Taliban's Enemies Emerge From the Shadows

Members of an Underground Resistance Movement Helped Drive Rulers Out of Herat

By Doug Struck

Washington Post Foreign Service

Tuesday, February 12, 2002; Page A12

HERAT, Afghanistan -- For three days, the men had followed Jama Gul Palwani. He was easy to track: a fat man who had expensive cars, thanks to the payments he got from the Taliban for naming the resistance leaders to be jailed and tortured in Herat.

One of Palwani's pursuers was a young man with a cold motive: His father was among those killed as a result of Palwani's tips.

Finally they moved. Wearing black turbans like those of the Taliban, they blocked Palwani's car shortly before noon at a busy intersection and pulled him from the back seat. The aggrieved young man raised an automatic rifle from under his robe and squeezed the trigger. They left Palwani's body in the street.

The assassination of the Taliban informant last summer was but one of an untold number of acts carried out by an underground resistance movement during the Taliban's uneasy six-year reign over Herat. When the Taliban fled the city Nov. 11 without waiting to do battle with an approaching rebel army, the resistance and the popular uprising it had fostered helped send the radical Islamic militia on its way.

Directly and indirectly, the people of Herat resisted the rule of the Taliban, which was led predominantly by ethnic Pashtuns from the south and seen as an occupying force here in the largely ethnic Tajik west. Some plotted sabotage. Others ran a clandestine campaign to post subversive public notices. For some, the resistance was as private as trimming their beards in defiance of the Taliban religious police; for others, it was as risky as covertly teaching girls who were banned by the Taliban from attending school.

This opposition did not gravely threaten the Taliban's control until U.S. bombs and advancing rebel forces bolstered their efforts. But their stories help explain the Taliban's unexpectedly rapid flight from Herat. And they provide a glimpse of life in a city that was not fully cowed by the radical movement.

The secret leader of the resistance in Herat was Abdul Baqe, an intense man with an aura of coiled energy and a record of bravery in the war against Soviet occupation. But even the bravest resistance fighter sometimes was frightened by the thought of the stakes in the struggle against the Taliban, Baqe said in an interview.

Hours after Palwani's assassination, at midnight after his family was asleep, Baqe climbed the steps to the roof of his home. He carefully removed a worn plank by the top step and retrieved a satellite telephone.

If the Taliban had ever caught him with the telephone, he would have been hanged as a spy and his family likely would have been tortured. Nevertheless, he whispered as loudly as he dared into the telephone to his friend and comrade with the rebel forces in the mountains, Ismail Khan.

"The operation was a success," he reported, and then quickly hid the phone.

"Those phone calls made my beard white with fright," said Baqe, a chief deputy to Khan, who once again rules this western city that the Taliban wrested from him in 1995.

For Abdul Raziq, 15, it was a game -- although one with a dire penalty. Raziq would leave his home for school early, before much of the city had stirred. He would look carefully about. When no one was near, he would reach into his schoolbag and take out anti-Taliban leaflets to post in public markets, restrooms, on walls, fences and gates. Sometimes he taped them, sometimes he used a rock to hold them down.

"I was quick. I was never caught," he bragged. He said his family did not know. "I did it because I hated the Taliban."

Abdul Wahed Mokhles, 43, who heads a small Afghan charity, would give a furtive platoon of boys like Raziq 100 posters each to distribute. "The Taliban didn't suspect 12- and 13-year-olds," Mokhles said.

When Khan escaped from a Taliban prison in 1999, Mokhles ordered up 4,000 leaflets to publicize the welcome news.

Production began under the Taliban's nose. In city government offices, clerks secretly photocopied the announcement while their Taliban bosses were in the next room. At a shop by the mosque, the devout proprietor dutifully closed the iron shutters to go pray, as ordered by the Taliban. Inside, a colleague kept a copy machine grinding out the leaflets.

The Taliban's enforcers did not trust Mokhles and jailed him eight times. He still has bruises on his feet where they whipped him. But they never knew he was the source of the leaflets.

Nor did they realize the operation went even higher, to some of the respected elders of the town. Secretly, a council of 41 of them held resistance meetings in the Grand Mosque, a soaring, 1,000-year-old building clad in blue tile that shimmers like an oasis in the center of this mud-brick city.

The council organized into cells. "The members didn't know each other. If one was arrested, he didn't know the others," said Ghazi Ghulam Farouq Shirzadi, a mujaheddin commander and one of the top organizers of the council.

Direct resistance was mostly small-scale. "If we heard that a Taliban was going to be outside of town and vulnerable, we set up an ambush to have him killed," Shirzadi said.

They lost some members to betrayals. "The Herat prison was never empty of heroes," Mokhles said.

One of them was Mohammad Sharif Mojadadi Hadi, another council member.

Hadi, with a luxuriant beard and gold cap, was a theologian from one of the most respected families in Herat. As a religious man, he could go to Iran to visit other Muslim clerics. Secretly, he carried vital messages to Khan and other rebel commanders exiled there.

Once, after consulting with opposition leaders in Iran, Hadi found the Taliban waiting for him just inside the Afghan border. He was too respected in Herat for the Taliban to harm him -- the public backlash would have been a problem. But Taliban officials jailed him briefly, tortured his driver and forbade him to leave the country, Hadi said.

Another operation met a disastrous end after a betrayal. About 18 Shiite Muslim men were executed -- 10 were hanged publicly -- three years ago when the Taliban learned they were plotting against the movement.

Their bodies were just discovered a month ago when a shepherd pointed out a mass grave, a shallow pit dug in the rocky hills far above the city.

In the village of Kulab on the outskirts of Herat, Jawad Barat, one of the men found in the grave, has been proclaimed a martyr on a banner over his home. A photocopied picture nailed to the wall shows a young man with sad eyes.

In the same warren of mud homes, Mahbub Hidari, 19, ran a little shop, selling cigarettes and sundries. He hoped to use the Kalashnikov rifle and pistols he had inherited from his older brother, who was killed when the Taliban took Herat.

"He thought it was his duty," said Mohammad Musawi, a friend of the young man. Hidari's family identified his charred and decomposed body by a scrap of his sweater and a cast around his broken hand.

Less dramatic, but no less defiant, resistance came in day-to-day activities of Herat residents who balked at the Taliban's strict rules. Narwagis Karima, 19, taught 20 female students at her home every day despite the Taliban's ban on education for girls and women. When the Taliban became suspicious of the traffic at her house, she insisted the visitors were reciting the Koran.

Hadassa Erasad, 19, hid her English book under her burqa when she went to another home -- right next to a Taliban headquarters -- to pursue her studies with two other young women.

"I was afraid of their eyes and their guns," she said in slow, careful English. "But I wanted to keep studying." Resistance leaders said they knew of at least 120 teachers who were providing instruction to 3,400 girls and women at private homes.

Disdain for the Taliban came to a head in Herat a month after the the U.S. bombing in Afghanistan began on Oct. 7. Mazar-e Sharif, the provincial capital east of Herat, fell to the Northern Alliance, a coalition of opposition militia groups, on Nov. 9. The Americans had turned their attention on Herat, and bombing of Taliban forces there, estimated at 5,000 men, had intensified. Khan's forces were nearing the city from the direction of Mazar-e Sharif.

Inside Herat, the resistance organized by the council meeting at the mosque had also intensified. The leaflets distributed by Mokhles announced that Khan was coming and told residents to prepare to resist. Hidden weapons were taken from caches dug in back yards. At 9 a.m.on Nov. 11, with Khan still 25 miles away, the Taliban suddenly started to withdraw.

The result was chaos. The Taliban raided the bank vault and commandeered cars to escape in. People hid in locked houses. Others tried to block the convoy to trap the Taliban and its supporters in the city. They threw stones at cars. The Taliban responded with gunfire. Estimates of the dead run from 19 to 50.

The house of the Taliban governor was besieged. He was "wonderfully horrified" as he fled with an angry mob in pursuit, said Mir Abdul Khaliq, now a deputy governor.

About four miles south of town, other citizens stopped the car of the head of the religious police. They yanked him out and beat him to death with sticks. According to one popular account, somebody then tied the man's black turban to a dog, painted "religious police chief" on the dog's head and set him loose in town. Some men found razors and shaved their beards next to the police chief's body.

By 3 p.m., most of the Taliban had escaped southeast toward Kandahar, well before Khan rode into town a day later. It may have been a tactical retreat. But Baqe and others of the underground resistance say they have no doubt that their dangerous work hastened the Taliban's decision.

"It was the people's rage that did it, and we helped create that," Baqe said. "Even if I had been killed, it would have been worth it."