| |
| Traveller who called Kandahar prison 'home' |
|
11/03/2004
Traveller who called Kandahar prison 'home'
From Tim Reid in Washington
I MET Jamal al-Harith four times last year inside a jail in Kandahar, the week before he was unexpectedly arrested by undercover CIA agents and sent to Guantanamo Bay. I was never able to fathom him. Yet I felt sure he was no terrorist. I even tried to get him released.
It was one of the more bizarre episodes from the wreckage of post-Taleban Kandahar, the Islamists’ spiritual stronghold in southern Afghanistan until they were ousted in December 2001.
When I arrived in Kandahar in early January 2002, the city’s dusty jail was empty, save for an extremely odd group of five inmates. A few days after Mullah Muhammad Omar and his Taleban army had fled, 2,500 of their prisoners had been freed from the jail. But these five remained. One of them was Jamal al-Harith, or Jamal Udeen as he asked to be known.
His fellow inmates were a Russian from Tartarstan, two Saudi Arabians and a Syrian Kurd. Being non-Afghans, with no passports, they were free to go, but had nowhere or nobody to turn to. So they stayed living in the jail, “guests” of the new Kandahar Government.
On my first visit to the jail, Mr al-Harith refused at first to talk to me. He kept himself apart from the other four, sleeping alone in his own cell, which he kept clean and tidy. Later I bought him some antiseptic cream and a shortwave radio (which he had requested) and he opened up.
He spoke in a broad Mancunian accent. He sat in the corner of his cell, reading a Koran and taking notes. He said that he had been teaching himself Arabic for more than a year.
He said that he was desperate to return home, that he was a website designer, that his date of birth was November 20, 1966, and that he had been travelling in northern Pakistan in September 2001, retracing a journey he made to Iran in 1993.
He paid 4,000 rupees (£66) to a lorry driver, who agreed to take him to Iran and Turkey. After a day and a half, he said, they were stopped by three Taleban soldiers. When they saw his British passport, “it all turned to hell”.
He was stripped of everything, beaten for three days and eventually put in Kandahar jail in October 2001 with 250 other “political” prisoners.
He said that he had converted to Islam in 1992, after reading Malcolm X’s autobiography, changing his birth name. He thought that the Taleban were “pretty good news” when he first arrived in the region — “but first-hand experience is different,” he said.
I told him that his story and his reasons for being in Afghanistan in September 2001 sounded suspect. “If I came here to fight, I wouldn’t have been thrown in prison. I travel all the time. That is all I was doing. When the Taleban arrested me, there were already British special forces in the country. Everyone was suspicious.”
He said that he felt “abandoned” by Britain and that he was haunted by the memories of fellow prisoners being beaten by the Taleban.
One story stood out. One day the Taleban took a donkey to the jail. They had arrested it because its owner had used it to ferry stolen goods. On the first night of American bombing, as the Taleban shot and beat prisoners and the jail shuddered, the donkey went crazy. Amid this chaos, confronted with their bleating donkey cellmate, the prisoners broke into a collective fit of giggling.
“We were praying for the Americans to come,” he said. To Allah? “Well, I wouldn’t say that. But we saw the Americans as a blessing. Without them I would have been lost and out of sight for years.”
The day before I left Kandahar, the Red Cross told me that it would fly Mr al-Harith to Kabul and deliver him to the British Consulate.
I went to tell him the good news. The previous day, the CIA had arrived. After interrogating the five for several hours, they had been driven away to the US base at Kandahar airport. Soon, all five were in Guantanamo Bay.
Source:The Times
|
|
|
