Handcuffed and weary, three self-confessed Taliban fighters revealed this week how they had crossed into Afghanistan from Pakistan to carry out “jihad” against coalition troops there after clerics in Pakistan told them that they were duty-bound as Muslims to do so. The young men - two Pakistanis and an Afghan - were captured on Tuesday after a fierce five-hour gunbattle in Afghanistan’s Paktika province, just a few kilometres from the Afghan-Pak border. During the battle, 24 of their fellow fighters were killed, with the Afghan army later showing their bloodied and broken bodies to reporters at an army base in Barmal district.The dead were mostly Afghans but also included Pakistanis, Chechens, Turks, one Arab and one Yemenite, an Afghan officer said, citing information from the three detained fighters, as well as captured identity cards and, in one case, a name on a bullet belt. “Mullahs in Pakistan were preaching to us that we are obliged to fight jihad in Afghanistan because there are foreign troops - there is an Angriz (British) invasion,” Alahuddin, one of the captured men, told reporters. “A Pakistani Taliban commander, Saifullah, introduced us to a guide who escorted us to Barmal,” he said. “Then he left and we joined a group already here and came to the ambush site.”
It was only AlahuddinÂ’s second day in Afghanistan and it went horribly wrong. His group of 32 Taliban lay in wait for an army convoy, launching a clumsy attack mainly with AK-47 machine guns. The Afghan soldiers and their International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) counterparts retaliated. Two columns of support quickly arrived and surrounded the fighters as attack helicopters were called in. After five hours of fighting, 24 Taliban and a soldier were dead. Some of the rebels not killed by the troops blew themselves up with their own grenades, Afghan soldiers said.
One of the dead had a Pakistani ID document on his chest when his body was shown to reporters, while the others had other papers on them that the Afghan army said gave their nationalities. Alahuddin said that he had been misled into believing that Afghanistan was overrun by foreign “infidels”, especially British forces, which have been hated since their 19th century wars in the region. “We were sent to Afghanistan blindly. We call on our other friends in Pakistan and say, ‘There is no jihad here, everybody is Muslim,’” he told AFP.
A few hours later, the three men were on the floor of a helicopter with their eyes taped shut before being taken to Kabul for interrogation. Alahuddin comes from Miranshah in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal area, which lies just on the other side of the border with Paktika province. Another of the captured men, Zahidullah, also hails from Miranshah. He said that he too had been brought into the fight by a mullah who had put him in touch with the Taliban. “We came to Afghanistan to carry out jihad against British forces - as Muslims we are obliged to do jihad against them, this is what we were told,” he said. The captured men had no identification documents to prove that they were Pakistanis. However an AFP reporter recognised their dialect as being from the Waziristan area.
General Murad Ali, the deputy commander of Afghanistan’s southeastern military corps, said he was proud of the actions of his men in the counterattack. He accused the Pakistani military of aiding the Islamists. “The cooperation of Pakistan with Taliban and Al Qaeda is visible,” Ali said. “They cross into Afghanistan even in areas where Pakistani posts are installed. ” His views appeared to be supported by political analyst Samina Ahmed, from the International Crisis Group (ICG), who this week reiterated criticism of the September 5 deal between Pakistan and pro-Taliban tribesmen. For “all practical purposes, now the Taliban are running the show,” she told a meeting in Brussels.