Wretched Jihadi

By Julius Strauss in Kabul

30 November 2001

Muhammad Jamil must be one of the world's most wretched jihadis.

Six weeks ago he was studying the Koran at a madrassah in eastern Pakistan when his mullah approached him. "Go to Afghanistan," he said. "Go and fight the Americans."

Yesterday the skinny 25-year-old lay in a dirty hospital bed in Kabul's military hospital, his head disfigured by beatings and his leg embedded with shrapnel.

"I have a mother, father and two brothers at home in Kashmir," he mumbled through swollen and blackened lips. "I am very sad that I left them to come here."

Jamil's military career was short and undistinguished.

He sneaked accross the border into Afghanistan with thousands of other Pakistani militants and headed for Kabul.

Expecting to be welcomed with open arms, he was instead hated by local civilians and despised by his hosts, the Afghan Taliban he had come to help.

For a month he waited to fight American soldiers he never saw.

On the night of November 12, the Taliban fled the city in pick-up trucks for their southern stronghold of Kandahar.

Jamil was one of hundreds of Pakistanis and other foreign fighters left behind. The next night he was cornered by Northern Alliance soldiers bent on revenge.

Mumbling prayers to steel his resolve, he seized a man he believed to be one of his enemies and thrust a hand-grenade between their bodies.

But the grenade rolled to the ground. The blast injured both men in the leg but killed neither.

Ironically his victim was Muhammad Kazim, a 34-year-old devout Muslim who teaches the Koran to secondary school students, and had been pleading with the soldiers to spare Jamil's life.

In a different wing of the same hosptial, Kazim was lying on his back yesterday, his leg encased in thick white plaster and slightly raised.

He said: "I had been praying in the mosque and was returning home when I saw the mujahideen had caught three Pakistanis. They killed one and another escaped. I pleaded with them not to kill the third. In return he clasped my tightly and let off a hand grenade."

Doctors say Kazim will be allowed home in about 10 days. The metal fragments have been removed from his leg and the bone is mending.

But Jamil's future is less certain. When he recovers, he can expect a firing squad or a long prison term for his part in helping the Taliban.

While Jamil's tale is a tragicomedy of sorts, the stories of other foreign fighters who came to fight a Holy war are invariably pitiful.

Led to believe they would be honoured warriors in a crusade against the western infidel, they were abandoned by their Taliban hosts. For al Qa'eda they were little more than expendable foot-soldiers.

Along the corridor from Jamil were two more Pakistanis with leg wounds. Both were under lock and key, guarded by two Northern Alliance soldiers.

Ahmed and Said were praying as we entered straining to raise themselves from their prone positions in supplication to Allah.

Said was a second year engineering student in the northern Pakistani town of Rawalpindi before he left for Afghanistan a month ago.

Slight and wearing wire-framed glassed he looked more like a frail intellectual than a holy warrior.

"My mother and father begged me not to leave," he said. "They were both in tears. But I heard the Americans were attacking Islam."

When he arrived in early October, Said was sent to the Shomali plain, north of Kabul. Under day and night bombardment from US bombers, it was one of the most dangerous postings.

He was injured within a week. He said: "I was told I would fight Americans not fellow Muslims. The attack on the World Trade Centre was a very bad thing. But Afghanistan is Islamic and could not be allowed to fall to the Americans. Now I wish I had stayed at home."

In the next bed Ahmed, a young man with wild hair and an intense gaze, was equally pitiful. An ethnic Pathan from a village near Peshawar, he wore a purple hat and had blood blisters under his nails.

"I was injured by an American bomb," he said. "Ten of us were killed in the same attack. But I would not come if I had the chance again. I thought I was protecting our Islamic country from the Americans and the Russians."

"When the Taliban fled they didn't even bother to come and get us, they only came for their own. We were left behind. It seems we were without value even to them."