Manhattan to Baghdad: Dispatches From the Frontline in the War on Terror

MANHATTAN

TO BAGHDAD

MANHATTAN

TO BAGHDAD

PAUL McGEOUGH

First published in 2003

Copyright © Paul McGeough 2003

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

McGeough, Paul, 1954– .

Manhattan to Baghdad : despatches from the frontline in the

War on Terror

ISBN 1 74114 025 0.

1. McGeough, Paul, 1954– . 2. War on Terror, 2001 –

Personal narratives, Australian. 3. Journalists –

Australia – Anecdotes. I. Title.

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For Pam and Peggie,

two great women.

CONTENTS

MAPS

PROLOGUE: PEOPLE ARE CRYING IN THE STREETS

Part I: Afghanistan and the US, July–October 2001

1 IN THE NAME OF WHICH GOD?

2 STICKS ON HUMAN BONES

3 THE LION AND THE DARKNESS

4 THE DEVIL’S HAND

5 A FAIR WARNING

6 RUDY THE ROCK

Part II: Eyewitness to the war in Afghanistan, October–November 2001

7 AN UZBEK CROOK IS GEORGE’S NEW FRIEND

8 A WAR OF CONTRADICTIONS

9 THE DEATH OF THREE COLLEAGUES

10 TALIBAN PINNED DOWN

11 A SCUNGY LITTLE PACKAGE

Part III: Trouble on the road to Baghdad, March–April 2002

12 BY THE WATERS OF JORDAN

13 THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES

14 THE MATZA BOMB

15 MARKED MEN

16 DEFIANT GAZA

17 A FAMILY’S DISTRESS

18 GUIDED MISSILES

19 WAR CRIMES AT JENIN

Part IV: The US and Iraq prepare for war, August–September 2002

20 SANCTION CITY

21 WEAPONS OF MASS PROPAGANDA

22 THE ROAD TO BASRA

23 SEPTEMBER 11, 2002

EPILOGUE: MANHATTAN TO BAGHDAD

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CENTRAL ASIA

MIDDLE EAST

MANHATTAN

TO BAGHDAD

Prologue

PEOPLE ARE CRYING IN THE STREETS

Manhattan, USA September 11, 2001

Six blocks from what is left of the World Trade Center, the streets are full of crying people. The city is totally shocked. Hundreds of emergency vehicles and paramedics are massing on street corners. Jet-fighters circle the city. The entire lower end of Manhattan is gridlocked. Crying people crowd the pavements. A massive mushroom cloud hangs overhead. People are on rooftops. Car radios are at full blast. Papers that a few minutes ago were on people’s desks now litter the streets and float in the air like a blinding white snowstorm. It is 10.30 am. The second tower has collapsed.

Smoke and zero visibility, even six blocks away. Smoke and dust. The streets are more eerie and tenser than the wildest depictions Hollywood could dream up. It is like in the movies when the building collapses and all you see is a cloud of dust in the shape of the building. But the building itself isn’t there. A massive cloud of smoke, dust, building contents and materials belts up Church Street—driven by the force of the explosion. There are more explosions from within the cloud of smoke. Hundreds of police and firemen are charging uptown after the collapse, racing ahead of the explosion as the smoke and dust cloud punches its way after them. I’m running with them—I can feel it behind me.

Mothers with children holding bandanas to their faces are trying to get away. They are evacuating apartment buildings. All businesses have closed. People are leaving with overnight bags. Every vehicle in the area is covered in a thick layer of dust. Dazed and injured firemen wander the streets aimlessly. I wipe the blood off the dusty, stunned face of one of them and take him to a temporary medical post. Dozens of these posts have been set up on street corners. Hundreds of paramedical vehicles have come into the area. I get closer, to within two blocks. Literally, it is like a moonscape; the dust on the ground is so thick, so heavy. It is almost impossible to breathe—all the emergency services personnel are wearing face masks because of the dust.

Now there are more explosions. I presume it is the buildings around me. The whole of Manhattan is enveloped in a ghostly cloud of dust. And another explosion goes off—I don’t know what it is. Cars in the street are exploding now. Have they been booby-trapped? The smoke from the car explosions is black. Everyone walking around this side of town looks like a ghost—covered from head to foot in grey dust.

Kenny Johannsenn, who works in the World Trade Center, is almost in tears: ‘I was in the number one tower. I was waiting for the elevator in the basement. This is the time of day when the building is most crowded. There are thousands of people because it is shift-change time, and also the subway under the building is pushing peak crowds. The lift door exploded open. There was a man inside half burnt. His skin was hanging off. I dragged him out of the lift and somebody helped me get him out of the building. The explosion hit the building at about level 80. I counted at least 17 people jumping from that height. What choice did they have? It was either be burnt alive or jump.’

Mike Derby, 30, was attending an economics conference in the Marriott Hotel, which is part of the World Trade Center. His hands shake as he describes what he saw. ‘A man was giving a boring speech about securities when it happened,’ he tells me. ‘The building shook. I didn’t think much of it, but all the economists in their grey suits started running. They knew it was a terrorist attack. I got out into the street. I watched maybe 30 people jump. It was surreal. The people who jumped didn’t just flop. They were carried, spread-eagled on the wind. I was surprised when the bodies did hit the pavement. I didn’t think they would make so loud a noise. I was looking up at the second tower when the jet came in like a black flash.’

Now it is more than two hours after the first explosions and—very disturbingly—no injured people are coming out. The ambulances are all lined up but no one is being put into them. Literally thousands of emergency personnel have arrived. All the streets from the World Trade Center up to 17th Street, more than 36 blocks, are bumper to bumper with emergency services vehicles. And a team of about 400 surgeons, doctors, nurses and volunteers is mustering at the Chelsea Piers on 17th Street, setting up an emergency field hospital.

It is still impossible to see anything. The whole site remains blanketed in a cloud of dust. And smoke. The emergency teams have been told to expect tens of thousands of injured people. But a doctor I speak to says he doesn’t expect many survivors to come out of that mountain of wreckage. The Air Force continues to circle the city. They are pushing us back uptown. There is another explosion. It doesn’t look good.

PART I

AFGHANISTAN AND THE US

July–October 2001

1

IN THE NAME OF WHICH GOD?

Herat, Afghanistan July 2001

It was early evening in the Kokcha valley and a silvery, slivery crescent moon hung in a rosewater sky. Teenagers played volleyball; a family threshed grain in the fields; and, alone on a rock in the river, a wizened old man knelt to face Mecca for his evening prayers.

Their country was wrecked and withered, yet there were always rare snatches of time such as these when you could forget that Afghanistan might be the worst place on God’s earth in which to live. These were glimpses of a rural idyll that had been engulfed by a tumultuous combination of war and drought that had started more than 20 years before.

In the north a mean wind whipped through the mud-brick emptiness of ghost villages. Entire communities—from ancient Herat in the far west to Asadabad, which is tucked into the creases of the mighty Hindu Kush away over to the east—had vanished as first fighting and then famine stalked a land of subsistence farmers who could subsist no longer. In the first year of the drought they had sold their sheep and cattle; last year they had bartered their tools and donkeys; finally, as they confronted the failure of this year’s rains, they had eaten the seed that was to ripen as the next crop. Only then did they take to the roads. And still they were walking away, united in their poverty and misery.

But there was worse, much worse, in the warm land where the pistachio and the pomegranate grew. As I pieced together the tales from the battlefields, it became clear that the Taliban regime was bent on its own version of Slobodan Milosovic’s ethnic cleansing. Religious bigotry was the fire in the belly of many of the Taliban fighters as they cleared swathes of country, chucking out minority Hazara, Uzbek and Tajik communities in a campaign of fear and terror. Civilians were being burned alive, whipped with lengths of electric cable and mutilated with knives and bayonets. Mountain farmers and their families were being strafed from hand-me-down Soviet helicopter-gunships. And tanks were lined up on hilltops, lobbing endless shells among civilian farmers in the hope that they would abandon their pastures. In some hideous cases, victims of the Taliban were being skinned and their bodies put on public display as a warning to others not to resist. Witnesses told how Taliban fighters sometimes daubed themselves in the blood of their victims before turning to Mecca to pray.

These shockingly detailed accounts were provided to me in the office of an earnest UN official who, like virtually all the Afghans and expatriates I interviewed, insisted that he could not be named because he feared Taliban retribution. When he saw disbelief on my face, he produced from a briefcase a small bundle of Polaroid photographs— what appeared to be scenes from a butcher’s shop turned out to be an Afghan home and the victim of what he claimed was the Taliban’s knife-work was hardly recognisable as a human. ‘They want all Afghans to know that when they walk down the street any Talib they pass is capable of turning on them and inflicting severe pain. Unfortunately, the shock of what is happening here is being masked in the rest of the world by the sense that this is all that Afghans are good for, and aren’t they just a bunch of warring factions?. No one has seriously confronted the Taliban about what they are doing.’

Weeks later I was in Herat, in the dustbowls of the far west of Afghanistan. The city squats in the shadow of the tall, elegant minarets of the Musalla, its university district. The great towers were crumbling, echoing an emptiness in the heart of Herat. This was once an ancient centre of art and learning, but today’s intellectuals and middle class have long since fled—they were way ahead of the farmers on the road to refuge.

Peculiar, grey-black trees glistened in the sun as I approached the city. When I got closer I realised that they marked the Taliban’s roadside checkpoints—it turned out that these ‘trees’ were posts festooned with thousands of metres of audiotape that had been ripped from the cassette players of motorists who dared to ignore the regime’s ban on music. Still, I was told that by Taliban standards, Mullah Khairullah, the governor of Herat, was a reasonable man. ‘He is educated and he understands our logic,’ a senior UN man told me and I kept this in mind each day as I walked the pine-flanked avenue to the governor’s office.

A lot of bearded young men lounged about and the hospitality was wonderful—they served wrapped sweets with green tea—but the access was lousy. The governor would not see me and neither would his colleague who ran the local branch of the much despised Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue (PVPV), the Taliban agency that enforced its strict religious, moral and social code. There was a list of things I wanted to interview the governor about—the arrest of women teachers for the crime of educating young girls; the deportation of an aid worker for the sin of playing CDs in his office; and the death of a woman on the operating table because the PVPV ruffians ordered a doctor to abandon her during one of their regular raids on the local hospital to check that men were not talking to women.

And there was one more issue—the body in the circle. It was a balmy evening in the rambling gardens at the UN compound in Herat and, as we sipped illegal homemade wine, the senior UN man was quite blasé as he told me: ‘Last week I went down to that first roundabout and there was the body of a man hanging from the lamppost. A sign said that he was an opposition commander who had been captured by the Taliban. But I don’t believe that—he was in his twenties and that’s too young to be a commander. I heard that he had clashed with Taliban officials over the rights of people in his village.’

This was not an isolated case. When the Taliban first came to power it banned all recreation, but in 1997 it lifted its ban on football, prompting aid agencies to rebuild Kandahar’s war-ravaged football stadium to encourage public entertainment in the Taliban’s soulless, joyless southern headquarters. But when it came time to inaugurate the refurbished stadium, the Taliban had other ideas. The first scheduled event was a sharia-style public execution between the goalposts on a Thursday afternoon. A capacity crowd of 10 000 men and boys watched as Abdullah Afghan, in his early twenties, was shot six times by an uncle of the man he was accused of murdering during a village theft.

Towards midnight, as the UN man packed away the jam jars in which he bottled his wine, he spoke lightly enough about his daily dealings with the Taliban authorities: ‘You cannot predict which way a tick will jump—it is random and it is illogical.’

The expatriate aid workers lived on a knife-edge—fighting for the rights of ordinary Afghans, women and children in particular, while trying not to offend Taliban sensibilities. It was a wearying round of bluff and compromise, a tense game in which there were many more snakes than ladders and in which the urge to help people in need clashed with the greed of local power-brokers and their followers. The head of one of the aid agencies in Herat explained to me: ‘If you don’t make the move to bring the Taliban on side, they will bring you on side— and that’s far less comfortable. So I refuse to ask for the governor’s permission to do anything . . . but at the same time, I keep him informed of the things I’m doing. And it works some of the time. How were we to convince the Taliban to surrender a warehouse they’re using as an ammunition dump when we want it for a food store? We did it . . .’ But when the heads of three UN agencies protested over a Taliban demand that a woman lawyer representing the UN High Commission for Refugees speak to its representatives from behind a curtain so that they would not see her face, all three were drummed out of the country. And the Save the Children Fund was forced to close down several of its programs when the Taliban barred women from classes intended to save them from death, by teaching them how to avoid the carpet of land-and anti-personnel mines left across the country by the Soviets and the local warring factions.

Maslak—it means slaughterhouse—was the name that had been given to the sprawling refugee camp west of Herat, because the only structure to be seen for miles on the stony wasteland was an abandoned abattoir. Here there was constant conflict with the authorities on just how many people lived on this patch of dirt, which was bigger than New York’s Central Park. The aid agencies said maybe 200 000 people, but the Taliban’s Ministry for Martyrs and Repatriation insisted that there were 300 000, a number that would require the aid agencies to provide 50 per cent more food than was needed, which the authorities would then skim off to sell elsewhere. The Taliban authorities stood by their figure and thwarted every effort to count the refugees, but an enterprising Argentinian aid worker thought that he could outsmart them with a plan to count the structures in the camp—huts, lean-tos, tents and hovels.

As we stood on a windswept ridge behind the camp, he told me: ‘We got a team of volunteers together and we started the count early in the morning. But within 30 minutes the Taliban were there with guns— the count was off.’ Explaining how the camp was divided into blocks and how the food was distributed through a network of block leaders, he said: ‘Food distribution cards are the latest currency and the block leaders are the rortmeisters. We want to break their grip so that we can get the food direct to all families. Everyone is miserable, but they have been learning how to milk the system for 20 years. The only thing that works is trucking—and that’s because it’s vital for the smugglers.’

There was a rhythm in the life of the aid workers, most of whom lived in the high-walled UN compound, which was a bit like a boarding school, with a good-natured Afghan chef demanding to know each morning who would be back for lunch and who would be in for dinner. But that rhythm went awry the day before I was to leave Herat. The Taliban had reduced Afghanistan to a technical and social wasteland for Afghans, but the UN has a satellite communications system that fed the BBC World Service into the common room in the Herat compound. And that day the news was that the PVPV in Kabul had just arrested 24 aid workers, eight of them expatriates working for the German-based Shelter Now International, on charges that they were attempting to convert Afghans to Christianity.

Stabs of fear and anger ran through the Herat aid workers. They already lived on a UN Stage IV security alert—all families and nonessential staff had been evacuated—and only one grade of alert remained on the chart before they would have to pack up and go too. As it was, there was enough tension in their lives—they had to be indoors by 9 pm; they were discouraged from going out alone; if they left urban areas they had to travel in a convoy of at least two radio-equipped vehicles; and the men were denied any contact, professional or otherwise, with Afghan women. They were never sure when the bullying PVPV squads would strike. A few weeks earlier a new Italian-funded hospital in Kabul had been mothballed because the PVPV claimed that male and female staff were lunching together in the hospital cafeteria, even though a curtain separated them.

Increasingly, the Taliban was making life difficult for the aid agencies by delaying visa approvals, making some staff wait a month or more for permission to enter Afghanistan to help the local people. Worse, it blocked the aid agencies from minority population areas and its prohibition on foreigners meeting women, and on local women working for aid agencies, was making it incredibly difficult for the UN and NGOs to provide care to more than half the population—the women of Afghanistan. So the arrest of the Shelter Now International (SNI) staff was a powerful reminder that all 350 foreign aid workers in Afghanistan literally diced with death in their daily efforts. They had all been pulled out of the country when an Italian UN official was murdered in the wake of the 1998 US missile attacks on suspected terrorist training camps operated by Osama bin Laden. Now one of the officers in Herat told me: ‘Listen, if they touch one of those people, we’re all out of here.’

But anger was directed at the arrested aid workers too—among them, Diana Thomas and Peter Bunch of Perth in Western Australia. Their group, SNI, had a reputation in the aid community as ‘holy rollers’ whom the Taliban, as well as other humanitarian agencies, had warned several times to back off on the proselytising. An angry and edgy Herat aid worker exploded: ‘God, they’re arseholes. Messing with Christianity is a death sentence for the local staff, so their lives are at risk; if some aid workers are into this, then we all are at risk. And what do you think the donor nations to Afghanistan will do with their money when they hear that aid workers are being arrested here? They’ll say fuck you to the Taliban and give their money to a cause somewhere else in the world.’

In the evening there were loud groans from the crowd around the TV as the Taliban elaborated its case against the SNI Christians. Deputy Minister for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue, Salim Haqqani, claimed that 6000–7000 video and audiotapes of Christian teaching had been uncovered in addition to an earlier haul of material, Bibles and the like, that might have been explained away as ‘for personal use’. He said to the camera: ‘Why would SNI need to print Bibles in Dari or Pashtun [the main languages in Afghanistan] and have all these tapes in local languages? The findings are indicative of the fact that [the aid workers] were deviating Afghans.’

The BBC followed Haqqani with a clip of SNI’s international director, Esteban Witzemann, who seemed to be admitting to some of the Taliban charges with a plea that the seized Christian material was ‘for personal use’. Anger erupted among the aid workers in Herat. A few wanted to reserve judgment but others warned that they would be ganging up on SNI if it was confirmed that the SNI team had taken even a single local-language Bible into Afghanistan. One of the aid workers told me: ‘That is just so bloody stupid. How can a foreigner bring in a local-language Bible and claim that it was for personal use?’

I was torn. A part of me wanted to stay and watch this drama unfold and another part of me said that the real story was in Kabul, and that I should get there as fast as I could. But Afghanistan was not like that. There were no flights to Kabul and public transport or hitchhiking could take up to a week—20 years of war have destroyed just about every road in the country. Also, I was booked on the next day’s UN flight to Islamabad and if I didn’t go it might be weeks before another seat became available.

I flew to Islamabad and observed events in Kabul through the diplomatic and media lenses of the steamy Pakistani capital. As tense and frustrated diplomats from the US, Germany and Australia beat a path to the Afghan Embassy, pleading for the release of the arrested aid workers, the Taliban tormented them, the families of those arrested and the whole aid community: ‘maybe we’ll execute them’, ‘visa applications for diplomats to visit them must be processed in an orderly fashion’, ‘they are locked up, but we are feeding them’.

It soon became brutally clear that the arrest of the SNI staff was not an isolated incident—the Taliban was sending orchestrated signals to the world. Another was a brutal display in front of the presidential palace in Kabul, where four dead Afghans were strung up on the same traffic control tower from which they had hanged the bloated and broken body of former president Najibullah. The Taliban had celebrated the ‘liberation’ of Kabul in 1996 by beating Najibullah senseless, mutilating him and then dragging his body around the city behind one of their beloved pick-up trucks. Now, with the SNI staff in custody and aware that they had the full attention of the world, the Taliban wanted to show what it did to lawbreakers. When the accused Afghans were brought to the city centre, trussed up on the back of a pick-up, there was not enough room for all to hang from the well-used traffic control tower, so a couple of mechanical cranes were brought in to provide more hanging space in a macabre demonstration of justice—Kabul-style.

The authorities claimed that the offenders had admitted their role in a series of bomb explosions which in the previous year had killed one man and injured dozens in Kabul. A big crowd stood in the hot morning sun as the bodies were strung up. The police continued to direct traffic through the square. The onlookers were held back, but as the Taliban left the scene the crowd surged forward, the words of the leader of the execution squad ringing in their ears: ‘They are the enemies of Islam and Afghanistan—hanging their bodies here is a good lesson to others.’

Execution by hanging or a spray of gunfire and the public amputation of criminals’ hands or feet were regular spectator sports around Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. And with eight foreigners, including two Australians, among the arrested aid workers, it was hard not to conclude that the Taliban must have enjoyed the disquiet this gruesome spectacle would have caused in Canberra, Berlin and Washington—the capitals whose nationals were now in a Taliban jail.

The Taliban had arrived at a point of no return. Mullah Mohammed Omar, the reclusive leader of the Taliban whose formal title was Leader of the Faithful, no longer believed he could win international recognition for his Koran-and-Kalashnikov regime. They had been so demonised in the West that he now allowed hardline elements within the Taliban to have a freer hand as they buffed their reputation as a rogue state. That was why they had thumbed their noses at the world in June 2001 when they destroyed the awe-inspiring statues of Buddha in Bamiyan, a region in central Afghanistan. These colossal rock carvings had stood for almost 2000 years, long before the prophet Mohammed or the Taliban came along. Standing at heights of 50 metres and 35 metres, they were among the true wonders of the ancient world, yet the Taliban had talked about the need to destroy them because they were ‘pagan idols’. First they took the odd potshot at the statues, biding their time as an indignant international campaign reached fever pitch; then they laid explosives, ensuring total destruction.

And the same thinking was behind the increasing harassment of the expatriate aid community. The hardliners in the Taliban wanted to throw out all foreigners because they feared that their Western or Christian influence would undermine the Taliban’s attempt to re-create a contemporary version of the 15th-century society of the prophet Mohammed.

A rearguard effort by moderates who had tried to look after the aid workers failed. They were the ones who could see that, as far as services to their people were concerned, the Islamabad-based UN and NGO aid network had become a much needed government in exile. All power in Afghanistan had been seized by a band of barely educated schoolyard bullies who had read only one book—the Koran. The Taliban had been described by Afghanistan scholar Dr William Maley as ‘perhaps the most fiercely anti-modernist movement in any Asian country since the Boxer Rebellion’.

Another regional expert, Ahmed Rashid, attributed the cruelty of the regime to the barren life experiences of the Taliban leadership, whom he described as ‘the orphans, the rootless, the lumpen proletariat from the [Afghan wars] and the refugee camps’. Those who now ran Afghanistan had grown up in the refugee camps of neighbouring Pakistan with limited learning about life, either in the male-dominated madrassa Islamic schools that had taught them about the ideal Islamic society of Mohammed’s day, or in the brutal trenches of the civil war that had erupted in Afghanistan upon the retreat of the Russian occupation forces in 1989. The young Talibs—the word means ‘students’— were an all-male brotherhood, many of them orphans who had grown up without the company of women. The madrassa mullahs had taught them by rote that women were a temptation to be avoided, a distraction from their service to Allah. Mr Rashid argued that the Taliban took power in Afghanistan feeling utterly threatened by the mothers and sisters they had never known. So it was easy to banish them.

The country had been in grave crisis when the Taliban took control in 1996. And in mid 2001 it was a humanitarian disaster zone.

Education was skewed to fundamentalism and twisted to block half of the population—its women. The health system favoured the other half of the population, the men, and it could not function without the unstinting intervention of UN agencies and NGOs from across the world. The Afghans were victims of the Taliban’s sharia legal code, the world’s harshest version of the ‘kill it or chop it off ’ Islamic creed.

There were few basic rights and little forensic skill. Instead, the law functioned on kneejerk findings of guilt and the irreversible punishments of stoning, flogging, amputation and execution. Political opponents disappeared; adulterers were lashed in public or stoned to death; homosexuals were executed by having a wall topple on them; and those who could not recite their prayers or who trimmed their beards to less than fist-length were beaten by the thuggish foot soldiers of the PVPV.

The law was a swirling sea of formal edicts and verbal warnings, none of which translated precisely into English, few of which addressed the extent to which they contradicted each other and all of which were applied depending on the personalities and places involved. One of the aid workers at Herat gave me a classic example of the confusion when he pleaded with the authorities on behalf of a young man convicted of breaking into the aid worker’s vehicle. He said: ‘I told them that in accordance with Islam I forgave the thief and therefore he should not have his hand amputated. But the Taliban official said that I might forgive under Islam but they would be taking off his hand under sharia. They did—and the thief comes to my clinic to have the stump treated.’

Earlier in 2001 the Taliban