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AP. 28 November 2001. Afghan Uprising Raises Questions. QALAI JANGHI FORTRESS -- Corpses with bound hands, dust mixed with dried blood, spent mortar rounds littering fields where horses grazed: No part of this massive fortress was left unstained by death in one of the most ferocious battles of the war on the Taliban. A field inside the fortress was strewn with about 50 bodies. An Associated Press photographer Wednesday saw that some corpses had their arms tied with cloth -- despite assurances by a key northern alliance commander that none had been tied up. Full details may never be known of the uprising by Taliban who were being held prisoner at Qalai Janghi fortress near the city of Mazar-e-Sharif or of the fierce assault that ended the rebellion. Red Cross workers on Wednesday began hauling bodies away, and with the remains likely went much of the evidence of what happened. The questions include how the prisoners -- including Pakistanis, Chechens, Arabs and other non-Afghans -- got access to weapons, and whether some prisoners were executed after northern alliance troops gained control or died in the battle. Nearly all the prisoners involved in the uprising were killed, alliance officials say -- perhaps around 450 fighters, though the precise number was uncertain. The uprising was put down with the help of U.S. airstrikes, U.S. special forces and other covert forces believed to be British. At the Pentagon on Wednesday, Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem said American officials do not have a clear picture of what happened. "There's a lot of questions that obviously need to be asked or answers that need to be obtained as to how that came about, or how that can be prevented in the future." What is known is that the uprising began on Sunday and lasted three days -- another chapter in the bloody history of Mazar-e-Sharif, a city that has swapped hands repeatedly since 1997. It was the first major city to fall from Taliban control under the U.S. onslaught on Afghanistan aimed at rooting out Osama bin Laden and his terror network. At the fortress, soldiers were seen cutting the bindings off the bodies with knives and scissors. One soldier used a piece of metal to pry gold fillings from a dead man's teeth. Bodies dotted the dusty ground and dry scrub of the compound, some falling together in trenches, many shoeless. In another field, the bodies of many horses lay with gaping wounds. Swaggering through the fortress Wednesday in a long brown robe cinched by a wide black leather belt, northern alliance Gen. Rashid Dostum insisted the prisoners were treated properly but had nonetheless rebelled. "We did not tie them. We brought them here to be safer," he told reporters. Dostum is one of Afghanistan's most feared and notorious warlords. When his fighters took Mazar-e-Sharif from the Taliban in 1997, they threw prisoners into wells and tossed in grenades to finish them off, the United Nations reported. Northern alliance soldiers in the compound were seen tossing a grenade into a gutter leading to a basement in one of the buildings, presumably to flush out any remaining prisoners. Other explosions rang out through the day at the fort, sending up clouds of black smoke -- some from the many pieces of undetonated ordnance. Once the fighting started Sunday at the fortress, the prisoners seized a cache of weapons, holed themselves up in the southern part of the fortress and lobbed mortars toward the headquarters building that crowns the northern wall. To conserve ammunition, they fired only single shots from Kalashnikov rifles. Hundreds of alliance fighters streamed toward the fortress and several dozen U.S. special forces troops were seen moving into the fortress and coordinating airstrikes from outside. The Americans wore desert camouflage and carried guns with laser scopes. Other troops, apparently British, did more to attempt to blend in -- covering their faces with black-and-white checkered scarves. Earlier this week, Amnesty International called for an inquiry into the "proportionality of the response" by alliance fighters and U.S. and British military personnel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barry Stoller http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ProletarianNews ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9WB2D Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
