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QUETTA, Nov 23: Wounded Taliban fighters are being smuggled across the border into Pakistan from southern Afghanistan to be treated and protected in safe houses, Taliban activists and witnesses said on Friday.
“In the last few days, mostly at night, many injured Taliban have come here”, said a man living down an alley in Quetta opposite a house that is known locally to be used frequently by the Taliban.
“They take them to a private hospital for immediate treatment and then take them to another safe house, where they can recover”, said the neighbour, who declined to be identified.
Not far away, a large Taliban compound was protected by high walls and steel gates. An ambulance was seen being driven down the lane and through the gates into the compound, where small groups of Taliban sat resting in the sun.
One Taliban activist, his head wrapped in the obligatory black turban, said most of the wounded fighters were coming from Kandahar, where the hardline movement was fighting to cling onto its spiritual stronghold in southern Afghanistan.
It was not possible to enter the compound or talk directly to wounded fighters.
INJURED FROM KANDAHAR: Kandahar, where the Taliban launched their conquest of most of Afghanistan at the end of 1994, looks set to become the scene of their last stand.
In two weeks, the forces of Taliban supreme leader Mulla Mohammad Omar have been swept out of the north and the capital, Kabul, by the US-backed Northern Alliance military coalition and rebellious tribesmen.
The lightning Northern Alliance advance followed six weeks of US air strikes against Taliban positions in retaliation for harbouring Saudi-born Osama bin Laden, Washington’s chief suspect in the Sept 11 suicide hijack plane attacks on New York and Washington.
Harried by 48 days of US air strikes on Taliban positions, a steady stream of wounded Afghan civilians trek across the border into Pakistan in search of medical help, which is mostly unavailable inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Doctor Atta-ul-Rehman, medical superintendent at Quetta’s privately-funded 36-bed Al-Khiduat Al-Hajeri Hospital, which offers free treatment to Afghan refugees, said the main hospital in Kandahar had no doctors or other staff and no medicines.
A few of those arriving from Kandahar were the Taliban but most were civilians, he said, adding that “we are getting injured people arriving. There was one family where 23 people were killed and six others, including a 10-year-old girl, were wounded in an American bombing raid on Kandahar. The survivors left here to go home yesterday.”
In a children’s ward, 15-year-old Fazal Bari sat on a filthy bed in the tatty room.
“I was on the roof when a plane came and bombed”, he recalled, saying that “I was blown off the roof and fell unconscious.
‘‘My family took me to Kandahar Hospital, but there was no chance of treatment there so I came to Quetta.”—Reuters
