by Doug Stanton
Some of the women started removing their veils completely and making eyes at Walden when they passed him on the street. Dean nicknamed him “Casanova.” Walden blushed whenever he heard the word.
He also began to fear something bad would happen either to him or to the women he met in the street if he was caught looking at their uncovered faces. At the same time, the experience made him appreciate the plight of these women, many of whom had been beaten by their husbands simply for being female. He guessed this was their form of silent protest, a flirtation with a man from the outside world.
From his new office, Mitchell oversaw the rebuilding of the hospital and its water and electric plants, and supervised the disposal of unexploded bombs and land mines that still littered Mazar’s airport and streets. Working alongside him was his friend Major Kurt Sonntag, who had helicoptered into Mazar from K2 after the Americans had ridden into the city. Major Steve Billings, who’d been running the teams’ operations from the comfort of a desk back at K2, arrived, too, his worst nightmare realized: the war had gone on without him. With Billings was his buddy Sergeant Roger Palmer, who was equally glad to be entering the war zone, and an eager young captain, Paul Syverson, thirty, from Lake Zurich, Illinois.
None of these men had lately fired a weapon in a battle, if at all, and all of them were glad to have escaped the monotony of K2, which in the preceding weeks had grown by several thousand men. It was now a tented city populated by soldiers from all branches of the U.S. military, and they had been waiting for Mitchell, Dean, and Nelson to capture Mazar. Over the coming weeks, they would now enter the country in follow-on maneuvers. Just as they had planned, Mazar was a base from which the rest of Afghanistan could be controlled. The battle to win Mazar had proven decisive; but Mitchell, Dean, and the others all knew that the Taliban were still at large by the thousands, and that Mazar could be lost almost as quickly as it had been won.
With such uncertainty in mind, Sergeant Betz, who had also flown in from K2 to staff the new headquarters, began fretting about the schoolhouse’s security. The building was approachable from all sides. Betz worried about its close proximity to the busy street—an easy target for would-be car bombers.
Such an attack could deliver a devastating blow. Mitchell’s feeling was: Don’t relax yet.
With the temporary cessation of major military confrontations came the sudden yet murky game of strategic brinksmanship, with men, weapons, territory, freedom, and American dollars as the chips on the board. And soon Dostum made a move. Ever the wily diplomat, he lured a Taliban archrival, Mullah Faisal, deputy defense minister and commander of some 10,000 Taliban troops, into Mazar to negotiate the terms of his own surrender. If Dostum could achieve this surrender, he would decrease the enemy force he’d otherwise face in Konduz, and add more soldiers to his own ranks. He had set the date for his movement to Konduz as November 25, so time was of the essence.
On November 21, eleven days after he’d driven the Taliban army from Mazar, a gloating Dostum welcomed the dour, defeated Faisal back to Qala-i-Janghi. Faisal roared through the fortress gate in a convoy of about forty vehicles and five hundred men, all of them heavily armed. They pulled into a parking lot inside the fortress walls and Dostum’s men instantly surrounded them.
As each side stood with its guns trained on the other, the portly Faisal, his head wrapped in a black turban, and dressed in a brown sport coat, marched up to Dostum’s chambers to discuss the terms of surrender. He was trailed by several dozen of his own gunmen, who took up positions around the room. The room was tense.
As a show of Dostum’s strength, helicopters from the U.S. 160th SOAR, the same unit that had delivered Nelson and Dean into the country, patrolled overhead as the two warlords talked over tea and biscuits, with Bowers listening quietly in the corner. Dostum leaned on Faisal to order the Al Qaeda soldiers in his midst to surrender. Many of the local Taliban were already eager to give up.
At all costs, Dostum wanted to avoid urban combat in Konduz. Like the Al Qaeda fighters who’d been trapped at Sultan Razia, the enemy soldiers inside Konduz were fanatical and opposed to surrender; subduing them would mean another bloody slaughter.
For his part, Faisal wanted passage from Konduz to Herat, about sixty miles west of Mazar, where pockets of sympathetic Taliban still had not surrendered. The usually defiant mullah had a proposition for Dostum: he would pay the Uzbeki warlord $500,000 if he and his fellow Taliban were allowed to travel safely to Herat.
After some discussion about the overall plan, the enemies looked each other in the eye and shook hands. They were agreed.
The two men emerged from Dostum’s quarters and announced to the Taliban and Afghan soldiers gathered below that nearly 13,000 Taliban would surrender in Konduz.
“The fighting of the Taliban is finished in Afghanistan,” Dostum happily proclaimed. “They are preparing to surrender to us.” Ever the diplomat, he carefully described the surrender not as a moment of defeat for the Taliban but as a chance for all warring Afghans to be reunited.
Dostum realized he was about to vastly enlarge his army, as long as he could convince the enemy fighters to join his side. The Taliban in Konduz owned valuable tanks, weaponry, and a fleet of beat-up Toyota trucks. That he would be $500,000 richer for the deal had to seem a bonus.
The Afghan Taliban would be allowed to join the Northern Alliance or return home, to their farms, businesses, and families, as long as they didn’t have an affiliation with Al Qaeda. The fate of the approximately 3,000 Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechen, and Chinese—the “foreign” Taliban—would be decided later. Dostum would eventually sort them out, he announced, deciding who was an Al Qaeda terrorist and who was not. But for now, they would be safe.
Faisal and his men loaded up in their Toyotas and delivery trucks and shot off from the fort in a cloud of dust. Bowers watched them go. He didn’t like the feeling he had about the meeting. Dostum, it seemed, was suffering an attack of hubris. (Bowers would later be surprised to learn that Dostum also believed he might convince Al Qaeda and foreign Taliban fighters to surrender to him.)
During the meeting, Bowers had found Faisal to be vague about his plans to carry out the surrender in Konduz, and he distrusted the warlord (Bowers was also unaware of Faisal’s cash payment). But there was nothing he felt he could put a finger on. And besides, there was the pressing matter of Konduz to turn to.
Upon returning from his meeting with Dostum in Konduz, Faisal informed his soldiers that any Taliban who put a picture of Massoud or Dostum on the windshield of their vehicle would be allowed safe passage into Mazar and on to Herat. Faisal didn’t mention that at first they would be held as prisoners, and that the local Taliban would be freed, while the fate of the foreign ones was as yet undecided. The foreigners were also led to believe that they likely would be allowed to continue to Herat. Faisal misled them in order to get them to comply.
His double cross went further, in the later estimation of Max Bowers: with Dostum pacified by the surrender, Faisal planned an attack on Mazar itself. His payment of money to Dostum had bought him the time and space to accomplish this.
Taliban fighters located in Balkh, to the northeast of Mazar, were awaiting word from Taliban command when to attack. Further attacks would come from Taliban soldiers in Konduz, and from those still hiding in Mazar.*
If they could retake Mazar, then the Americans’ battle for the north would be lost. And with it, the battle for Kabul, and thereby the rest of the country. The Americans would soon be mired in conflict through a long, bitter winter. Without Mazar, they wouldn’t have access to the Mazar airfield and nearby Freedom Bridge to Uzbekistan, with which they planned to bring humanitarian and military supplies into the country.
Without Mazar, they would lose everything.
While the surrender negotiations were under way, Diller had worried that he’d be left out of the fight in Konduz. Bowers, again, seemed to have a sore spot for Diller’s team. Sam Diller wondered what kind of action he him
self would see if he had to stay behind in Mazar. Not much, he guessed. He couldn’t imagine sitting out a fight.
To remedy the situation, he knocked on the door of the ranking officer on the ground, Admiral Bert Calland, who had arrived in mid-November as a high-ranking liaison with Alliance forces. The ultimate decision about who would be going to Konduz would be Calland’s. Diller knew he was going over Bowers’s head. The move could end his career.
Calland was looking through some papers when Diller entered. He looked up. “Yes?”
Diller removed his boonie cap and said, “Sir, there’s a fight coming up in Konduz, and we want to be there. I’ve heard that we might not get to go.
“Nobody put me up to this,” he went on. “Captain Nelson didn’t ask me to talk to you. So if there’s gonna be any heat, I’ll take it.”
Calland, obviously impressed with Diller’s initiative, smiled and thought a moment. “You won’t be taking any heat, Sergeant. I’ll see what I can do.”
After that, Diller and the team were placed on the list to go to Konduz.
That night, Sergeant Dave Betz drove to a helicopter landing zone north of the city to pick up some soldiers newly arrived from K2. These men would help form the support staff at the schoolhouse. Betz was relieved to be receiving more men to supplement the skeleton crew. He was looking forward to seeing his buddy Captain Kevin Leahy. Leahy had been riding out the war back at K2. Now he walked up and slapped Betz heartily on the shoulder. “Ol’ Sarge, how the hell are you?”
The two men had worked in adjoining offices back at Fort Campbell, and Leahy remembered the day the news of the attacks in New York City had come over the radio, when he had worried about his brother who worked for a brokerage firm on Wall Street. Betz had been a steady presence as Leahy waited for the news that his brother hadn’t been in the World Trade Center when it collapsed.
Not everyone could fit in the van already stuffed with gear and weapons, so Leahy volunteered to stay at the landing zone with eight other soldiers while Betz drove eight British SBS (Special Boat Service) soldiers back to the city. The Brits had arrived to help Mitchell secure the Turkish Schoolhouse in the aftermath of the war. Betz was glad to see them, too.
About an hour after Betz left, Leahy watched red tracers streak across the horizon, maybe a quarter mile away. That was odd. Leahy had been told when boarding the helicopter that he shouldn’t expect to meet any resistance when he landed. He ordered the other men to don their night vision goggles and find cover among the ruined walls of some nearby mud buildings. U.S. Army staff sergeant Jason Kubanek hadn’t been part of an active combat team, like Newman’s or Nelson’s, but he was hungry for a fight. Maybe now, he thought, he was going to get it.
Leahy heard the angry roar of a vehicle approaching, tires skidding to a stop at the edge of the landing zone. Three men in desert camo—Leahy could see they were Special Forces soldiers—jumped out. Captain Paul Syverson and Sergeants Andrew Johnson and Gus Forrest had been ordered by Betz to come back and pick up Leahy and the remaining men.
“They started firing at us at a checkpoint!” yelled one of the soldiers. “That was an ambush. They’re coming after us right now!”
That explained the tracer fire, thought Leahy.
“Let’s move the vehicle to the buildings,” said Leahy.
“If we do that,” said one of the soldiers, “somebody could see we’re here because of the taillights.”
“Okay,” said Leahy, “then break the taillights!”
He waited and nobody moved. Then he realized that some of the guys were hesitant to take a swipe at the truck. Like it was war, but you couldn’t break anything, Leahy thought.
“Like this,” he said. And he raised his rifle butt and smashed one of the lights. Somebody quickly smashed the other.
These guys were staff people, not warriors who had recently seen battle, Leahy reminded himself. In fact, he counted himself among them. But he could feel his own fear as he reminded these guys of the seriousness of the situation.
“Can somebody get comms with the schoolhouse?” he asked.
“Sir,” said blue-eyed, blond-haired Ernest Bates, a thirty-five-year-old sergeant from the Midwest who was fiddling with a radio he’d drawn from his rucksack. “Sir, I can’t raise the schoolhouse.”
Leahy knew he had to get a message to Betz explaining why they hadn’t returned already.
Bates pulled another transmitter from his bag. “Sir, using this, we can send a distress signal to K2,” he suggested.
Leahy considered it. “Nah, ’cause we’re not in distress, yet. Listen, everybody has got to relax.”
Back at the Turkish Schoolhouse, Betz was, in fact, wondering why Leahy hadn’t yet returned. Impatient, he grabbed another sergeant, Bob Roberts, and they jumped into a vehicle, Betz driving like hell for the HLZ.
Shortly, Leahy looked up from behind his pile of rubble and watched as a van ripped over the desert road, heading toward him.
“Is it ours?” he shouted out.
“We think it’s Betz,” one of the men answered.
“Keep an eye on it,” said Leahy. He told everybody to be ready to hammer it with automatic fire.
The door flew open and a stout man silhouetted by headlights bounded up, sputtering. Betz.
He walked up to Leahy. “Hey, sir! What the hell! What are you guys doing?”
Leahy snapped. “What the hell? I’m out here and we’ve got guys getting shot at!”
And then they heard something falling toward them from overhead. Around them the ground thudded. An air drop, thought Leahy. We’re standing in a supply drop zone!
They scattered to the edges of the gravel field and listened as the night erupted with shouts. There were people out there, scurrying around in the dark, tearing at the bundles of food and blankets.
“Does anybody know who those people are?” asked Leahy.
“Locals,” said Betz. “They’ve been raiding our supply drops.”
“We’re going to recon the crowd and see,” Leahy decided.
He turned to Sergeant Roberts. “Get in and drive. And put the headlights on.”
Leahy, Betz, and Roberts drove toward the crowd.
Leahy watched as the looters stood up, arms laden with bandages, blankets, and boxes of MREs. He stepped out into the headlights and held his hand up in peace. Salaam alaikum, he said. Peace be with you, brother.
Leahy could see the looters were nervous, fingering beat-up AKs.
Betz couldn’t figure it out. These were local citizens, with some Northern Alliance soldiers in the mix. What was making them so nervous?
Leahy decided that he and Betz and several others would make a run for the Turkish Schoolhouse. They would have to leave the rest of the group behind until daylight. Leahy wanted to get word to Mitchell that they had arrived and were all right. He wanted to know: What in hell is going on?
PART FIVE
AMBUSH
Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan
November 24, 2001
Probing close to the city limits, but unseen, unheard, and completely unexpected, a force of six hundred armed Taliban warriors, tired, filthy, and wavering on the verge of total physical collapse, had halted in the cold desert sand, about two miles from Leahy’s position at the ruins.
It was these men who had made the local Afghans so nervous.
They had walked and driven several days from Konduz. These were some of the foreign soldiers who had been tricked by Mullah Faisal into believing that General Dostum would afford them safe passage to the nearby ancient city of Herat, east of Mazar, one of the Taliban’s remaining strongholds.
Six large trucks sat idling on the highway. Among the Taliban fighters was a young American so tired he was unable to speak. He squatted in the dust and made a fireless camp, waiting for dawn.
Through the night, the Americans in the city could hear gunfire erupting, growing in intensity, as if there were a battle brewing that no one had told them about. At abou
t 3 a.m., Betz and Leahy back at the schoolhouse were still trying to sort out why the locals at the landing zone had been so jumpy. At the same time, Dean was fitfully dozing in his safe house when a team member burst in and shook him awake.
The team member had gotten up to go to the bathroom and had seen a light on in an office often used by Atta in an adjoining room.
The Siege of Qala-i-Janghi Fortress, November 25–December 1, 2001
The man had thought it was unusual that Atta should be there so late. Dean jumped up from his sleeping bag, which was laid out on a large pillow on the floor; he dressed and pulled on a brown Army T-shirt and his hiking boots, and rushed across the courtyard to the general’s makeshift office.
Atta looked up in surprise as Dean entered.
The usually dapper warlord had also apparently dressed quickly and hurried to his office. His brown smock was misbuttoned at the neck and his trademark hat was askew over one eye.
Dean saw the stricken look on the man’s thin face and asked in pantomime, What’s wrong?
Atta had unrolled a map of northern Afghanistan on a table and he bent over it, pencil in hand, and traced a line along the road from Konduz to Mazar.
“Taliban and Al Qaeda!” Atta said.
He ran his finger over the road leading from Konduz. He then tapped the map with the pencil around the city of Mazar and said again, “Taliban and Al Qaeda!”
“Here?” asked Dean, pointing at Mazar.
Atta shook his head. “Yes.”
Dean stood up. “You’re shitting me, sir,” he said in English, forgetting for a moment that the warlord couldn’t understand him.