posted on September 29, 2001 08:31:05 PM
I was one of the Taliban's torturers: I crucified people
(Filed: 30/09/2001)
In an astonishing interview with Christina Lamb, the Afghan leader's former bodyguard reveals the full brutality of the fundamentalist regime sheltering Osama bin Laden
"YOU must become so notorious for bad things that when you come into an area people will tremble in their sandals. Anyone can do beatings and starve people. I want your unit to find new ways of torture so terrible that the screams will frighten even crows from their nests and if the person survives he will never again have a night's sleep."
These were the instructions of the commandant of the Afghan secret police to his new recruits. For more than three years one of those recruits, Hafiz Sadiqulla Hassani, ruthlessly carried out his orders. But sickened by the atrocities that he was forced to commit, last week he defected to Pakistan, joining a growing number of Taliban officials who are escaping across the border.
In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, he reveals for the first time the full horror of what has been happening in the name of religion in Afghanistan. Mr Hassani has the pinched face and restless hands of a man whose night hours are as haunted as any of his victims. Now aged 30, he does not, however, fit the militant Islamic stereotype usually associated with the Taliban.
Married with a wife and one-year-old daughter, he holds a degree in business studies, having been educated in Pakistan, where he grew up as a refugee while his father and elder brothers fought in the jihad against the Russians. His family was well off, owning land and property in Kandahar to which they returned after the war.
"Like many people, I did not become a Talib by choice," he explained. "In early 1998 I was working as an accountant here in Quetta when I heard that my grandfather - who was 85 - had been arrested by the Taliban in Kandahar and was being badly beaten. They would only release him if he provided a member of his family as a conscript, so I had to go."
Mr Hassani at first was impressed by the Taliban. "It had been a crazy situation after the Russians left, the country was divided by warring groups all fighting each other. In Kandahar warlords were selling everything, kidnapping young girls and boys, robbing people, and the Taliban seemed like good people who brought law and order."
So he became a Taliban "volunteer", assigned to the secret police. Many of his friends also joined up as land owners in Kandahar were threatened that they must either ally themselves with the Taliban or lose their property. Others were bribed to join with money given to the Taliban by drug smugglers, as Afghanistan became the world's largest producer of heroin.
At first, Mr Hassani's job was to patrol the streets at night looking for thieves and signs of subversion. However, as the Taliban leadership began issuing more and more extreme edicts, his duties changed.
Instead of just searching for criminals, the night patrols were instructed to seek out people watching videos, playing cards or, bizarrely, keeping caged birds. Men without long enough beards were to be arrested, as was any woman who dared venture outside her house. Even owning a kite became a criminal offence.
The state of terror spread by the Taliban was so pervasive that it began to seem as if the whole country was spying on each other. "As we drove around at night with our guns, local people would come to us and say there's someone watching a video in this house or some men playing cards in that house," he said.
"Basically any form of pleasure was outlawed," Mr Hassani said, "and if we found people doing any of these things we would beat them with staves soaked in water - like a knife cutting through meat - until the room ran with their blood or their spines snapped. Then we would leave them with no food or water in rooms filled with insects until they died.
"We always tried to do different things: we would put some of them standing on their heads to sleep, hang others upside down with their legs tied together. We would stretch the arms out of others and nail them to posts like crucifixions.
"Sometimes we would throw bread to them to make them crawl. Then I would write the report to our commanding officer so he could see how innovative we had been."
Here, sitting in the stillness of an orchard in Quetta sipping tea as the sun goes down, he finds it hard to explain how he could have done such things. "We Afghans have grown too used to violence," is all he can offer. "We have lost 1.5 million people. All of us have brothers and fathers up there."
After Kandahar, he was put in charge of secret police cells in the towns of Ghazni and then Herat, a beautiful Persian city in western Afghanistan that had suffered greatly during the Soviet occupation and had been one of the last places to fall to the Taliban.
Herat had always been a relatively liberal place where women would dance at weddings and many girls went to school - but the Taliban were determined to put an end to all that. Mr Hassani and his men were told to be particularly cruel to Heratis.
It was his experience of that cruelty that made Mr Hassani determined to let the world know what was happening in Afghanistan. "Maybe the worst thing I saw," he said, "was a man beaten so much, such a pulp of skin and blood, that it was impossible to tell whether he had clothes on or not. Every time he fell unconscious, we rubbed salt into his wounds to make him scream.
"Nowhere else in the world has such barbarity and cruelty as in Afghanistan. At that time I swore an oath that I will devote myself to the Afghan people and telling the world what is happening."
Before he could escape, however, because he comes from the same tribe, he spent time as a bodyguard for Mullah Omar, the reclusive spiritual leader of the Taliban.
"He's medium height, slightly fat, with an artificial green eye which doesn't move, and he would sit on a bed issuing instructions and giving people dollars from a tin trunk," said Mr Hassani. "He doesn't say much, which is just as well as he's a very stupid man. He knows only how to write his name `Omar' and sign it.
"It is the first time in Afghanistan's history that the lower classes are governing and by force. There are no educated people in this administration - they are all totally backward and illiterate.
"They have no idea of the history of the country and although they call themselves mullahs they have no idea of Islam. Nowhere does it say men must have beards or women cannot be educated; in fact, the Koran says people must seek education."
He became convinced that the Taliban were not really in control. "We laughed when we heard the Americans asking Mullah Omar to hand over Osama bin Laden," he said. "The Americans are crazy. It is Osama bin Laden who can hand over Mullah Omar - not the other way round."
While stationed in Kandahar, he often saw bin Laden in a convoy of Toyota Land Cruisers all with darkened windows and festooned with radio antennae. "They would whizz through the town, seven or eight cars at a time. His guards were all Arabs and very tall people, or Sudanese with curly hair."
He was also on guard once when bin Laden joined Mullah Omar for a bird shoot on his estate. "They seemed to get on well," he said. "They would go fishing together, too - with hand grenades."
The Arabs, according to Mr Hassani, have taken de facto control of his country. "All the important places of Kandahar are now under Arab control - the airport, the military courts, the tank command."
Twice he attended Taliban training camps and on both occasions they were run by Arabs as well as Pakistanis. "The first one I went to lasted 10 days in the Yellow Desert in Helmand province, a place where the Saudi princes used to hunt, so it has its own airport.
It was incredibly well guarded and there were many Pakistanis there, both students from religious schools and military instructors. The Taliban is full of Pakistanis."
He was told that if he died while fighting under the white flag of the Taliban, he and his family would go to paradise. The soldiers were given blank marriage certificates signed by a mullah and were encouraged to "take wives" during battle, basically a licence to rape.
When Mr Hassani was sent to the front line in Bagram, north of Kabul, a few months ago, he saw a chance to escape. "Our line was attacked by the Northern Alliance and they almost defeated us. Many of my friends were killed and we didn't know who was fighting who; there was killing from behind and in front. Our commanders fled in cars leaving us behind.
"We left, running all night but then came to a line of Arabs who arrested us and took us back to the front line. One night last month I was on watch and saw a truck full of sheep and goats, so I jumped in and escaped.
"I got back to Kandahar but Taliban spies saw me and I was arrested and interrogated. Luckily I have relatives who are high ranking Taliban members so they helped me get out and eventually I escaped to Quetta to my wife and daughter.
"I think many in the Taliban would like to escape. The country is starving and joining is the only way to get food and keep your land. Otherwise there is a lot of hatred. I hate both what it does and what it turned me into."
posted on September 29, 2001 08:44:39 PM
This seeming inconsistency in Mr. Hassani's tale leapt out at me:
"Like many people, I did not become a Talib by choice," he explained. "In early 1998 I was working as an accountant here in Quetta when I heard that my grandfather - who was 85 - had been arrested by the Taliban in Kandahar and was being badly beaten. They would only release him if he provided a member of his family as a conscript, so I had to go."
Later in the story, after his escapes, he writes:
"I got back to Kandahar but Taliban spies saw me and I was arrested and interrogated. Luckily I have relatives who are high ranking Taliban members so they helped me get out and eventually I escaped to Quetta to my wife and daughter.
Where were these high-ranking Taliban member/relatives when his Grandfather was being beaten? Mr. Hassani was "forced" to join the Taliban in 1998, to free his Grandfather -- did these relatives who freed him become high-ranking Taliban officials in the last two years?
[ edited by plsmith on Sep 29, 2001 08:46 PM ]
posted on September 29, 2001 08:50:02 PM
Well, I'll grant you that I have absolutely no idea about this guy's credentials or credibility. It struck me that whenever anyone says over stories about their own brutality somehow they tend to paint themselves as really detatched, forced into it or otherwise somehow innocent of real wrong doing.
Very good point. Perhaps this guy was just concoting a story as to why he was part of this group in the first place that makes him come across as more blameless. Or perhaps he is just concoting a story. I really don't know.
posted on September 29, 2001 08:56:39 PM
Helen, that's fine.
Do you propose that the Taliban really aren't a murderous, oppressive and torturous regime because you dislike the source of this interview? Assuming this person is who he says he is, what difference does it make what paper it's from? I didn't post the editorial page.
I laughed at your assertion that the Guardian is unbiased. It's unbiased like the New York Post or New York Times are unbiased. Which is to say, it's an extremely biased newspaper.
posted on September 29, 2001 09:14:59 PM
The Guardian is not a credible source to me. So there. As fas as the Telegraph, ya got me there. I don't read it myself. Maybe you're right, maybe not.
The story sounds like hogwash? Why is that? Because I posted it? Because I laughed at your newspaper?
The Taliban's murders and tortures are well documented. They were enemies of humanity before September 11, you know.
posted on September 29, 2001 09:26:28 PM
I can't validate the article as accurate or false. It isn't that hard for me to believe after watching CNN's "Behind The Veil" and some other news stories.
When the Afghani Foriegn Minister on camera defends using the football stadium for executions because it is an occassion for joy and because the international community won't fund a proper execution facility I had to back the tape up to make sure I heard that right. Granted I don't speak arabic, but they were supplying his words that seemed to be in sync with his lip movements along with the translation.
posted on September 29, 2001 10:10:21 PM
Don't keep on getting all excited about that football stadium execution thing, Uaru, it wasn't all that long ago that we did public executions here ourselves, and not too long before that that they were quite the occassion in England.
Or, if it's that they're corrupting a football stadium to do it, that's not really football, it's soccer, and who cares about that?
As to the story, it's a good juicy one to be sure. As to whether it's true or not, who knows? We've all been warned, time and again, that this is a new kind of war, with new kinds of strategies. This story might be part of one of the new kinds of strategies, though that strategy isn't really new at all.
posted on September 29, 2001 10:30:53 PM
I certainly see how any of this is possible. Demonizing your enemy is Propoganda 101. However, as I pointed out this sort of thing happens to be true. It's been well-documented and that was before September 11.
As far as what "we used to do", yes. "We" used to do it and we don't anymore because we've come to see that it was disgusting and barbaric. In fact, we've evolved to a point that some of us in society think that even in self defense violence isn't permissible, let alone a virtue.
Spaz, remember when Rudy seriously wanted "Our City Can Kick Your City's Ass" as the NYC slogan?
posted on September 29, 2001 10:32:55 PM it wasn't all that long ago that we did public executions here ourselves, and not too long before that that they were quite the occassion in England.
You must be older than me.
As to the story, it's a good juicy one to be sure. As to whether it's true or not, who knows?
Do you figure it wasn't really the Afghani Foriegn Minister on camera or do you figure that CNN missed the translation?
posted on September 29, 2001 11:24:44 PM"we don't anymore because we've come to see that it was disgusting and barbaric"
"We" do it still, with as much PC cleansing as can be brought to bear. Our own barbarism is simply more tidy than theirs is, but not less disgusting. Not only that but each time "we" do one the cry for publicity seems louder than it was the time before that. Now though "our" own ghouls would have their entertainment brought to them on their TV sets so that they needn't suffer the weather or any interference to their daily schedule. So much better to be able to tape it for later should one have to be at work or at sleep or at meal.
posted on September 30, 2001 03:24:46 AM
Which set of actions indicates that you think you are doing the proper thing - doing the execution in public with the executioners known -- or hiding it from the public eye with the executioner secret?
If you have to hide it in shame perhaps you should not do it at all.
It was silly of me to question your newspaper source but equally silly for you to laugh at mine.
I realize that the Taliban is a primitive society and I am especially concerned about their treatment of women. But, historically everything that is happening in the Taliban right now has happened in one way or another right here including lynchings, witch hunts, torture and executions.
It is interesting that this educated CPA first saw the Taliban...who were beating his 85 year old grandfather...as "good people who brought law and order into the community."
It's my opinion that this story is a piece of propaganda, designed to implicate the Arabs and Pakistanis into the Taliban problem.
posted on September 30, 2001 06:30:32 AMJames' story, Uaru.
It's not my story, damnit!
Ken, I almost titled it "I was a teenage Taliban torturer" but he's 30 and it probably wasn't the best subject matter for that. Sometimes ya gotta self moderate.
As fas as the Telegraph, ya got me there. I don't read it myself. Maybe you're right, maybe not.
Too funny.