NP - I was one of the Taliban's torturers

[David Morris]

I was one of the Taliban's torturers: I crucified people
(Filed: 30/09/2001)

In an astonishing interview with Christina Lamb, the Afghan leader's former 
bodyguard reveals the full brutality of the fundamentalist regime sheltering 
Osama bin Laden

"YOU must become so notorious for bad things that when you come into an area 
people will tremble in their sandals. Anyone can do beatings and starve 
people. I want your unit to find new ways of torture so terrible that the 
screams will frighten even crows from their nests and if the person survives 
he will never again have a night's sleep."

These were the instructions of the commandant of the Afghan secret police to 
his new recruits. For more than three years one of those recruits, Hafiz 
Sadiqulla Hassani, ruthlessly carried out his orders. But sickened by the 
atrocities that he was forced to commit, last week he defected to Pakistan, 
joining a growing number of Taliban officials who are escaping across the 
border.

In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, he reveals for the first time 
the full horror of what has been happening in the name of religion in 
Afghanistan. Mr Hassani has the pinched face and restless hands of a man 
whose night hours are as haunted as any of his victims. Now aged 30, he does 
not, however, fit the militant Islamic stereotype usually associated with 
the Taliban.

Married with a wife and one-year-old daughter, he holds a degree in business 
studies, having been educated in Pakistan, where he grew up as a refugee 
while his father and elder brothers fought in the jihad against the 
Russians. His family was well off, owning land and property in Kandahar to 
which they returned after the war.

"Like many people, I did not become a Talib by choice," he explained. "In 
early 1998 I was working as an accountant here in Quetta when I heard that 
my grandfather - who was 85 - had been arrested by the Taliban in Kandahar 
and was being badly beaten. They would only release him if he provided a 
member of his family as a conscript, so I had to go."

[...]

Before he could escape, however, because he comes from the same tribe, he 
spent time as a bodyguard for Mullah Omar, the reclusive spiritual leader of 
the Taliban.

"He's medium height, slightly fat, with an artificial green eye which 
doesn't move, and he would sit on a bed issuing instructions and giving 
people dollars from a tin trunk," said Mr Hassani. "He doesn't say much, 
which is just as well as he's a very stupid man. He knows only how to write 
his name `Omar' and sign it.

"It is the first time in Afghanistan's history that the lower classes are 
governing and by force. There are no educated people in this administration 
- they are all totally backward and illiterate.

He became convinced that the Taliban were not really in control. "We laughed 
when we heard the Americans asking Mullah Omar to hand over Osama bin 
Laden," he said. "The Americans are crazy. It is Osama bin Laden who can 
hand over Mullah Omar - not the other way round."

The Arabs, according to Mr Hassani, have taken de facto control of his 
country. "All the important places of Kandahar are now under Arab control - 
the airport, the military courts, the tank command."

Twice he attended Taliban training camps and on both occasions they were run 
by Arabs as well as Pakistanis. "The first one I went to lasted 10 days in 
the Yellow Desert in Helmand province, a place where the Saudi princes used 
to hunt, so it has its own airport.

It was incredibly well guarded and there were many Pakistanis there, both 
students from religious schools and military instructors. The Taliban is 
full of Pakistanis."

He was told that if he died while fighting under the white flag of the 
Taliban, he and his family would go to paradise. The soldiers were given 
blank marriage certificates signed by a mullah and were encouraged to "take 
wives" during battle, basically a licence to rape.








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