250 Prisoners Granted Amnesty in Afghanistan; Others’ Fate Uncertain

Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum supervised the release of 250 prisoners Friday under an amnesty granted in honor of the Persian New Year.

The ethnic Pashtun prisoners, who have been held in an overcrowded prison in Dostum’s hometown in northern Afghanistan, were chosen for the amnesty either because they were very young, very old or ill.

Before the journey home, they were forced to sit in the pouring rain for hours while being processed for release.

The 3,000 prisoners in the prison 75 miles north of Mazar-i-Sharif were detained four months ago by the Northern Alliance, accused of collaborating with the Taliban.

Besmellah, 19, awaiting release in white plaster casts, both legs splattered with mud, claimed that he was pressed into the Taliban’s service but didn’t go into battle.

“When I go home, first I’ll wait to be healthy and then I’ll work on the farm,” he said.

Daweza, 80, admitted he had been a guard for the Taliban, but said: “I never fought against the Northern Alliance--look, I’m an old man, I can’t fight.”

The fate of the hundreds remaining--filling the prison to 10 times capacity--is still unclear.

The prison doctor said disease in the prison is rampant, ranging from diarrhea to heart disease and kidney ailments.

Some of the prisoners flashed emaciated torsos as they changed their shalwar kameez shirts while waiting in Red Cross lines before boarding buses for home.

The amnesty for this holiday is the second at the prison since the Northern Alliance brought the detainees here in November; about 200 were released for the Islamic holiday Eid al-Adha, or Feast of Sacrifice.

U.S. military interrogators have also questioned inmates at the compound and took a few for further questioning to determine if they were top Taliban figures or Al Qaeda members.

Across the muddy courtyard where the prisoners were being registered, Khalid Seffula lay unable to move in his sweat- and urine-stained mattress in the makeshift prison clinic as flies buzzed around the windowless room.

He is one of the estimated 1,100 Pakistanis at the prison who came to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban--and not among those released.

Seffula, 23, said he left his studies in Islamabad, Pakistan, and arrived to fight two days after the American bombing campaign started in October.

“When I was there, I heard that Americans were attacking Muslims. When I arrived here, I saw that was wrong--that Americans helped Muslims--but after that I couldn’t leave,” he said, his left leg atrophied from disuse after it was injured during fighting in Kunduz.

“If they can’t treat us, they should kill us here. We don’t want to be alive here,” he said.