November 26, 2003	Wednesday	Shawwal 1, 1424

WASHINGTON: Many among more than two dozen Pakistanis and Afghans released recently from the US prison at Guantanamo Bay complain about harsh living conditions and torture. However, all of them are of the view that they were lucky for not being left at the mercy of Afghan warlords like hundreds of others.

Thousands of Pakistani volunteers went to Afghanistan in October 2001 to express solidarity with the Taliban when US forces invaded the country.

“Most of them were religious villagers who went simply to help their Muslim brothers fight an invading army,” says Mohammed Sadiq, Pakistan’s deputy chief of mission in Washington.

Mr Sadiq says that after the fall of the Taliban regime, many local commanders changed sides overnight and handed over Pakistani volunteers to the advancing troops of the Northern Alliance.

Some of these later ended up in Camp X-Ray in Cuba; but most were kept at personal jails of Afghan warlords.

According to Pakistani officials who interviewed those released from Camp X-Ray, the prisoners were divided into three categories. One group was put in containers and shipped to northern Afghanistan. Some of them could not bear the suffocating atmosphere and died on their way. Others were handed over to various Afghan warlords. And some were given to US authorities and brought to Guantanamo Bay.

Some of those given to the warlords were released after paying up to $3,000 as ransom, a huge sum even for a middle class family in Pakistan or Afghanistan and an impossible amount for most prisoners who were poor farmers from small villages. Many of them are still languishing in Afghan jails.

Also there was a huge number of prisoners who died during the uprising at an 18th century fort in northern Afghanistan in November 2001.

“Those who ended up in Guantanamo Bay were lucky. They escaped summary executions and the subhuman conditions of the personal prisons of Afghan warlords,” said Mr Sadiq.

“The treatment at Guantanamo Bay was harsh but better,” says Salaiman Shah, a car salesman from Afghanistan who has now returned home. Before Guantanamo he was kept at the notorious Sheberghan prison in northern Afghanistan run by Gen Abdul Rashid Dostum.

“At Sheberghan life was inhuman; all prisoners suffered from diarrhoea, some had tuberculosis; there was no food for days and we were subjected to torture,” he told a BBC reporter.

Most of the 18 prisoners released with Shah did complain about conditions at the US base but were more upset about the way they were arrested and brought to Guantanamo. Almost all of them said they were treated brutally by their Afghan jailers before they left.

Another released person, identified only by his first name Murtaza, said prisoners were sometimes hooded and handcuffed in 2X2 metre cages in Cuba.

“Some of us were interrogated 20 times, others 50 times, and some 60 times. But the food was good and they did not beat us,” he said.

Murtaza spent two months in Sheberghan, five months in Kandahar and more than a year in Guantanamo before he was released.

Almost all the prisoners released from Guantanamo said they were innocent and were handed over by local Afghan commanders keen to appease the Americans or to settle personal scores.

One of them, Sher Gulab, blamed Pakistani authorities for his arrest. Gulab, who is from the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, said he was arrested while working as a labourer in Pakistan.

A fourth man, Bismillah, said he was arrested as an Al Qaeda suspect because he was deaf and could not understand his American interrogators when caught in Afghanistan.

Mohammed Sagheer, 60, released from Guantanamo on Oct 27, 2002 is the first Pakistani allowed to leave the US base. In July this year Sagheer sued the US government for $10.4 million.

Sagheer said that three top Taliban leaders, including their former ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdus Salam Zaeef, were also in US custody at Guantanamo.

He said the convoy that was taking him and other prisoners to the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif from Kabul was bombed. “Hundreds of prisoners were killed while hundreds of wounded prisoners were thrown into ditches and buried alive by Gen Dostum’s forces.”

He said they were stuffed into containers and taken to Sheberghan where “there were more than 3,000 Pakistani prisoners, all in very poor condition.”

He said prisoners were flown to Kandahar in batches of 14 and held for 18 days.

“Initially, US officials were a bit harsh and strict. But they did not torture us. Later, we were allowed to offer prayers and given a copy of the holy Quran to recite. We were also allowed to grow beards.”