Wed, Oct 17, 2001 page6

• Veterans and boys, the `mojas' are getting ready foran attack on Kabul

  • THE GUARDIAN
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  Baba Sultan squeezes the flesh of his upper arm and shows the outline of a Russian bullet still buried under the skin. He has six bullet wounds in his body, taken over the past 20 years.

  "I haven't seen my home for three years," he says. "We are exhausted with this fighting."

  He pulls back the trouser of his left leg and reveals a shaft of shiny brown plastic with a wooden foot squeezed into a second-hand running shoe. The foot was acquired after an encounter with a Russian landmine in 1989.

  Now, at 40 and after 20 years of war -- fighting first against the Soviets and the past six years against the Taliban -- he would prefer to do battle against the might of the USSR than the hardline Islamists.

  "Fighting the Russians was fighting a technical war," he says. "In the fighting if 10 or 20 of them were injured or killed they would retreat. The Taliban are like crazy dogs. Hundreds of them can die but they never turn back."

  Men from two generations of mujahidin fighters who have known nothing but war are gathered in their resting house, a mud cabin with Kalashnikovs hanging from rusty hooks. They offer tea and boiled sweets.

  "We were told we should prepare for the battle to begin on Sunday but we are not so sure that it will happen now," Sultan says. "We will wait."

  Mir Wais, 16, another Northern Alliance fighter, says he can't remember his first action.

  His commander can: "I was 15 years old and I was on my bicycle. My job was to take my Makrov pistol and pull my bike out in front of a Russian truck going through my village. I shot the driver through the windscreen and stalled the first truck, then the rest of the mujahidin ambushed the convoy. When their tanks came we ran away."

  Since the US bombing began the Northern Alliance has insisted it is ready to move with a couple of hours of notice. Every male on the Shomali plain, which stretches north of Kabul, has years of experience fighting the Soviets or the Taliban -- often both.

  There is nothing else to do in this country without industry, commerce, even an economy. Men are unemployed, shopkeepers, or mojas. The women don't exist outside their family compounds.

  The Russians called the mujahidin dushi (ghosts). One recalled in his memoir The Hidden War how they would patrol the streets and see men smiling at them. The same men who would come in the night as dushis to kill them.

  Despite their experience of war the Northern Alliance has so far held back. First, due to the insistence of the US, who are opposed to the faction taking Kabul before a power-sharing transitional government is formed. Second, because they are waiting for the bombing raids to weaken the Taliban.

  "People are beginning to desert from them," Sultan says. "We have radio contact with some of them and they are waiting for the chance to come across."

  Stories of hundreds of deserters are circulating in the Shomali plain. They are relentlessly sought by the 130 journalists squeezed six to a room into the tiny town of Jabal Saraj. "Show us one then," we demand. Within minutes Mohammed Haider, a tall, bearded Afghan, is produced.

  He says he fought with the Taliban for a year and was paid US$250 a month: "There was no shortage of money, cigarettes or food at the Taliban front." He claims he deserted with 25 other men after the first night of bombing, by crossing a mountain range after slipping on to a mountain path on their way to the front.

  "We walked for one and half days," he says. "We were familiar with the routes over the mountains as some of us were from here. We had been looking for a way to get out for the past year, but on one side we had the mines and on the other side was the Taliban."

  He estimates that there are between 20,000 and 30,000 Taliban massed on the front lines north of Kabul. Some 10,000 are Arab fighters from Algeria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Chechnya and Sudan. "We were told to go to the front two weeks ago. They said it was the time of the jihad [holy war], but we were tired from fighting."

  The 35-year-old says the Taliban were well prepared for the US attacks. "Before the bombardment they brought everything they had to the front line, they are that kind of people. You don't think they didn't expect the US to attack after the big explosions in America?"

  He dismisses reports that Afghan fifth columnists within the Taliban ranks are preparing to take up arms against a force run by Pakistani and Arab fighters. "How can the Afghan Talis do anything? When we go to the front they give us the guns from the depot and when we get back from the front they take them from us again."

  Haider has seen the Arab fighters and does not expect them to give up easily.

  "They came to die as martyrs. I watched them fighting at Bagram. Forty of them fighting in a field and even when 35 of them are dead the other five are still standing and fighting."

  Outside the sun is going down on the dustbowl of the Shomali plain, home to hundreds of displaced people. Among them are Sultan's family. They have lived for three years between three mud walls covered with canvas. "If America helps us now and bombs their front lines we can take Kabul," he says. "We have 15,000 men but without them we can't hold it." He stretches his plastic leg out from underneath him and goes out to pray.

  The 16-year-old with a thin moustache and heavy Kalashnikov on his boy's shoulders stays to talk. "I had 12 days' training in the desert and then I went to the front. I don't know who I killed, I just started shooting for my country."
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