A taste of hell for a few hours

MAZAR-e-SHARIF, NOV. 26. Following is an eye-witness account of the Reuters correspondent, Mr. Nikolai Pavlov, who along with cameraman Shavkat Rakhmatullayev, was present at the scene of the Taliban prisoners' rebellion in Mazar-e-Sharif yesterday.

It was bloody mayhem. Bombs were falling, grenades exploding and machinegun bullets flying all around us. And it seemed to come from nowhere on a mild and slightly hazy autumn day on the dusty steppes of northern Afghanistan. We wanted to visit the prison at Mazar-e-Sharif, the bastion of the region's warlord, the Uzbek general, Abdul Rashid Dostum, and the jail for hundreds of prisoners he had taken when Taliban fighters surrendered near the besieged city of Kunduz.

With cameraman Shavkat Rakhmatullayev, I approached with a sense of excitement this folly of a 19th century fortress, whose 20- metre high walls and mud-baked crenellated ramparts dominate the parched desert. We entered the fort and were about to go inside the prison to interview some of the captives at about 11 a.m. on Sunday morning when we were halted at a small gate by a commander who said we needed permission from his superior.

It seemed to be the usual bureaucracy. But that red tape may have saved our lives. Because just then all hell broke loose. We heard two grenades exploding and then rifle fire. The cameraman and I threw ourselves down under the trees.

We just had no idea what was happening but we could tell that something had gone very wrong inside the prison section of the huge fort. After a while we managed to make a dash for shelter against the thick wall of the fort where we were pinned down for what seemed like hours by the intense firing.

The fighting was so heavy that we couldn't really move, we couldn't go anywhere. When I tried to raise my head and see what was happening several bullets whizzed right past me and into the dusty ground nearby. As soon as I tried to look out some grenades landed near us. It was not pleasant.

We weren't entirely alone. Northern Alliance fighters pinned down with us explained that foreign Taliban prisoners - some of the hardline Pakistanis, Arabs, Chechens and Uzbeks associated with Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network - had grabbed weapons and launched a bloody rebellion.

Sharing our fear was a television crew from Germany's Ard station and a mysterious American man in plainclothes, equipped with an automatic weapon and a satellite telephone. He refused to tell us his name. But we could hear him calling in information to someone, perhaps his base command, saying one American could be dead and hundreds of the Taliban fighters killed, hundreds more injured. It seemed that a really large number of people were killed in the mayhem. From our tiny patch of cover, we saw four wounded Alliance fighters.

The firefight raged for at least four hours. It felt like forever. Finally, we plucked up our courage and with the flak- jacketed U.S. observer and the German crew we made a run for the wall, leaving our tripod and camera batteries behind. We leapt over. Luckily the wall was more of an incline than a sheer drop and we slithered down amid a hail of bullets in the gathering dusk.

We ran for our lives down the road and had the good fortune to meet a Northern Alliance official who stopped his car and gave us a lift back to safety in Mazar-e-Sharif about 10 km away. I can't imagine many of the prisoners survived.

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