November 25, 2003	Tuesday	Ramazan 29, 1424

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window).

PESHAWAR, Nov 24: Pakistani Taliban prisoners released from prisons in Kabul on Sunday said they had enough and had no energy left in them to return to Afghanistan and fight again.

“The whole game is over. The Taliban are no more. We have gone through hell and have no desire left in us to return and fight again”, Mohammad Israr, a resident of Zaida in Swabi told Dawn, remorse written large on his face.

Israr, in his early 30s, was captured by the Northern Alliance forces to the north of Kabul back and had remained in prison since 1998. “This was our sixth year in captivity”, he said, “ and we had no hope of ever returning home. It was unexpected.”

Mohammad Saleh from Karachi said he was returning to shoulder responsibility of a home without his parents. Like Israr, he too, had gone in 1998 to fight on the side of the Taliban and was captured in northern Afghanistan. “The past six years had been difficult”, the 28-year-old former madressah student from Gulshan-I-Iqbal said.

“My parents died while I was in prison and I am now the only one left behind to return and look after my family”, the bespectacled Saleh said.

“I have lost six years of my studies and I now want to catch up on that too”, he remarked.

Saleh said that the news about their release came to them as a big surprise. “We were preparing for our Sehri when we were told about the arrival of the ANP delegation in Kabul and our expected release. We couldn’t believe it. There had been such promises in the past too”, he remarked.

Israr and Saleh were part of the 30 Pakistani prisoners released from prisons in Kabul on Sunday and surrendered to the Pakistani authorities at the Pakistan-Afghan border check-post at Torkham.

This takes to 771 the total number of Pakistanis released from Afghan prisons.

They were transported to Peshawar past midnight and are currently being held at the Central Prison Peshawar.

A senior official in Peshawar said the prisoners would remain under detention in Peshawar until their interrogation and clearance by security agencies.

“Interrogation would take some time”, the official told Dawn, requesting he not be named.

He said that the interrogation would be conducted inside the prison and prisoners categorized according to the level of involvement and association with Taliban and Pakistani militant organizations.

Out of the 771, only 156 have so far been declared ‘white’ and allowed freedom after furnishing an affidavit of future good conduct, the official said.

Both the prisoners said they had been brought over from Punjshir to the prison in Kabul about four months ago. They claimed that the Northern Alliance had swapped them for 12 Pakistanis who were later shifted from Kabul to Punjshir.

“Most of us have developed tuberculosis. The prison authorities in Kabul knew that some of us could die of the disease and therefore had no option but to release us. One of us has lost his mental balance and does not even remember his name or address”, Saleh said.

He said that the prison condition in both Punjshir and Kabul were tough and Pakistani and Arab prisoners had been held in underground cells under inhuman condition.

“It was there where some of us developed tuberculosis and renal diseases”, he said. “The meal was barely enough to survive and we were allowed to walk out and attend toilets only twice a day. We used plastic bottles to urinate in.”

Encouraged by the now-banned Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat Muhammadi, Rashid Ahmad from Timergarah, Dir had gone to fight for the Taliban. After going through the prison ordeal, Rashid now has no love last for the TNSM chief Sufi Muhammad.

“He led us into Afghanistan and abandoned us”, he said with anger in his voice.

An official who had met Sufi Muhammad, who is undergoing detention in Dera Ismail Khan prison, said the TNSM chief had no regrets. “I did not ask anybody to come and go with me to Afghanistan. All of them came and went with us of their own volition. I take no responsibility for their action”, the official quoted Sufi Muhammad as saying.

Most Pakistani-Taliban combatants said their Taliban hosts in Afghanistan had given them rudimentary training in assembling and dissembling Kalashnikovs before sending them to the frontline.

“It was a one-week or 10 days training and then some shooting exercise in Dasht-i-Laila in northern Afghanistan”, Mohammad Saleh said.