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| 3'000 Forgotten Mujaahideen Slowly Dying |
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| mujaahid |
| 03/15/02 at 15:36:40 |
| With no medicine and little food, detainees are slowly dying SHIBARGHAN, Afghanistan On most days, lunchtime at the Jowzjan Jail opens with a macabre display of the sick and dying Taliban prisoners, carried from their cells and laid in the dirt for a few moments of fresh air and sun. . Splayed in silence atop baby blue blankets, the men appear dead. But then a limb moves or a groan rises, and the guards understand that this prisoner or that is well enough to be hauled back inside when lunchtime is done. . "Every 15 days or so, one of them dies," said General Jura Beg, the warden. "We don't have enough food for them anymore. We don't have medicine." . So unfolds the fate of the 3,000 Taliban prisoners brought here after the U.S.-backed campaign against them. Most were captured in Kunduz, where thousands of Taliban and Al Qaeda soldiers threatened to fight to the death but surrendered instead. . At the time, there was talk of handing the men over to the United Nations. There were promises, by Afghans with little experience in the matter, that the prisoners would be treated handsomely. Now, nearly four months later, most such talk has died away. With the war still smoldering and Afghanistan led by a fledging government, few people of consequence appear to have time for the prisoners now. . The Americans were here in the beginning, photographing and tagging the inmates, trying to select the worst ones. They took about 100 to Guantanamo, the U.S. base in Cuba, Afghan officials said. The Uzbek government took at least 10 of its citizens. The warden freed about 250, most of them either very old or very sick, before the Muslim Eid al-Adha celebration last month. . The remaining prisoners, all of them Afghan or Pakistani, appear to have been largely forgotten. "Everyone thinks: Maybe today, maybe tomorrow," said Makhsood Khan, 26, a Pakistani captured at Kunduz. "We count the days." . Standing outside his cell the other day, Khan reeked of the narrow cell he shares with about 50 of his unbathed brethren. Khan, like so many of those captured with the Taliban, portrayed himself as a largely innocent man. . Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Khan said, he was enlisted by his cousin, Nasir Ahmed, a journalist for a militant newspaper called Islamic Attack, to join him on a trip to Afghanistan. His cousin needed a photographer. . Khan, an illiterate auto mechanic from Islamabad, said he had seen in his cousin's invitation a way to fulfill his duty to be a good Muslim. "I was a photographer for the jihad," he said. "Jihad has many aspects: fighting, newspapers and taking photographs." . Khan and the other Pakistanis imprisoned here, about 800, face an especially uncertain future. As foreigners who took part in a civil war, they will have to depend not just on the persistence of Pakistan to get them out but also on the mercy of the Afghans to let them go. Some Afghan officials have talked of putting the men on trial in Afghanistan, or of turning them over to Pakistan. . Beg, the warden and a friend of Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord who controls the prison, said no decision had been made about the prisoners' fate. . From his office overlooking the prison yard, Beg sighed like a man who had long ago given up. He has 3,000 men in 40 cells, in a prison designed to hold 800. He has had to reduce food rations for the prisoners, he said, because of government cutbacks. Lacking medicine, the handful of doctors available at the jail are able to do little more than provide comfort for those who have fallen ill. Source: International Herald Tribune |
| Re: 3'000 Forgotten Mujaahideen Slowly Dying |
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| Ghurabah |
| 03/16/02 at 11:00:29 |
| [slm] The title makes the Mujahideen seem on the losing side.. which is bull in my opinion. People, don't believe the mainstream media, don't rely on it too much, all they're trying to do lower the morale of the Muslims. Remember.The time is very near.Islam will win in the end.Insha'Allah. [wlm] |
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