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Times Newspapers Limited, September 23, 2001

 

 

Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Limited 

Sunday Times (London)

 

September 23, 2001, Sunday

 

SECTION: Features

 

LENGTH: 2687 words

 

HEADLINE: Living with the sins of the pure ones

 

BYLINE: Marie Colvin

 

BODY:

Who are the Taliban? Marie Colvin met them in Afghanistan as their revolutionary zeal started to push the country to ruin

 

On my last visit to the Taliban's foreign ministry in Kandahar, I had to dodge a dozen donkeys driven by two boys with sticks just to get to the wooden door. As I knocked, a few sheep picked their way through potholes in the dirt road outside. More sheep wandered around the internal courtyard, nosing the skeleton of a discarded bed.

 

The foreign ministry is one of the better buildings in this isolated town, the seat of government for the Taliban. There are no obvious targets for military attack. Not because Kandahar is well defended, but because the mullahs rule in such makeshift conditions that it is hard to think of any target worth a $ 1m cruise missile.

 

The Taliban believe their Islamic regime, not their infrastructure, is the real target, and that their refusal to hand over Osama Bin Laden to America is part of their battle in the cause of Allah. That should come as no surprise. They have been as unyielding in their enforcement of an extremist Islamic rule as they have in their response to the American ultimatum.

 

To many Islamic scholars, their behaviour is misguided, having as little to do with Islam as the whisky consumption of sheikhs in the Gulf. But this is a naive and isolated leadership. The Taliban are the sons of a country engulfed by war for 20 years. None has any education beyond the Koran; few speak any language other than their own.

 

Mullah Mohammed Omar, their leader, has left Afghanistan only once, for medical treatment in Pakistan after losing an eye fighting Soviet forces during their occupation of Afghanistan. The restrictive rules the Taliban place on the Afghan population reflect not just Islam but also the culture and customs of the conservative Pashtun villages from which the Taliban emerged.

 

This is not the first crisis they have faced because of Bin Laden's presence in their mountainous country. After the bombings in 1998 of the American embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, in which Bin Laden was also implicated, the Taliban were ill-prepared for the intense international attention focused on Afghanistan.

 

They are certainly no diplomats. When I asked to see Omar, I received a personal reply, hand-written on pink paper and delivered to my hostel in Kandahar. He was so direct that it was difficult to take offence.

 

"I am extremely busy and I only receive visits from those who are very important and highly responsible," he wrote. "As women in our society do not have very important responsibilities, up to now the necessity of receiving any woman is not felt."

 

Since taking power, he is not known to have met a non-Muslim, or a woman outside his family. But he did answer my questions about his support for Bin Laden.

 

"We will never allow anybody to use our land for political or military purposes," he wrote, obliquely critical of the man he calls an honoured guest. "There cannot be two different emirates (governments) in Afghanistan."

 

The same point was emphasised in a three-hour discussion I had with Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakil, an adviser to Omar and the Taliban's unofficial foreign envoy.

 

"We have cut off his (satellite) telephone and have made it clear to him that any communication with any other person outside the country will be a violation of the rules, regulations and laws of the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan," Mutawakil said.

 

He made it clear that, if the Taliban were given evidence of Bin Laden's guilt, they would put him on trial. "He will face the justice of a sharia court but we will never consider that he will be turned over to the jurisdiction of the non-Muslims," he said.

 

Mutawakil was soft-spoken, articulate and thoughtful; none of the Taliban members I met was the wild-eyed fanatic of caricature. They will be no more yielding in this crisis, but that is not to say they support the September 11 hijackings and murder of more than 6,000 people.

 

The Taliban and Bin Laden have very different goals. The Taliban have almost no interest in the world outside their borders. They want to create their vision of a pure Islamic utopia on earth within Afghanistan. Bin Laden, on the other hand, has declared a personal jihad against the West.

 

Bin Laden himself recognises their differences, although the precariousness of his position does not seem to have circumscribed his actions, if the Americans and British have the evidence they seem to.

 

"There are two camps in the Taliban," Bin Laden told an Arab visitor as they sipped sweet tea in a cave headquarters hollowed into the rock face above Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. "There are the pragmatists, who don't want Arabs like me ruining their country; they say leave us alone, we want to rebuild our country. The Russians left, so you should leave too. Then there are what you could call the radical camp in the Taliban. They say it would be un-Islamic to kick me out. They remind the others of the Islamic custom that if someone seeks refuge in your tribe you have to protect him, even if your tribe is wiped out."

 

The visitor found Bin Laden completely unapologetic about the ruin he might be visiting on his hosts. He said his only regret was that he had not died a martyr in the holy war against the Russians, and that he hoped soon to die a martyr so that he would "go to heaven and rest for ever".

 

Given their differences with Bin Laden, why are the Taliban so unyielding to western demands for him to be handed over?

 

The answer lies in their history. Their strength has never been military prowess, whatever is said about indomitable Afghan fighters. Taliban means "student". Like Omar, most of the Taliban fought the Soviet invaders from 1979 but went home when Moscow's troops were driven out in 1989. They resumed their studies in the Islamic schools that teach the Koran by rote. Omar went back to being a local preacher in his mosque in Sanghisar, a small village north of Kandahar.

 

As they studied, Afghanistan plummeted into civil war. Local mujaheddin military commanders became rapacious warlords. Commanders set up checkpoints and extorted huge sums from travellers. If they could not pay, they were tortured or killed. Women were raped. It became unsafe to walk on the streets. Kabul, virtually untouched during 10 years of Soviet occupation, was destroyed by shelling between competing Afghan warlords.

 

People in Kandahar still recount the myths of that time, whether or not they support the Taliban today. It is impossible to tell how much is truth; the important thing is that people believe them.

 

The worst tale I heard was one explanation for the shattered state of the market in Kandahar, where every building shows evidence of shelling. In the chaos, people in Kandahar say, two commanders confronted each other with tanks in the market, disputing the possession of a beautiful young boy that each wanted as a homosexual partner. They shelled each other, killing civilians and traders without a thought. They both survived. The Taliban hanged both men when they took Kandahar.

 

The myth of Omar's re-emergence is equally uncheckable, but equally told as truth by everyone in Kandahar. The story goes like this: Omar had retired to Sanghisar, where he lived in a mud hut in the grounds of the local madrasah or Islamic school. He was not a particularly sociable fellow. He would arrive at the mosque, lead morning prayers, then take tea and study the Koran.

 

Angry as he may have been at the descent of Afghanistan into chaos after the defeat of the Soviet forces, he did nothing until 1994, when villagers came to tell him of the kidnap of two teenage girls from Sanghisar. They had been taken at one of the local warlord's checkpoints near the village and raped. Omar gathered two dozen former guerrillas like himself. Armed with Kalashnikovs, they rescued the girls and hanged the checkpoint commander from the barrel of a gun on a Soviet tank.

 

The rest of the story is no myth. Omar never went back to the mud-walled mosque. He simply kept going, calling the students to arms. Within two years, Kabul had fallen and Omar had been voted Amir-ul-Momineen, the commander of the faithful, the supreme spiritual authority in the 90% of Afghanistan that his organisation controls.

 

How did it happen? Essentially, the Taliban did not have to fight. Afghans were so exhausted by the war with the Soviet Union and terrified by the civil war between their own commanders afterwards that they greeted the Taliban with open arms. Anyone who could restore order seemed a saviour, and that was the Taliban's promise.

 

Sometimes they bought off local commanders; mostly, it was enough for the Taliban to appear on the horizon with fluttering white flags, symbolising their Islamic purity. They rooted out -often brutally -the military commanders turned brigands.

 

A former Afghan military commander, now resident in London in opposition to the Taliban, recalled that he at first welcomed the Taliban troops.

 

"I was living in Kandahar when all law and order had broken down and 700 families had taken refuge from the factional fighting in Kandahar airport," he said. "When the Taliban arrived in November 1994, we went to war with them for a day because they were strangers to us. Then, over the walkie-talkie, Mullah Omar told us he simply wanted passage to the city to kick out the thieves and checkpoint pirates and to stop the civil war. After they took Kandahar and kicked out all the thieves, the families in the airport were grateful to the Taliban because they could all go home."

 

So what went wrong? A lot, and not just for the West. An official of the Taliban foreign ministry came to visit me after my interview with Mutawakil. Officially, the reason for his visit was that he wanted to use my satellite phone to talk to relatives in Iran. The one-line foreign ministry phone could only receive incoming calls. It was provided by Pakistan, and the authorities there would not pay for international calls. (Pakistan funded, trained and armed the Taliban from the beginning of their long march, seeing them as a force for regional stability, but that support had waned even before the attacks in New York and Washington.) Unofficially, the reason for his visit was that he wanted to leave Afghanistan. He was young, in his mid-twenties, wore the black turban of the Taliban clerics and was one of the few people in Afghanistan who had anything approaching a job. But he wanted out. He couldn't live like this. He spoke English -didn't I agree he spoke it well? If he came to England, could I find him a job?

 

I had several similar conversations, with whoever was brave enough to speak to one of the few foreigners to visit Kandahar; and there was also anger among the civilian population at Bin Laden. Bizarrely, they resented the disappearance of their falcons -Bin Laden loves falcon hunting and had captured all the local falcons for his own pleasure.

 

Afghans chafe under the Taliban reign. Initially, people welcomed the restoration of law and order; one truck driver said that before the Taliban came, there were at least 200 checkpoints on the road from Kandahar to Herat, all demanding bribes. But then the Taliban began to enforce a severe version of sharia, descended from the strict Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. Men were imprisoned if their beards were not long enough; women were constrained by regulations that ranged from a ban on working to a ban on noisy shoes (they might incite lust in men).

 

The Taliban are at pains to say women should be treated equally. Mutawakil told me that the Taliban were not against women being educated, just that they had to be educated separately, and there was not enough money to educate all Afghanistan's boys, much less the girls. When they had the money, the facilities and treatment would be equal, he said.

 

That is never going to happen. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. About 1m have fled their homes in the past three years of drought. Thousands of others are now fleeing before the threat of an American-led assault. But the Taliban seem determined to go down with the ship.

 

Even if it means the end to their social experiment, the Taliban led by Omar will never give up Bin Laden. Despite the ruling from 1,000 clerics in the shura (council) last week that Bin Laden should be asked to leave voluntarily, this is a consultative body that can be overruled by Omar.

 

He feels a debt of gratitude to Bin Laden: when the Taliban had no military expertise, Bin Laden persuaded generals from the opposition to come over to their side. Since then, Bin Laden has provided the Taliban with Arab fighters against the Northern Alliance, whose leader, Ahmed Shah Masood, was assassinated days before the attacks on America, and money to build the little infrastructure they have.

 

More personally, Bin Laden built homes for himself and Omar side by side on Herat Street in the heart of Kandahar. Omar's house is surrounded by a white wall that encloses a small garden and a mosque, where he and Bin Laden sometimes pray together. The bond is in blood; whatever the cost, Omar will never give up his "honoured guest".

 

Additional reporting: Annie Mills

 

INSIDE THE TALIBAN: A GUIDE TO ITS LEADERS

 

MULLAH OMAR Taliban leader

 

Known as Amir-ul-Momineen (commander of the faithful), the 40-year-old Taliban leader lives in Kandahar. While running a small Islamic school in 1994 he heard about the abduction and gang rape of some local girls and - so the story goes - gathered together a group of taliban (religious students) to rescue them. Their success led to the taliban becoming an armed militia, with Omar as leader. As a child Omar had very little education and he has only basic literacy. His family were so poor he did not wear shoes until he was 13. From 16 he fought against the Russians, sustaining a bad eye injury during their occupation.

 

This is a rare picture of Mullah Omar; being photographed is against sharia law This conflict led to his only trip abroad, when he was treated by the Red Cross in Pakistan. His bad eye is always shut, but sometimes he wears glasses. He is a well built man, about 5ft 11in tall. He continues to use a peasant dialect and goes fishing with his friend Osama Bin Laden. Omar has four wives and eight or nine children. In 1999 a bomb blew up his home, killing three of his children by his first wife and two of his brothers.

 

MULLAH GHAZI Deputy leader

 

Deputy leader for only three months, the 38-year-old Ghazi is at the heart of the Taliban, informing Omar in all his decisions, and organising the armed forces. His role is to lead the shura (the Taliban government), and the public perception of him is as a loyal, just statesman. An experienced soldier who ought against the Russians, Ghazi's real name is Mullah Mohammed, but after shooting down two Russian helicopters he was given his new name, which means miracle. He sustained a bullet to his right arm during the incident.

 

Vowing not to marry during the Russian occupation, he now has one wife and five children.

 

MULLAH NOORUDIN TURABI Minister of justice

 

The Taliban's minister for justice has been at the heart of the organisation from its inception. He became well known in Afghanistan during the 1980s, when he lost an eye and a leg while removing Russian landmines. Incredibly devout, he prays five times a day and often fasts outside Ramadan. After blowing up the BamiyanBuddha statues earlier this year (a symbol of national heritage carved into an Afghanistan mountainside) Turabi justified the decision with the simple answer: 'We have obeyed the order of Allah.

 

MULLAH ABAS Minister of the interior

 

Formerly a commander of a small group of 15-20 mujaheddin in the Orzgan province, he is a now a prominent member of the shura and mayor of Kandahar. Fiercely protective of theTaliban's public image, he threatens anyone who criticises their rule in Afghanistan. He is married, with one wife.