Militias Bring 18 Terrorists Down From Mountain

The band of terrorists who survived the battle for Tora Bora came down the mountain on donkeys Monday, dazed and sick and wounded, hands tied behind their backs with red nylon, their eyes to the ground.

There were 18 of them--nine Arabs and nine Afghans. They were young and bearded and caked in dirt. They rode with slumped shoulders. Some cried. Village men and boys lined the dirt track along the way but said nothing as the nameless faces of Osama bin Laden’s shattered army passed by.

Captives Brought Before Photographers

Their captors put the prisoners in a small mud-walled building in the foothills of the White Mountains and bandaged their wounds. Most appeared shellshocked, many limped. One flashed a V sign as two guards led him into a courtyard where foreign photographers waited.

The others followed in ones and twos, sat quietly, as directed, with heads bowed for a few minutes, then were brought back to their makeshift cell to await another cold, dark night and an unknown fate.

Unlike 300 or so of their colleagues, these men--some of whom came from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates--survived the battle for Tora Bora, the last organized stronghold of Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network.

It was overrun Sunday after nine weeks of U.S. air attacks and two weeks of ground fighting in which several hundred American and British commandos played a prominent role.

“Al Qaeda has been a problem not only for Afghanistan but for the whole world,” said militia commander Haji Zahir, who spent four years in prison under the Taliban regime that harbored the network. “It is the duty of every Afghan to search for the rest of the Al Qaeda people.”

The fiery-eyed, trim-bearded Zahir held a rare news conference for foreign journalists near the POW compound, gesturing with small, dainty hands at odds with the image of a tribal warrior. He said Al Qaeda was finished in Tora Bora--”they have lost their ammunition, food, confidence”--and noted that his men and those of two other militia commanders had taken over all the fighters’ positions and ammunition depots.

Like other military leaders in Afghanistan, Zahir all but denied the presence of U.S. and British forces on the ground, saying he had received no help from any foreign country, and he dodged questions about the whereabouts of Bin Laden, whose fate is of less concern to the Afghans than to the Americans.

The Bush administration has accused Bin Laden of masterminding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and placed a $25-million bounty on his head.

Militia fighters returning from the front said they had not seen Bin Laden in Tora Bora for about a month, although U.S. intelligence operatives were reported to have intercepted radio traffic from him in the region last week. Afghan observers say that although Bin Laden trains others for martyrdom, there is no indication that he seeks it for himself, and they find it unlikely that he wouldn’t have formulated a plan to escape to Pakistan when it became apparent that Tora Bora would be attacked.

“Bin Laden killed my brother, my nephew,” said Zahir’s father, Haji Abdul Qadeer.

“He knows his enemy, and he is not a child. He understood what was coming. He knew he was fighting a superpower. He knew our forces were coming to fight him in Tora Bora,” Qadeer said.

“If he had strength, I believe he would have stayed in the mountains. But if he did not have adequate supplies and soldiers, I believe he would have made a plan to leave.”