KABUL, Dec 3: A 20-year-old American who fought for the Taliban and survived last week’s massacre at Qala-i-Jangi has said his heart drew him to the hardline movement.
“I was a student in Pakistan, studying Islam and came into contact with many people connected with Taliban,” John Walker said in an interview shown on CNN television. He was being held by US forces in northern Afghanistan.
“I lived in the region, the North West Frontier Province (of Pakistan),” he said. “The people in general have a great love for the Taliban so I started to read some of the literature of the scholars, the history of Kabul ... my heart became attached to that.”
A spokesman for US Central Command, which is running the military campaign in Afghanistan, confirmed that a man who said he was an American was in the control of US military forces.
“Military forces in Afghanistan do have in their control a man who calls himself a US citizen,” Marine Major Brad Lowell, a Central Command spokesman, said.
“He was among the Al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners; he was held by the Northern Alliance in Mazar-i-Sharif. He is injured and is being given medical assistance by US forces,” Lowell said.
The CNN clip showed the man appearing dirty, with a long beard and grimacing as if in pain as he answered questions from a stretcher.
He was described by Newsweek magazine’s website as “a white, educated-sounding, apparently middle-class American” who identified himself as Abdul Hamid. It said he was taken into custody on Saturday at a hospital where he had been taken for treatment of minor gunshot and shrapnel wounds.
Hamid was identified by his parents as John Phillip Walker Lindh, of northern California, according to Newsweek.
SAW PHOTO ON INTERNET: Marilyn Walker said on Sunday that the photo of her son that appeared on Newsweek.MSNBC.com was the first indication that she had had of his whereabouts since he left a madressa in the NWFP seven months earlier.
John Walker, who uses his mother’s last name, told Newsweek he had travelled across the border to Afghanistan to help the Taliban build a “pure Islamic state”. He told CNN he had gone to Kabul and volunteered to serve the Taliban.
Because he did not know the local languages, he said, the Taliban told him to contact forces supporting Osama bin Laden. He said he received combat training at a camp in northern Afghanistan, fought with Pakistani allies of the Taliban in occupied Kashmir and then returned to Afghanistan recently to fight with the Taliban at Kunduz.
John Walker was born in Washington in Feb 1981, Newsweek said. He is the second of three children of a home health care worker and a lawyer, Frank Lindh. His mother said he spent the first 10 years of his life in the Washington suburbs of Maryland, moving to northern California in 1991.
John’s father, Frank Lindh, who is divorced from Marilyn Walker, said that his son took to Islam naturally. “I support him and his studies,” Lindh said. “He’s learned Arabic and is memorising the Quran. He’s a very good scholar.”—Reuters
