NP '10,000 a day' flee press gangs in Kabul

[David Morris]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,557717,00.html

'10,000 a day' flee press gangs in Kabul
Ian Traynor in Denau
Tuesday September 25, 2001
The Guardian

The Taliban press gang arrived in their Datsun pickups in the small hours of 
Sunday morning, striking terror into every family in a block of flats in 
north Kabul.
On the fifth floor Wahidullah, a 30-year-old ethnic Tajik, comforted his two 
young children and looked on fearfully as the building was shaken by the 
howling and shrieking of mothers and sisters.

The gunmen moved through the first few floors of the block, seizing all 
males aged between 18 and 30 and dragging them away, the hostages were told, 
to fight America.

"That was when I decided to leave. I thought they were going to take me 
too," said Wahidullah yesterday, after a 12-hour trek with his family out of 
Kabul to the other side of the lines in Afghanistan's civil war.

Caked in dust, his 18-month-old sobbing in the open back of the jeep 
carrying 14 people, Wahidullah recounted how the Taliban fighters turned up 
in 50 vehicles and started hauling men from their beds. One was bound and 
gagged.

For the past several days, according to scores of refugees who came up the 
Old Kabul Road yesterday seeking a safe haven on territory held by the 
opposition Northern Alliance, mayhem has been visited on the Tajik quarter 
of the Afghan capital.

Taliban militias have been staging nighttime raids on the district's homes, 
dragging the menfolk away to fight for them on the frontline, to get ready 
to defend the city against US attacks, to be thrown into jail, or to be held 
as hostages and perhaps human shields.



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