Over a hundred prisoners died in the dirt with bound hands and were found that way when it was finally safe for the UN observers to enter. Others untied their neighbours’ hands so that they could fight. Izmat Khan led a group of others, including his eleven fellow Afghans, in a dodging, weaving run through the trees to the south wall where he knew the armoury was from a previous visit when t
he fort was in Taliban hands.
Twenty Arabs nearest to Mike Spann fell on him and beat him to death with fists and feet. Dave Tyson emptied his handgun into the mob, killed three, heard the click of hammer on empty chamber and was lucky to make the main gate just in time.
Within ten minutes the open compound was empty except for the corpses and the wounded, who lay and cried out until they died. The Uzbeks were now outside the wall, the main gate was slammed and the prisoners were inside. The siege had begun; it would last six days and no one was even interested in taking prisoners. Each side was convinced the other had broken the terms of surrender, but by then it did not matter any more.
The armoury door was quickly shattered and the treasure trove distributed. There was enough for a small army and masses of resupply for only five hundred men. They had rifles, grenades, launchers, RPGs and mortars. Taking what they could they fanned out through the tunnels and passages until they owned the fortress. Every time an Uzbek outside put his head over the parapet, an Arab, firing through a slit from across the compound, took a shot.
Dostum’s men had no choice but to call for help, urgently. It came in the form of hundreds more Uzbeks sent by General Dostum, who hurried towards Qala-i-Jangi. Also on their way were American Green Berets in the form of four men from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, one US Air Force man to assist in air-coordination and six from the 10th Mountain Division. Basically their job was to observe, report and call in air strikes to break the resistance.
By mid-morning, coming up from Bagram base north of the recently captured capital of Kabul were two long-base Land-Rovers bearing six British Special Forces from the Special Boat Squadron (SBS) and an interpreter, Lieutenant Colonel Mike Martin of the SAS.
Tuesday saw the Uzbek counter-attack taking shape. Shielded by their single tank, they re-entered the compound and began to pound the rebel positions. Izmat Khan had been recognized as a senior commander and given charge of one wing of the south face. When the tank opened up he ordered his men into the cellars. When the bombardment stopped they came back up again.
He knew it was only a matter of time. There was no way out and no chance of mercy. Not that he wanted it. He had finally, at the age of twenty-nine, found the place he was going to die, and it was as good as any other.
Tuesday also saw the arrival of the US strike aircraft. The four Green Berets and the airman were lying just outside the parapet at the top of the external ramp, plotting targets for the fighter-bombers. Thirty strikes took place that day and twenty-eight of them slammed into the masonry inside which the rebels were hiding, killing about a hundred of them, largely by rockfalls. Two bombs were not so good.
Mike Martin was down the wall from the Green Berets, about a hundred yards from them, when the first bomb went amiss. It landed right in the middle of the circle formed by the five Americans. If it had been a contact-fused anti-personnel bomb they would have been shredded. The fact all survived with shattered eardrums and some bone-breaks was itself a miracle.
The bomb was a JDAM, a bunker-buster, designed to penetrate deep into masonry before exploding. Landing nose-down in gravel, it shot forty feet down before going off. The Americans found themselves on top of an earthquake, were hurled around, but survived.
The second mis-hit was even more unfortunate. It took out the Uzbek tank and their command post behind it.
By Wednesday the western media had arrived and were swarming all over the fort, or at least the outside of it. They may not have realized it, but their presence was the only factor that would eventually inhibit the Uzbeks from achieving a total wipe-out of the rebels to the last man.
In the course of the six days, twenty rebels tried to take their chances by escaping under cover of night and seeking escape across country. Every one was caught by the peasantry – the Hazaras who recalled the Taliban butchery of their people three years before – and lynched.
Mike Martin lay on top of the ramp, peering through the parapet and down into the open compound. The bodies from the first days still lay there and the stench was appalling. The Americans, with their black woolly hats, had uncovered faces and had already been well photographed by cameramen and TV film makers. The seven British preferred anonymity. All wore the shemagh, the cotton wraparound head-dress that keeps out flies, sand, dust and gawpers. By Wednesday it served another purpose, a filter against the stink.
Just before sundown the surviving CIA man, Dave Tyson, who had come back after a day in Mazar-e-Sharif, was bold enough to enter the compound with a TV crew desperate for an award-winning movie. Martin watched them creeping along the far wall. Marine J was lying beside him. As they watched, a snatch squad of rebels came out of an unseen door in the wall, seized the four westerners and dragged them inside.
‘Someone ought to get them out of there,’ remarked Marine J in a conversational tone. He looked round. Six pairs of eyes were staring at him without a sound.
He uttered two intensely sincere words, ‘Oh shit’, vaulted the wall, went down the inner ramp and raced across the open space. Three SBS men went with him. The other two and Martin gave sniper cover. The rebels were by now confined to the south wall only. The sheer daftness of what the four Marines had done caught the rebels by surprise. There were no shots until they reached the door in the far wall.
Marine J was first in. Hostage recovery is practised and practised by both SAS and SBS until it is second nature. At Hereford the SAS have ‘the death house’ for little else but; at their Poole HQ the SBS have the same.
The four SBS men came through the door without ceremony, identified the three rebels by their clothes and beards and fired. The procedure is called ‘double tap’; two bullets straight in the face. The three Arabs did not get off a shot; anyway, they were facing in the wrong direction. Dave Tyson and the British TV crew agreed then and there never to mention the incident, and they never have.
By Wednesday evening Izmat Khan realized he and his men could not stay above ground any longer. Artillery had arrived and down the length of the compound it was beginning to reduce the south face to rubble. The cellars were the last resort. The surviving rebels were down to under three hundred.
Some of these decided not to go below ground but to die under the sky. They staged a suicidal counter-attack which succeeded for a hundred yards, killing a number of unwary Uzbeks of short reaction time. But then the machine gun on the Uzbeks’ replacement tank opened up and cut the Arabs to pieces. They were mostly Yemenis with some Chechens.
On Thursday, on American advice, the Uzbeks took barrels of diesel fuel brought for their tank and poured it down conduits into the cellars below. Then they set fire to it.
Izmat Khan was not in that section of the cellars and the stench of the bodies overrode the smell of the diesel, but he heard the ‘whoomf’ and felt the heat. More died but the survivors came staggering out of the smoke towards him. They were all choking and gagging. In the last cellar, with about a hundred and fifty men around him, Izmat Khan slammed and bolted the door to keep out the smoke. Beyond the door the hammering of the dying became fainter and finally stopped. Above them the shells slammed into the empty rooms.
The last cellar led to a passage and at the far end the men could smell fresh air. They tried to see if there was a way out, but it was only a gutter from above. That night the new Uzbek commander Din Muhammad hit upon the idea of diverting an irrigation ditch into that pipe. After the November rains the ditch was full and the water icy.
By midnight the remaining men were waist deep. Weakened by hunger and exhaustion, they began to slip beneath the surface and drown.
Up on the surface the United Nations was in charge, surrounded by media, and its instructions were to take prisoners. Through the rubble of the collapsed buildings above them the last rebels could hear the bullhorn ordering them to come out, unarmed and with hands up. After twenty hours the first began to stagger towards the stairs. Others followed. Defeated at last, Izmat Khan, with the six other Afghans left alive, went with
them.
Up on the surface, stumbling over the broken stone blocks that had once been the south face, the last eighty-six rebels found themselves facing a forest of pointed guns and rockets. In the daylight of Saturday dawn they looked like scarecrows from a horror film. Filthy, stinking, black from cordite soot, ragged, matted, bearded and hypothermic, they tottered and some fell. One of these was Izmat Khan.