The ferocity of the US blitzkrieg confirmed Abu Walid’s grim mest fears—and his caustic assessment of his comrade bin Laden. ‘Look what you have done’, Rabiah would hear him muttering.
Over the months and years that followed, Abu Walid would emerge as bin Laden’s harshest critic within the jihadist movement. In a series of articles published after the fall of the Taliban, he blamed bin Laden’s flawed leadership, lack of wisdom and strategic myopia for the loss of Afghanistan’s Islamic state.
‘The most serious issue was the extreme weakness of bin Laden’s political and military capabilities’, Abu Walid wrote. ‘This was no longer a secret as bin Laden revealed this himself in his own statements, which he released after leaving Afghanistan … which revealed his gross ignorance of the fundamental principles of military action.’ Abu Walid cited the Chinese sage Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and opined: ‘If you are ignorant of yourself and of your enemy you will be defeated in every battle’. He said bin Laden’s style of leadership was like a ‘disease’ and flew in the face of basic military principles known for centuries. ‘This includes the idea that the method of absolute individual command was unsuccessful, outdated, and usually ended in defeat.’ Abu Walid’s view was that America’s greatest success was in the field of ‘psychological warfare’, because it succeeded in ‘misleading bin Laden and caused him to have the illusion that he had become a great and frightening superpower, thus his decisions and actions were influenced by that illusion’.
Abu Walid personified the schism in al Qaeda’s governing shura, which would leave the organisation splintered and weakened in the aftermath of September 11. Reflecting this split, as the US bombardment continued bin Laden and his colleagues fled in two separate directions. Bin Laden and loyalists including his deputy Dr Ayman al Zawahiri headed towards the underground Tora Bora cave complex excavated by bin Laden in the 1980s in the Spin Ghar mountains near Jalalabad, close to the Pakistan border. The dissenters including Abu Walid and his son-in-law Saif el Adel—described later by US military analysts as ‘the opposition group’ in al Qaeda’s senior leadership—would flee in the opposite direction to Iran.
There was nothing orderly about the exodus as the families too scattered in different directions as they were told. ‘They were trying to evacuate the Afghan-Arab families to either Iran or Pakistan, everything was organised by the men’, says Rabiah.
It was at this point, in Kandahar, that Abu Walid bade Rabiah and her family farewell. ‘He said he was leaving, he said he had things to do and he had made arrangements and we would be taken care of.’ Before she could argue, Rabiah and the children were bundled into a Toyota double-cab pickup with an Uzbek driver and their faithful guide, Hamid. The van was plastered with mud to make it less visible from the air and they were told to keep the windows up so it was less likely they would be seen. Then they set off into the desert, driving on rutted tracks and along dry riverbeds, to avoid the main roads.
‘I don’t even know where we went, or what direction, or where we were heading, but we were in the car for three days’, Rabiah recounts.
Abu Walid had instructed the Uzbek driver to take them to a pro-Taliban village north-east of Kandahar where a rendezvous had been arranged with some Uzbek families. The driver found the house and left them, promising to return the next morning. But the Uzbek contingent never arrived, and the driver didn’t return. They were told later he had been killed by anti-Taliban forces who were said to be nearby and reportedly hunting down Arabs sympathetic to al Qaeda.
‘So we ended up in this house, completely on our own—and we basically prepared to die’, says Rabiah.
She and the boys dug a trench in the yard behind a row of sandbags and filled empty bottles with kerosene for Molotov cocktails. They had a Kalashnikov and a grenade, given to them by some Arabs in a nearby village. Aminah and Huda were told to hide in a cavity under the stairs with the grenade. ‘I told them that if we were all killed and the Northern Alliance came to take them, they should detonate the grenade’, Rabiah says. But this dramatic finale did not come to pass. As they continued their preparations they heard banging on the door. Outside was an elderly Afghani man waiting beside a taxi with a nervous-looking driver ready to take them to safety. Rabiah says he told them he had heard they were in there and thought that if he didn’t rescue them he would have to meet Allah with the blood of women and children on his hands.
It transpired that their lucky escape had been two-fold. The driver who never came back was to have taken them to a safehouse in Paktia province near the Pakistan border, where some al Qaeda families had taken shelter. Among them was Rabiah’s friend Umm Fatima, the wife of al Zawahiri. She had fled Kabul after September 11, travelling with her children including her youngest, four-year-old Aisha who had Down syndrome. Also at the house was another family whose children had attended Abdullah Azzam’s school in Peshawar with Rabiah’s children. One of the girls who was there later related to Rabiah’s daughter Aminah the story of what happened. She said the women and children in the house (she makes no mention in this account of any men being present) had just prayed and kissed each other good night when they heard the familiar drone of a US bomber approaching. ‘The sound got closer and closer and soon it was as if it was on top of our house. Suddenly we heard the sound of rockets. I got up and ran to the corner of the room … Suddenly the roof collapsed on us and everything went dark. I was trapped in the corner and I couldn’t move. I started to call out for my mother and there was no reply.’
The two-storey house had scored a direct hit, smashing the cement roof and caving in the mudbrick walls. According to a separate account, Umm Fatima was pinned under a beam on the ground floor. Her only son was crushed, while her daughters who made it out could hear their mother and the other trapped women screaming, ‘Help us, help us’. Four-year-old Aisha was dragged from the rubble with a severe open head wound and died three days later. By the time rescuers reached Umm Fatima she too was dead. Aminah’s friend told her that almost everyone in the house was killed.
‘The Americans lied about that bombing’, says Rabiah. ‘From what I was told there were about twenty women in that house with their children, and no males over twelve. The only men were the Afghani drivers. Nine or twelve women died, plus about fifteen children.’
Zawahiri later wrote that he had ‘tasted the bitterness of American brutality’ with his family’s death: ‘To this day I do not know the location of the graves of my wife, my son, my daughter, and the rest of the three other families who were martyred in the incident and who were pulverized by the concrete ceiling, may God have mercy on them and the Muslim martyrs. Were they brought out of the rubble, or are they still buried beneath it to this day?’
The elderly Afghani man who had rescued Rabiah and her family arranged for a relative to drive them into the low-lying mountains near the town of Khost, a long-time al Qaeda stronghold close to the Pakistan border. There they belatedly met up with the Uzbeks who had promised Abu Walid they would protect his family. The Uzbeks had taken refuge in a makeshift mountain camp used in spring by Afghan kuchis, the nomadic animal herders who roam the country’s deserts and mountains in search of pasture for their sheep and goats. Now deserted by the nomads, the camp consisted of several dozen mud huts, each comprising a room divided in two by a mud wall, with dirt floors and a single window. There were no toilets or cooking facilities but each hut had a bukhar, a traditional Afghan stove made from an old oil can and fired by wood or coal.
‘We arrived at the camp in the middle of winter’, says Rabiah. ‘It was freezing. I had one jumper and the children had one change of clothes. There was no wood, we had to collect these huge spiky tumbleweeds— they were needle-sharp so we were lacerated with blood and scratches.’
The Uzbek emira—the woman in charge of the women and children—allocated Rabiah’s group a hut and supplies: five spoons, three plates, a saucepan, a box of matches and a load of wood. Like the other families, they were also given rat
ions of rice, flour, vegetable oil, potatoes, onions, salt and tomato paste. The temperatures plunged to well below zero at night and their only heating was the bukhar, which belched soot that filled their hair and left a grimy coating on their skin. They were allowed to light the stove at breakfast and dinnertime but had to extinguish it at nightfall in case the fires could be spotted by the US bombers overhead. There was no water for washing and it would be more than two months before they would next have a bath. The family took to calling Huda kuchi because she looked like a wild gypsy.
Meanwhile the US-led coalition’s bombardment of Afghanistan continued. The first stage of the offensive had wiped out Taliban air defences, al Qaeda training camps and communications facilities. The next phase, which began at the end of October, featured cluster-bombing of Taliban ground positions and the deployment of FA-18 Hornet fighter-bombers in pinpoint strikes targeting Taliban vehicles. US and British Special Forces were on the ground to help guide the attack planes in.
‘The Americans would send out reconnaissance planes. If they spotted the enemy—us—they would circle’, says Rabiah. ‘The jets would circle three times and that would be the mark of where the bombs would drop. You would know they had sighted you because you would see them circling. Between the first sighting and when the bombs dropped, you would have fifteen to twenty minutes, maximum. I became very good at spotting the planes—the trick to it is you hear the sound before you see the plane. And what they used to do was they would bomb a place and then, to make sure nobody had a chance of getting away, they would fly around and give anybody who had survived enough time to run, and then they would come back and bomb again. They used to kill a lot of kids that way.’
International media reports documented the mounting civilian casualty toll. On 27 October, US fighter jets dropped thirty-five bombs on a village north-east of Kabul, instantly killing ten civilians according to medical workers. Britain’s Sky News showed footage of an F-18 aircraft dropping bombs that struck a mud and timber family home, and reported that twenty family members were injured and another ten missing under the rubble.
On their third day in the kuchi camp, the children were out collecting tumbleweeds when Rabiah heard the sound of an approaching plane. She ran out, waving her arms to attract the children’s attention, but they just waved back. The Uzbeks were throwing children, bags and bedrolls onto their trucks for an immediate evacuation. Rabiah says she grabbed a Kalashnikov from one of the Uzbek guards and fired it in the air. This finally grabbed her children’s attention and they ran back to the camp. She and the girls jumped on the truck for women and children, which roared off down the mountain, as the drone of the attack plane grew louder.
‘The driver could hear the plane coming closer and he yelled “Allahu Akbar!” and drove off the side of the road’, says Rabiah. ‘He literally drove off the cliff and into a ravine, and— Allahu Akbar—we made it. But I don’t think my back will ever be the same.’
The truck continued down the mountain while the US bomber dropped its payload, flattening the mountain camp behind them. They eventually took shelter in a deserted school, now just a concrete shell with no windows. They had lost their luggage and the older boys including Rabiah’s sons Mustafa and Ilyas had been left behind. ‘I didn’t even know if they were alive’, she says. It was almost night time and they were in hostile terrain.
‘We were in this school and we were told that the Northern Alliance were close. So we had to lie down on the concrete floor and the women had to put the babies underneath them and we had to lie across the children so no noise could get out.’ The women had grenades, given to them by the Uzbek emira and secreted in pockets they’d sewn onto the outside of their shalwar kameez so they could keep them within reach. ‘If you got into a situation where it’s almost certain you’re going to be captured, you had the option—and some of the Afghan-Arab women did it—they’d hold onto their children and blow themselves up with their children. Would I have done it? Of course. There wouldn’t be much choice—die and go to paradise, or be raped. For a Muslim woman, there’s not much choice.’
They stayed like that in the abandoned school as night fell.
‘I have never experienced such pain in all my life’, says Rabiah. ‘It was below zero, lying on this cement floor. We stayed like that all night. Every time you nodded off you would dream that you were in a freezer. There were seventeen people in one room with three blankets. We took it in turns with the blankets, sleeping in shifts for three hours at a time. At fajr (dawn) it was our turn, and I have never slept such a beautiful sleep in all my life as when we climbed under that blanket and fell asleep.’
For three days they heard nothing of what had happened to the boys, until finally the truck driver went back to the razed camp and found them. Mustafa and Ilyas reported that the hut they had been staying in had been bombed into the ground.
By early November the Taliban was on the run, its frontlines decimated by US gunships dropping 7000-kilogram daisy cutter bombs. On 9 November, as US planes carpet-bombed Taliban defences, Northern Alliance troops overran the northernmost city of Mazar-e-Sharif, the first major centre to fall. They were quick to exact retribution. More than 500 Taliban found hiding in a school were massacred, and suspected Taliban and al Qaeda supporters were being executed on the spot. On the night of 12 November, the last of the Taliban’s fighters retreated under cover of darkness from Kabul, and by the next day the capital was in the hands of the Northern Alliance.
‘After the fall of Kabul it was pandemonium’, says Rabiah. ‘We had to move every few days. Sometimes we’d meet up with people; sometimes we were on our own. It went from incredible heat to cold. Sometimes we travelled en masse with truckloads of women and children. When we separated from them, we were on our own. It was just people running with nowhere to go—women and children running like cockroaches.’
Rabiah and her family made it to a border crossing where previously the frontier guards had been willing to accept a bribe of US$250 for passage into Pakistan. That was no longer the case; now there was a bounty on the heads of Taliban and al Qaeda sympathisers. ‘Even if you paid $US1000, the Americans will pay more’, Rabiah’s group was told.
Two weeks after the fall of Kabul, the Americans began bombing the Tora Bora cave complex where bin Laden and his lieutenants were believed to be holding out. As the cluster bombs rained down, civilian casualties climbed further. Rabiah tells of a Moroccan family who briefly travelled in convoy with her group. They were driving an old VW Kombi van, presumably a relic of Afghanistan’s hippy-trail days. Eventually the ancient Kombi would go no further on the boulder-strewn mountain roads. The pickup truck that Rabiah and her children were in could take no more weight, so Mustafa and Ilyas offered to stay behind and let the Moroccan’s wife and children take their places in the pickup. But the man and his family wanted to stay together, so Rabiah’s group went on and left them behind. Fifteen minutes later an American bomber flew overhead. Rabiah says they looked back down the mountain to see the Kombi van in flames, the family incinerated inside it. ‘We used to listen to the news on the BBC or Voice of America and my blood would boil at the lies—that they were “pursuing the remnants of al Qaeda”’, she remembers. ‘They were shooting women and children in the back from Apache helicopters while they were running—they were purposely killing women and children. And all in the name of “you’re either with us or against us”. I just couldn’t comprehend that people who were supposedly the leaders of the free world and who set themselves up as champions of what is right and good in this world would commit such acts—and use the excuse that we had committed atrocities.’
When they weren’t running or hiding, their time and energy were absorbed by the tasks of finding shelter, food and water to survive the ferocious Afghan winter. At one point they spent two weeks hiding in the underground cellar of an Afghan family’s home. Later they broke into a deserted UN clinic to take refuge with another family in its two concrete rooms. ‘We had
nothing, no water, nothing’, says Rabiah. There was no toilet and they couldn’t go outside, so they would defecate in plastic bags and throw them up on the roof. ‘We didn’t eat much so we didn’t go to the toilet much. We were living on mostly rice and water so we were all as skinny as rakes—we didn’t get sick, we were just skinny.’ For more than two months they went without a bath or shower and barely washed their clothes. ‘The water we used to do the washing was brown. We had to leave the water to sit so the dirt would settle, then it would freeze. It was no use washing our clothes because the water was freezing and it was so dirty and there was no soap. If we hung them outside to dry it was so cold they would freeze and the fabric would split. If we took them inside to dry where the bukhar was, the soot would stick to them while they were wet. But it was just the ritual of washing the clothes that made you feel better.’
Finding fresh water for drinking became a major preoccupation. On one occasion they walked for an hour to find a well. As they arrived back at their hideout, Ilyas tripped on a clod of earth and dropped the buckets, spilling their entire contents.
‘I can remember us all sitting there in the dirt and sobbing. Ilyas was like he had spilt the last water on the face of the Earth. He kept saying, “Please forgive me, please forgive me”.’
They ate rice and wild spinach and Rabiah cooked bread in the bukhar. The Afghan villagers sometimes donated food, and at the Muslim festival, Eid ul Adha, someone killed a buffalo and gave them a lump of meat. Their faithful guide Hamid, who stayed with them for the duration, showed Rabiah how to make a pressure cooker using an old oil can with a lid sealed by pastry. ‘You get a stick, and you have to keep poking the stick through the pastry, to make a hole to let the pressure out; otherwise they explode like a bomb.’ She recalls one miserable feast. ‘It was about 3 a.m. We’d been fasting, and it was so cold your nose would drip and it would freeze. We were standing in the snow and sleet, keeping the fire going. It took about an hour to cook the buffalo so it was edible. It was good, but I wouldn’t recommend that method of cooking.’
The Mother of Mohammed Page 33