Generals and Defectors Alike Revel in Booty Left in Wake of the Taliban

Vasudin, 25, a Taliban fighter, was the proud possessor of his dream car, a Datsun Hilux pickup truck, for not much more than one glorious hour.

He took possession of the truck as a trophy of war. Asked when, he looked at his gold watch. “About an hour ago,” he grinned Saturday.

Vasudin--one of many Afghans who uses a single name--said he grabbed the truck on the Taliban side after a fight over its ownership and defected to the Northern Alliance as part of a big Taliban convoy that crossed the front line Saturday.

But half an hour later he was back on foot again, hoofing it around the convoy looking for a lift on the back of someone else’s truck.

“Of course, I would have liked to keep it,” he said, admitting that he had no hope of ever buying his own car. “But some commander is going take it.”

In Afghanistan, everyone from the front-line fighters to the generals is out for what he can get from the war, and one of the defining symbols of the Afghan warrior is the Japanese pickup truck. With their blacked-out windows, garish velour seats and plastic prayer medallions swinging from their rear-view mirrors, they are rated as highly desirable war booty.

They’re like personnel carriers, except cool. Fighters cram on board; weapons protrude at every angle like the branches of a parched tree.

For the generals the stakes are higher. Tanks, helicopters, airstrips, whole towns are there to be gobbled up in their advance--hence the rivalry among Northern Alliance commanders to be the first into the strategic city of Kunduz, the last northern stronghold of the Taliban, staking their claims to the spoils.

Mohammed Alim, 20, a Northern Alliance soldier, and three other armed fighters were walking to war Saturday when they flagged down someone else’s taxi and climbed on board, airily brushing aside objections.

“Sometimes we go to war on foot. Sometimes we walk for five hours,” Alim said.

He dreams that one day he won’t be walking back but driving his own pickup. Even a Soviet-made jeep would do just fine.

“You can get a pickup or a jeep or weapons. Our commander said we can’t take money or valuables. We can only take things indispensable to us, like a car or guns,” he said.

Mohammed Hasan, 33, another Northern Alliance fighter, seized his pickup truck in the advance toward Taloqan more than two weeks ago.

“There was fighting. The Taliban ran away and left their jeeps. I came and saw the keys were in this one so I just sat in it and drove off,” he said in Taloqan.

Some Loot Repeatedly Changes Hands

According to the unofficial rules of Afghan combat, he said, the first man to see and take an abandoned car in war becomes its new owner. But the seesaw nature of Afghanistan’s civil war means that some jeeps and pickups have changed hands several times.

As the convoy of Taliban defecting with pickups, other trucks, antiaircraft guns and multiple-rocket launchers crawled along the road toward Taloqan on Saturday, having crossed the front line, the Northern Alliance was quick to count the vehicles, reporting that more than 40 had come over to alliance control.

Some of the pickups were smeared with mud for camouflage, while others shone metallic blue or claret red. Several vehicles had broken down and were being towed. A Soviet GAZ-66 truck, its windows pierced with several bullet holes, trembled and shook, its engine shrieking as the driver revved it to prevent the engine from dying.

Rows of Northern Alliance soldiers peered over the top of a wall staring at the surrendering Taliban fighters like kids in the front row at a circus.

The convoy crawled along, pickups jostling for position, the clouds of dust it raised mingling with choking black smoke from the tanks and trucks. The tanks were the first to peel off, close to the bridge at Bangi, several miles from the front line.

Zabihullo, 22, another Taliban fighter, was behind the wheel of a Soviet UAZ jeep. He says he grabbed it about 18 months ago, at a time when the Northern Alliance moujahedeen were retreating, not the Taliban.

“It was standing on the road, and everyone had run away. There were no keys so I hot-wired it,” he said. “It’s a good car. I repaired it myself.”

In fact, the jeep seemed to have been commandeered by Zabihullo’s commander, Nozikmir, who uses the fighter as his driver.

Nozikmir was horrified at the idea that he and other Taliban might be expected to surrender their vehicles as part of the defection deal.

“How can they take our cars from us? This is our country,” he complained. His indignation at the unfairness was beyond logic, yet it was somehow fitting in an atmosphere where fighters who were enemies just a day earlier were suddenly embracing one another and no one bothered to disarm the defectors.

Ahmed Shah, 30, a Northern Alliance deputy commander helping oversee the transfer of the convoy to a military base outside Taloqan, confirmed that the alliance would seize all of the vehicles.

“It’s all state property now,” he said. Just what that meant, and how the booty would be divided among the commanders, was not clear.

Ready to Fight Erstwhile Comrades

As readily as they abandoned their positions, the Taliban fighters were willing to go back to fight against their erstwhile comrades, including foreign fighters on the Taliban side from countries such as Pakistan.

“I could get another car if I take part in the attack on Khanabad,” Zabihullo said optimistically.

Fighting was reported Saturday near that town, about 20 miles east of Kunduz.

To people such as alliance fighter Alim, poorly educated and with no hope of getting work, being a warrior is the most noble, glorious job that he can imagine. His aims in life are to get a second wife, a good house and a good car. Going to war gives him a chance of the third.

“We want to be the first into Kunduz,” he said, in comments that underscored the rivalry between two Northern Alliance generals heading for the town, Abdul Rashid Dostum, who recently took the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, and Daoud Kahn, who recently took Taloqan.

“If Dostum gets there first, he’ll take the whole town under his control,” Alim said. “If our commander gets there first, he’ll get control.”

Fighters such as Alim, and even Taliban defectors who crossed sides Saturday, were showing no signs of mercy as regards the battle ahead to dislodge foreign Taliban fighters in and around Kunduz.

“Even if they surrender, we’ll kill them,” Alim said, in comments later echoed by the Taliban defector Zabihullo. “They’re all murderers.” Alim predicted that there would be a lot of bloodshed among the remaining Taliban fighters and civilians in the area.

The loss of human lives, the chance to grab a good car: They are two sides of the same coin to fighters such as these.

The proud new pickup truck drivers of Taloqan have a ritual that seems sweet confirmation of their ownership. The first thing they do is to drive to one of the town’s gutter-like canals, and there they have a team of men wash the truck clean.