapsed, leaving a gaping hole in the Qala i-Jongi defenses, offering further proof—if any was needed—what modern high explosives can do to medieval-style adobe fortress walls.

And yet still the Taliban, trapped like rats in a cul-de-sac sewer, fought on.

Then, toward nightfall, we were given to understand that the Americans
had run out of patience and were going to bomb Qala i-Jongi into oblivion. The best place to watch the spectacle would be from the safety of my balcony with its view toward the fortress, I decided.

Darkness fell. The odd explosion rang out; an occasional flash of light flickered. The low-intensity battle continued. Then came a different sound, a sort of
whoosh
that must have been aircraft but felt like longrange missiles coming from hell itself as the anticipated earth-shattering bombardment commenced. Huge orange balls of fire mushroomed into the sky, followed by smaller explosions when the initial blast had clearly detonated some of the tons of munitions General Dostum kept stored at the fortress. There was almost a sick beauty to it all, and flames shot into the heavens all night.

When morning came, we returned to the fortress to see what was left of it. Remarkably, there were still periodic shots coming from inside the complex, and the press was not being allowed in. That would take until the next morning.

When we were finally allowed to enter, it was a scene of absolute carnage, medieval in its choreography, gruesome beyond anything I had seen to that point in a decade of covering wars. Hundreds of bodies were strewn about in all sorts of warped poses of death, probably a spectacle Tamerlane would have delighted in. One man’s chest had been splayed open with what must have been a bayonet or some sort of sword. Others lay next to some of Dostum’s dead horses who had gotten caught up in the fighting. There was another group lying on the ground next to one another, hands bound and thus probably shot execution-style. Wandering around amid the sea of bodies, now attracting flies, was a small group of foreign war reporters. A battle-hardened, thick-skinned lot, some of them close to war-junkie status. I knew many of them. Even their mouths were agape at the slaughter and the sight of the bodies of the dead Taliban being tossed into flatbed trucks—four, five, and six deep, looking like livestock carcasses being loaded for processing at a meatpacking plant.

The Northern Alliance “victors”—who had just lost more than a hundred men in the battle—meanwhile, took a different approach. Many
joked or laughed and posed for pictures next to the dead Taliban, putting their boots atop lifeless heads while smiling for the cameras. Another group was arguing over war booty—the bombs poured onto the fortress had blown open a storage depot containing automatic rifles with retractable coils—World War II–vintage stuff. They were still wrapped in old brown wax paper and were regarded as a real find.

Nearby there was the remainder of a staircase going into the basement of a building that had been blown away in the bombing. A couple of Northern Alliance men stood next to the hole. As I stood a few feet away recording, one held a grenade, pulled the pin and tossed it into the basement, laughing hysterically. It exploded with the predictable
kaboom
, sending the two Alliance fighters into even greater hysterical mirth. “There are still a few of them left down there,” said one of the fighters.

And there were. A couple of days later, when we had left the charnel house better known as Qala i-Jongi because the battle seemed over, the Alliance forces got tired of tossing grenades and flooded the basement with water and diesel fuel, and the last starving, wounded, and dying fifty Taliban prisoners finally gave themselves up, begging for mercy.

Among those to ascend the stairs was the “Irishman” Taliban, John Walker Lindh, known to his associates by his nom de guerre, Sulayman al-Faris. (He would be taken away by CIA officials, interrogated on a navy ship, and finally be sent to the United States, where he would eventually be given a twenty-year prison sentence on a variety of charges related to his Taliban life after a plea bargain designed to save him from worse.)

Then General Dostum arrived, walking nonchalantly through the carnage and up into the terraced compound that overlooked the fortress grounds. Sipping tea and nursing what looked to be one of his common hangovers, he gave an impromptu press conference, emphasizing that the Taliban prisoners had been treated “humanely,” but that his men had erred by not handcuffing the lot and even failing to check some for concealed weapons. The prisoners, he suggested, had violated a kind of unwritten Afghan trust and had only themselves to blame for the slaughter.
(More serious were the allegations that the men who surrendered to Dostum had been packed into airless, scorching container trucks, and that several hundred of them had suffocated to death in the process. The general denied this, although he tried to prevent the examination of mass graves discovered years later that seemed to give credence to the ghastly story.)