This story is from our news.com.au network Source: AFP

Taliban shooting refugees From AFP 07nov01

QUETTA, Pakistan: The Taliban are slaughtering Afghans who try to flee the country, gunning them down in cold blood, refugees who have made it to Pakistan say.

On the outskirts of this south-western Pakistan town, near the Afghan border, thousands of "invisible" refugees exist in abject poverty.

They have fled because of the bombing of Afghanistan and a severe drought. But more than anything, they have fled to avoid persecution by the ruling Islamic militia.

Of a dozen Afghans interviewed, all had tales of random killings, human rights abuses and persecution.

Some told of mass murders.

Ovr Mohd, 65, fled to the hills from Bamiyan to avoid the rampaging Taliban. When he returned he said he found his three sons shot dead.

Mohd said they were targeted because they were ethnic Hazaras, whose sympathies lie with the opposition Northern Alliance.

"When we decided to leave Afghanistan we saw the Taliban attacking people who were fleeing. People were gathering on the road to leave and they were shot. We have seen this," he said.

"I saw 50 people in front of me who were killed. They were women, children and men," Mohd added, claiming the killings happened a month ago.

"I hate the Taliban for doing this."

Most of the 5,000 or so people who live in what has become known as Hazara town in Quetta's west, a dusty maze of dirt roads and mud brick houses, are Persian-speaking Shia Muslims descended from Mongol troops.

They are among the 100,000 Afghans believed to have crossed the border illegally since the US began pounding Afghanistan.

They have no identity papers and officially do not exist in Pakistan. They refuse to move into refugee camps for fear of deportation. Consequently they receive no help from aid groups.

Saeed Zaman, 35, said he witnessed similar killings in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

"There is a chowk (roundabout) where the people go when they want to leave. The Taliban are attacking them there. I saw dozens killed (on Friday). The people were pleading to leave but the Taliban shot them," he said.

"They left the bodies where they fell. The animals were eating them."

Zaman paid a smuggler 1,300 rupees ($A41) to escape the terror, arriving in Quetta on Monday. Six of his family have been killed by the Taliban, he said, including his wife.

Sad Shah Musa, 50, echoed these experiences.

"People are running and the Taliban are shooting them," he said. "We have lost our lives in Afghanistan. We have lost everything.

"'Why are you fleeing, this is your country', they say. They say, 'You are against the Taliban, you are running away' and then they shoot."

The Taliban have also been accused of forcibly conscripting young Afghans to fight their holy war (jihad).

They came for the three sons of Baqhtawar, a 60-year-old woman from near Herat, in western Afghanistan, 12 days ago.

When she protested she was punched in the face, losing four front teeth. She was left sprawled on the floor with a bloodied mouth and has heard nothing from her children since.

She fled soon after under the cover of darkness and arrived in Quetta 10 days ago.

"The Taliban took our husbands and our sons. They burned our homes and our mosque," she said.

"We have not come to Pakistan because of the bombing but because we are hungry, thirsty and the Taliban are so cruel."

The Taliban said yesterday the war against the United States could go on for decades, but Sadiqa, who arrived here eight days ago from Kabul, said Afghanis were tired of the fighting, of the killing.

"We are tired of this life, living like this. We are dead inside," she said.

-- Anonymous, November 08, 2001

Answers

It gets worse.

Independent, UK

Stories of Taliban atrocities spread as villagers flee over the front line

By Justin Huggler in Hajimala refugee camp, Afghanistan

09 November 2001

"They burnt some of us alive." It was almost the first thing he said to us. In the dust and squalor of a refugee camp, Salahuddin told yesterday how the Taliban burnt an entire family to death in their own home in revenge for the American bombing.

He says he saw them bringing out the blackened bodies of the children. Then the Taliban took Salahuddin and the other villagers to the front line, where they ordered them to gather up scattered bits of bodies, all that was left of Taliban soldiers killed by the American bombs.

"There was a hand on its own in one place, and then a head on its own far away from it," he said. "None of the bodies were in one piece. I myself found three heads." They too were blackened, he told us, with the faces having been burned off. He spent two days picking up heads without faces.

We found Salahuddin, a tall, turbanned man with a heavy, brown beard, living in a makeshift tent with his wife and two young children, sleeping on the filthy ground without even a blanket under them. He said they had not eaten for days.

We had already heard rumours of a village on the other side of the front line called Dasht-e Archi, where the Taliban had come after the American bombing started. There were stories of women being raped and men being beaten to death. But nothing prepared us for Salahuddin's story.

At first, he seemed unnaturally calm, his voice even and matter-of-fact. Only after a while did it become clear that he was in shock. His mind veered wildly from one horror to another. At one point, he was talking about the killings in Dasht-e Archi when he suddenly broke off and said: "The bodies were all in pieces, scattered all over the place." It was the first time he mentioned picking up the pieces of Taliban soldiers on the front line.

Salahuddin came here with his wife, his seven-year-old son, Qudbuddin, and his two-year-old daughter, Sakina, four days ago, making the perilous journey across the front line by night. If the Taliban had seen them, they would have shot them. But it was better than staying in Dasht-e Archi.

There is no way of verifying Salahuddin's story. Several other people have arrived from Dasht-e Archi in the last few days telling of Taliban atrocities, and stories are beginning to leak out of a Taliban reign of terror in the wake of the US bombing.

The Taliban chose Dasht-e Archi because the people there still openly support the Northern Alliance, according to villagers who fled. The Taliban captured the village, just over a mile from the front line, two years ago, after savage fighting with the locals. After that, the Taliban largely left the village alone – until a week ago, just after the American bombs started to fall regularly on this front.

"One day they came, and ordered everyone to go into the bazaar and protest against the bombings, and chant: 'Death to America'," said Salahuddin. "I was in my house and I had to go outside. When we refused to protest against America, they got angry."

Another man who fled the village said he saw the Taliban drag a man called Lash Boi from his house to the mosque and beat him to death when he refused to protest. Lash Boi's three sons are on the front line now, fighting to avenge their father's death, he said.

Why did the villagers refuse to make even a show of protesting? "Because we hate the Taliban," said Salahuddin. Many of the Taliban soldiers who came to the village were not Afghans, he said, but volunteers from Pakistan, Chechnya and Arab countries. "They started telling some of the people to give them their houses, to use for military purposes. When they did, the Taliban soldiers started to smash up the houses, then they drove their jeeps inside the ruins to hide them from the American planes."

But a man called Abdulhamid refused. And so, says Salahuddin, the Taliban burned his house down with seven people inside. Abdulhamid was a distant relative of Salahuddin. The first Salahuddin knew of what was happening was when he saw the smoke from Abdulhamid's house burning. "The women went over and said it was Abdulhamid's house. The Taliban poured petrol over it, and set light to it," he said.

Inside were Abdulhamid, a 50-year-old farmer, his eight-year-old daughter, Maira, and his three sons: Abdulhaq and Rahim, both 12 years old, and Abdullah, who was seven. His wife was there too. Salahuddin would not tell us her name as it is dishonourable in Afghan society to give the names of adult women. Abdulhamid's brother, Abdullah, was there too. He had run to Abdulhamid's house to hide from the Taliban, said Salahuddin.

"We were afraid they would do the same to us," says Salahuddin. "Then, that night, after the Taliban left, we went to the house. They were bringing the bodies out. They were all hunched up, their hands clutched in front of them.

"There was a smell of burning, a really bad smell. Everyone was crying. I was crying. We buried the bodies that night," he said.

The next day, the Taliban returned and ordered the men to go to the front line, where the bombs had been falling. Now they were subjected to forced labour, picking up body parts.

"They made us gather up the pieces of bodies in plastic bags," he said. "Some of the pieces were a long way from the trenches, where the soldiers were when the bombs fell." He did not think any of the dead were civilians; from where the body parts lay, he said, they all appeared to be Taliban.

"They came back the next day and made us do the same," he says. "After two days, I decided to escape. It was dangerous, but I decided: 'If we get there, we get there. If we die, we die. Trust in God.' "Now he and his family are in a wretched refugee camp, hungry and sleeping on dirt. "Please help us," he said. Plenty of US bombs have fallen here but of the promised humanitarian aid there is little sign.

-- Anonymous, November 09, 2001