Taliban mullah talks
Posted: Tuesday, April 24, 2007 10:07 AM
Filed Under:
Islamabad, Pakistan
By NBC News' Mushtaq Yusufzai in Nuristan, Afghanistan and Carol Grisanti in Islamabad, Pakistan
This time I was scared. I had crossed over from Pakistan into Afghanistan to interview Taliban commanders before, but the situation in Afghanistan hadn’t been this bad. Now journalists are prime targets for kidnapping and ransom; victims of a well-organized Afghan gang who are actually looking for journalists to sell to the Taliban and al-Qaida militants.
I had been offered a meeting with Mullah Munibullah, commander of Taliban forces in Nuristan Province, Afghanistan. He has never given an interview before. This could have been a trap.
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NBC News' Mushtaq Yusufzai, left, speaks with Taliban Commander, Mullah Munibullah, in Nuristan Province, Afghanistan. |
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I told my mother and gave her some phone numbers to call in case I went missing. She started to cry and forbade me to go. By the time I had convinced my mother that I would be fine – after all, I have known the people who arranged the meeting for me for more than two years and I trusted them – I had convinced myself of that as well.
Escorts – four bearded men with AK-47s
It was an eight-hour journey from Peshawar in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province to Nuristan Province in Afghanistan, on the southern slopes of the Hindu Kush mountains.
My escorts, four bearded men in their 30s armed with AK-47s, knew the way.
An elderly man embraced all of us when we arrived at a large house alongside of a dried stream bed in the Nuristan Valley. I had no idea who he was but he assured me I was in safe hands. I was then brought alone into a large room and told to wait.
Again I was scared.
Nuristan is the most remote province in Afghanistan and one of the poorest. It is allegedly one of the hiding places of Osama bin Laden.
When Munibullah finally arrived, he had news for me.
"We have received surface-to-air missiles. We now have what we need to target the B-52s, the Predators and the missiles of the enemy," said Munibullah. "We have also received surface-to-surface missiles for attacking the military bases of the enemy," he added.
I was surprised. I asked him how and from whom he acquired such high-tech weapons. He refused to answer, saying only that no one should doubt their ability to get whatever is needed to fight the enemy.
Munibullah, a native of Nuristan, is in his early 40s and has two wives and six children. The interview lasted 30 minutes, but we spent almost four hours together.
Drive to push Americans out, like the Russians
We spoke in my native Pashtu, the language of the Pashtun people who live in Afghanistan and in the northwest and western parts of Pakistan. I found him to be very polite and calm, even when answering some uncomfortable questions, and impressive with his grasp of politics and history.
He told me about a meeting between General John Abizaid, the former commander of U.S. Central Command, and his father, Sheikh Faqirullah, a former jihadi commander during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Abizaid had visited the family in 2001 right after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and tried to persuade Munibullah’s father not to side with al-Qaida. In turn the Americans would offer assistance to his family.
The general and the sheikh sat together all day and spoke in Arabic. In the end, Abizaid’s offer was refused.
Munibullah is proud of his father and believes he can force the Americans out of Afghanistan, just as his father fought against the Russians.
"We will cause two losses – human and economic – to the Americans. Just like our jihad caused the Soviet economy to collapse," he said. "We never killed all the Russians, but we forced them to leave Afghanistan by damaging their economy."
Are al-Qaida and the Taliban fighting together? I asked.
"We are all one now with a common enemy," said Munibullah. "Everyone – the Arabs, the Uzbeks, the Tajiks and the Chinese – have all accepted Mullah Omar as the supreme leader and we all fight together."
However, Munibullah conceded, "There is just one small difference…Everyone has their own unique war training and that is provided according to each group’s culture and program."
Safe ride home
Before it was time for me to leave, some of his fighters did a 30-minute reconnaissance of the area to make sure it would be safe for me to go.
I left, escorted out by the same group who had brought me to meet Munibullah, and followed the same route as when I had come.
We walked from the house through the dry stream bed for at least 10 minutes and then climbed back into the maroon-colored Datsun pick-up for the three-hour drive through Afghanistan’s Kunar Province over the same roads littered with landmines. Kunar is where the U.S. 10th Mountain Division is actively fighting al-Qaida and Taliban insurgents.
We crossed on foot over the mountains, through bushes and running rivers back into Pakistan at Binshahi, a town with the same name on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Once safely across, I quickly said goodbye to my four escorts, hailed a taxi and drove four more hours home to Peshawar. My first phone call was to my mother, who cried when she heard my voice. She had not slept for the two days that I had been gone.
