Ex-Captive’s Account of a Brazen Taliban Force Bent on Taking Kunduz
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Version 0 of 1. Stephen Farrell, a reporter for The New York Times, was held by the Taliban near Kunduz, Afghanistan, when he was kidnapped in 2009 while reporting on civilian casualties from a NATO airstrike. He was rescued in a British military raid in which his Times colleague Sultan M. Munadi, and a British paratrooper, Cpl. John Harrison, were killed. We sat looking at the high walls of a NATO compound perhaps 500 yards away across open farmland on the outskirts of Kunduz City. So close, but so far. Inside the car, our Taliban kidnappers sat relaxed, despite being parked in a vehicle filled with weapons in plain sight of their enemy. They wanted to make a propaganda point to their captive audience: that they could operate with impunity so close to NATO positions in Kunduz, even in daylight. It was a pattern the fighters would repeat throughout the four days that my colleague Sultan Munadi and I spent in the Taliban’s captivity on the edge of Kunduz in September 2009. They showed us off to villagers as trophies. They sat us out in the open as they drove along mostly deserted roads at night with their headlights on, Taliban music blaring from loudspeakers, almost as if they were inviting attack. The insurgents seemed utterly confident that Afghan government forces would not stray off the nearby Kabul-to-Kunduz highway to risk confrontation in what the insurgents regarded as their territory, beyond the Kunduz River and the tree line. During this time we did see some Afghan police trucks. The Taliban were driving them. It would be rash to draw too many conclusions about the situation today in Kunduz Province, a complex and ethnically mixed region of northern Afghanistan, from one snapshot of a few villages six years ago. But in many ways, 2009 in Kunduz foreshadowed the events of this week — two periods of Taliban resurgence bookended by the 2010-13 American troop surge in the province. As my colleague James Dao has written after his experiences accompanying those United States forces, that brief troop surge might have changed the security and economic situation of the city for a while. Despite all the Afghan and American sacrifice, though, the operation did not seem to make any lasting shift in the underlying social, political and military dynamics of the place. Although Kunduz is far from the Taliban’s southern heartland, in 2009 it was becoming increasingly troubled by insurgent attacks on the Afghan government and its international allies. Perhaps the most brazen of these was when Taliban fighters ambushed and hijacked NATO fuel tankers along a strategic border supply route in early September. That led NATO’s German commander in the region to call in an American airstrike that killed 142 people, many of them civilians. It was while reporting about the civilian casualties of that airstrike that Sultan and I were kidnapped at the scene of the bombing in Chardara, a cluster of mostly Pashtun villages a mile or two southwest of Kunduz City. What our enforced stay with the insurgents made clear was that the Taliban were a well-entrenched part of the political and social landscape in that area. By day, the 200-mile main highway that links the city to Kabul was passable. But even with NATO and Afghan forces at hand, the risk of Taliban attack had made the road unsafe anywhere near nightfall. The Taliban, meanwhile, seemed to move with impunity, commanding the network of lanes through the orchards, hedgerows and well-irrigated rice and wheat fields in the countryside. Given that still-recent experience of NATO death from the air, I expected the insurgents to be wary of the drones that we could hear in the air above us. But they seemed not to be bothered by them at all as they threw us onto motorcycles and into cars, moving us from farmhouse to farmhouse. Less than half a day into our captivity, they even gave up hiding us indoors, and let us sit in open courtyards. Sometimes they would point up to the buzzing in the sky and laugh, shouting “George Bush!” or “Tony Blair!” or pointing their Kalashnikovs into the sky in futile bravado. When night fell, dozens of Taliban fighters would sit together in the open to break their Ramadan fast, their weapons all piled up casually against the wall and their pickup trucks parked together in one large, inviting target. There was even a room-size brightly colored carpet spread out in the middle. It might as well have been a bull’s-eye. As this behavior persisted over days, it seemed that the Taliban fighters’ attitude to drones was much the same as American soldiers’ attitude to the roadside bombs and improvised explosive devices that are a deadly fact of life on patrols: They treated them as unpleasant and potentially deadly occupational hazards. But the devices did not seem to keep the Taliban fighters from doing what they do. Likewise with electronic surveillance — they must have known that the Americans were likely to be listening to their phone conversations on the basic Nokia and Motorola handsets that they used whenever they could get electricity. But they talked about us freely, with an openness that bordered on recklessness. As for the villagers in whose houses we stayed, it was impossible to discern what they thought of the Taliban, or of their foreign “guests.” From the villagers we interviewed at the site of the NATO bombing there was clear anger at the American and German forces. But when the Taliban rushed in to abduct us, the locals fled just as we did, obviously alarmed. From a few muttered words of advice and a grimace here and there by the Afghans in some of the houses in which we were held, it seemed that not everyone was delighted at the late-night knock on the door from an armed Taliban force demanding sanctuary. But no one turned them away. That would have been foolhardy in the face of an armed group that, doctors at the Kunduz hospital had earlier told us, had killed one of the fuel tanker drivers by beating him until his skull shattered. Such was the Taliban punishment for working with NATO, and the locals were clearly aware of it. Still, even though the Taliban could have used force to get anything they wanted, it was noticeable that as they drove around the villages, our guards insisted on paying for the gas that they used, apparently intent on winning hearts and minds. Some of the same behavior — a swaggering arrogance coupled with conscious efforts to win over the locals — has been widely reported over recent weeks as the Taliban have pressed their Kunduz offensive. You do not have to imagine the Taliban controlling these towns and villages. They have done it before. They are confident they can do it again. |