Montreal Gazette
Tuesday, November 6, 2001
Page: A1 / FRONT
Section: News
Byline: LEVON SEVUNTS
Column: In Afghanistan
Dateline: DASHT-E QALA, Afghanistan
Source: The Gazette
The anti-Taliban coalition is expecting a U.S. bombing campaign of unprecedented intensity in the coming days before launching an all-out ground offensive along its entire front line, a top commander said yesterday.
“We are expecting a very strong U.S. bombing, not just on our front but on every front in Afghanistan,” said General Mamur Hassan, an influential warlord with the anti-Taliban United Islamic Front, also known as the Northern Alliance. “We will attack along the entire front line from here to Taloqan.”
In the past week, several signs have pointed to an imminent attempt to take Mazar-e Sharif. The Alliance has been amassing its crack troops on the front lines to reinforce the village guards who usually man frontline positions.
Dozens of tanks and armoured personnel carriers, kept in reserve, have been refueled and tested, and several top Alliance commanders have been busy holding meetings.
Speaking from his compound in Dasht-e Qala, swarming with visiting commanders and journalists, Hassan said their troops have already started a successful offensive south of Mazar-e Sharif and predicted that a new offensive from a different front is imminent.
“Six districts around Mazar-e Sharif have been already captured, we are about to capture another one,” Hassan said. “About 3,000 Taliban soldiers defected to our side with all their weapons, supplies and ammunition.”
Hassan said that Alliance troops launched a surprise attack on the city Aq Kopruk, near Mazar-e Sharif, on Saturday, killing and capturing a large number of Taliban soldiers.
He said the defection of Taliban soldiers was arranged a week before the attack.
There was no independent confirmation of these claims, but defections have been reported since the United States began bombing in Afghanistan on Oct. 7 in an attempt to force the ruling Taliban to give up Osama bin Laden, the main suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.
Opposition leaders including Hamid Karzai are traveling the breadth of the country encouraging Pashtun tribal leaders to defect from the Pashtun-dominated Taliban. One Taliban commander was said to have defected Friday, bringing 1,350 fighters with him.
If the defections are true, they fit the pattern of fighting in Afghanistan since the Soviet Union departed in 1989. During the civil war between 1994 and 1998, the Taliban bribed several ethnic warlords to defect to its side.
In 1997, the Taliban bribed General Abdul Malek, the deputy of Uzbek warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum, to turn against Dostum and surrender Mazar-e Sharif.
But Malek changed his mind three days later and ambushed the Taliban troops on the streets of Mazar-e Sharif, inflicting heavy casualties on them.
Hassan said the Taliban have launched a counteroffensive to retake Aq Kopruk but were unsuccessful.
General Fayz Muhammad, Hassan’s deputy, said the U.S. carpet bombing Sunday was a 100-per-cent success.
“The bombing was very effective – it hit Taliban soldiers who were crowded in trenches,” Muhammad said. “The bombing has wiped out their first line of defence.”
Muhammad said, however, that many other Taliban soldiers survived the bombing and the Taliban have intensified their attacks on Alliance positions in other places.
He said that in the past three days there has been heavy fighting in remote areas near Taloqan, the Alliance’s former stronghold.
Muhammad said that the Taliban launched several attacks against heavily fortified Alliance positions near six villages, in the desert areas around Taloqan.
Hassan said the Alliance attack on Taliban positions in the same area had to be curtailed despite its initial success because of the difficulties of supplying the troops with ammunition.
“Initially we captured Taliban-controlled areas, but we had to withdraw,” Hassan said.
“It’s a very remote area, it takes about six hours in the jeep or 12 hours by horse to get there. But often there are no cars, so we have to carry everything on horseback.”
Afghan roads will be the biggest obstacle that the Alliance will have to overcome in any ground offensive.
It is very hard for a Westerner, even one living in rural areas, to imagine how bad roads can be in Afghanistan. Motorists often drive off-road because the fields and flat deserts provide a smoother ride than the crater-filled obstacle courses Afghans have for roads.
The government has been busy rebuilding roads from major cities and villages under its control to the front lines.
Driving from Khwaja Bahuddin toward the front line near Dasht-e Qala, one encounters hundreds of Afghan peasants trying to fill holes and craters in the roads with gravel.
A job that would take a bulldozer only a few hours to complete takes these peasants – who have nothing more than shovels and hoes – weeks to finish.
The road ends at the Kokcha River. There is no bridge, and trucks and jeeps risk getting stuck in the middle of the river.
Villagers and reporters who have no access to military trucks have to cross on foot or on horseback, pumping more money than any aid organization into the local economy.
A ride to the front lines is a fixed $20 U.S. For $5 or $10, one can also cross the river in a “ferry” – a raft made of two inflated tractor-tire tubes, attached to a wooden frame. Very few locals and reporters brave the crossing of the fast-flowing Kokcha River on the makeshift rafts.
Every year, dozens of people drown trying to cross the Kokcha.
On the other bank of the Kokcha, one must drive or ride through the narrow streets of a kishlak, an Afghan village. Only one truck at a time can pass through the village streets. Even then, a truck risks getting stuck or overturning if one of dozens of small bridges – a few logs bound together – gives way.
Two days ago, a military truck carrying 20 soldiers and villagers overturned in the village of Jelamkhor on its way to the front line because ground loosened and slid out from underneath.