A Monument to the Martyrs of Al Qaeda

Even in a driving rain, the worshipers stream to a roadside graveyard here.

They show their veneration by tying brightly colored banners onto pieces of string stretched between the burial mounds. Hundreds of these flags blow in the wind--rare spots of color in a desolate winter landscape.

But in this case, devotion carries a complicated and disturbing message for Americans. This is no ordinary graveyard.

Here and in a nearby, and even better-kept, burial ground lie the remains of 100 to 150 Al Qaeda members and Taliban leaders who died when U.S. bombers blasted the mosque where they were saying their evening prayers last fall on the second night of Ramadan, the most holy of Muslim holidays.

The graveyards’ popularity--local people call them “the shrine” and those buried there “martyrs”--is a chilling reminder of the persistence of Al Qaeda in eastern Afghanistan and of the depth of the movement’s local support. It also suggests how difficult it will be for the U.S. to eradicate the group, because with each Al Qaeda member killed, sympathy for the movement’s anti-American rhetoric builds.

‘Just About the Last Al Qaeda Stronghold’

“They were Muslims, and they were killed in a holy place, in a mosque. Even if they were Al Qaeda, it was wrong to kill them like that. We do not have ‘Al Qaeda’ in Islam, we only have Muslims,” said Youssef Rahman, 20, who came along with three friends to pray at the cemetery.

This is Al Qaeda country. Near here, American and Afghan government troops have joined forces for the largest joint ground offensive of the war. They are now heavily engaged in an effort to rout hundreds of Al Qaeda members from a mountain and cave complex in central Paktia province.

U.S. intelligence suggests that Paktia is the last place in Afghanistan where Al Qaeda is still active. Signs of its presence are everywhere, and the tucked-away pockets of Arabs--as the Al Qaeda fighters are widely known--have been an open secret among local residents.

At the hospital in Khowst, doctors say they last saw Arab patients in late December, when a dozen or so came for treatment of shrapnel wounds after a U.S. bombing attack on the village where they were living.

Before mid-November, when the Taliban regime abandoned the Afghan capital, Kabul, Arabs came to Khowst regularly for medical treatment. Their wives delivered their babies in the hospital’s maternity ward, and the facility even had two Pakistani nursing assistants who could speak some Arabic, said Hamidullah, 36, the chief nurse.

Just a short way away is a house right in the middle of Khowst where Arabs lived, said Surgul, the chief of security for the city and a local commander. The compound, which the Arabs evacuated in November, looks like most walled Afghan homes except for the fragments of paper and the fliers left behind, all in Arabic. One document found by Surgul was a fatwa, or religious edict, against Americans.

In one locked room, it is possible to glimpse boxes filled with large bottles of chemicals. U.S. forces came and photographed everything in the room but left it intact, Surgul said.

“This is just about the last Al Qaeda stronghold,” said a U.S. Special Forces soldier in Paktia province who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The hard thing here is that it’s difficult to sort out who is Al Qaeda and who isn’t.”

Americans first took aim at the region in 1998, when the U.S. shot a cruise missile at Zhawar Kili, a village high in the mountains just a couple of miles from the Pakistani border that Osama bin Laden had used as a major base.

More than 300 Arabs lived there at one time, hiding weapons in well-fortified caves, training soldiers on the rugged terrain and going to a school whose fervent motto can still be made out: “We will continue our jihad until the end of the world.”

Although the Arabs fled after that attack, some of them, along with their Taliban supporters, appear to have returned subsequently and used the caves for storing weapons. Many continue to cross into Pakistan, where they are suspected of receiving support from renegade members of the Pakistani intelligence services.

The U.S. bombed the area heavily in January. But Zhawar Kili is just one of a score of villages and compounds in eastern Afghanistan that the Americans destroyed because they suspected that Al Qaeda and Taliban members were hiding there.

Figuring out where Al Qaeda and Taliban loyalists take refuge is like searching for shadows. Local intelligence is a mixed bag, replete with disinformation and false leads. One former Taliban deputy minister of telecommunications, Maulani Monib, distanced himself from the Taliban and then apparently began to work clandestinely with the Americans at the same time that he was still working with Al Qaeda. He was found out last month and disappeared over the border into Pakistan, according to a high-ranking official in the Afghan Interior Ministry.

A $5,000 Bounty on American Soldiers

Some local commanders and soldiers play both sides because they still have ties to Taliban leaders. Some of the latter were heroes of the Afghans’ fight against the Soviets, and no one wants to betray them.

Further complicating matters is that it is dangerous for Americans to operate in Paktia.

There is a $5,000 bounty for killing an American and the promise of $300,000 for the assailant’s family if he is martyred in the process, according to Special Forces troops.

“The money is for any American, but particularly a soldier,” one U.S. fighter said.

Perhaps then it is not surprising that before a U.S. service member was killed this weekend, the only soldier killed in Afghanistan by hostile fire was slain in Khowst. On Jan. 4, Sgt. 1st Class Nathan Ross Chapman was shot as he stood in the back of a pickup truck surveying the damage that U.S. bombing had done to the mosque and looking at the graveyard nearby, according to locals.

“It’s a dangerous place for Americans because the threat isn’t an all-out assault. What you worry about is the low-level guy who hates you or just wants to make some money,” the U.S. fighter said.

But no amount of money offered by an American, it seems, would be likely to win over the worshipers at the Al Qaeda shrines in Khowst. They are rich and poor, young and old. There are too many of them even for the commanders of the city, who are closely allied with the Americans, to stop.

“It’s better for the Americans to leave our country and go back to their own country--and not only here. They should leave all the Muslim countries,” said Barat Khan, 18, a soldier in the new Afghan government who had come to worship at the shrine dedicated exclusively to Arab dead.

“The Americans are cruel. They kill 20 Afghans for one Al Qaeda member,” Barat said as he fingered a set of prayer beads. “Yes, of course they have enemies.”