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| Afghanistan |
| Taliban running press gangs to fill ranks |
| 2001-10-10 |
JABAL OS SARAJ, Afghanistan Each evening just after sundown, convoys of heavily armed Taliban fighters push out of their bases in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and drive to the safest place they know: the front line. Their enemies across the battle line, the Northern Alliance, watch the headlights of trucks and vans pulling up as close as they can. In Afghanistan's vicious civil war, the front line may seem an odd place to hide. But to the Taliban fighters defending Kabul, the closer they are to the front line, the farther they are from U.S. missiles raining down on the capital. "They go in convoys of pickup trucks like Datsuns. They wear turbans, and their eyes are painted with kohl. They have grenade launchers and Kalashnikovs and all kinds of other weapons," said Sharifullah, 20, a moujahedeen with the anti-Taliban opposition. Sharifullah, speaking in a teahouse in Jabal os Saraj, 45 miles north of Kabul, was in the capital Tuesday morning and crossed to the opposition-held northern territory the same day. Sharifullah said that after the first night of bombing, Taliban fighters knocked on the doors of every house in his village, Arghandi, 13 miles west of Kabul, and ordered each family to contribute one man to fight on the front line for the Taliban. Another Pushtun from Kabul, medical student Abdul Marouf, 19, said that since the U.S. strikes began, the Taliban had stepped up its campaign to press-gang young men in Kabul to fight a jihad, or holy war. "They were arresting people before," he said, "but in the last days it got worse." |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |