NEW YORK, Dec 4: The mother of John Walker, the American Taliban fighter who was captured at Mazar-i-Sharif, called upon US authorities to show mercy for her son who, she said, could have been brainwashed to fight on the side of Taliban.
Walker, 20, who calls himself Abdul Hamid, fought for the Taliban and survived a bloody prison uprising in northern Afghanistan, said his heart had drawn him to the hard-line Islamic movement.
“I was a student in Pakistan, studying Islam and came into contact with many people connected with Taliban”, he said in an interview shown on CNN on Monday. He is 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.”
Marilyn Walker said on Sunday the photo of her son appeared on Newsweek.MSNBC.com was the first indication she had of his whereabouts since he had left a religious school in the NWFP, where he had been studying the Quran seven months earlier.
John Walker, who uses his mother’s last name, told Newsweek that he had travelled across the border to Afghanistan to help the Taliban build a “pure Islamic State.” He told CNN he had gone to the Afghan capital, Kabul, and volunteered to serve the Taliban.
Because he did not know the local languages, the Taliban asked him to contact forces supporting Osama bin Laden. He said he had received combat training at a camp in northern Afghanistan, fought with Pakistani allies of the Taliban in the disputed region of Kashmir and then returned to fight recently with the Taliban at Kunduz, Afghanistan.
He was born in Washington in February 1981, Newsweek said. He is the second of three children of a home healthcare worker and a lawyer, Frank Lindh. His mother said he had spent the first 10 years of his life in the Washington suburbs of Maryland, moving to northern California in 1991.
His father, Lindh, who is divorced from Marilyn Walker, said his son had taken to Islam naturally. “He’s learned Arabic and is memorizing the Quran. He’s a very good scholar.”
His mother said she was shocked by her son’s support for the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. “If he got involved with the Taliban, he must have been brainwashed”, she told Newsweek. “He was isolated. He didn’t know a soul in Pakistan. When you’re young and impressionable, it’s easy to be led by charismatic people.”
A Pentagon official said on Monday US military forces had in their control a man who claimed to be an American who had come into their possession in the Mazar-i-Sharif area, near where the prison uprising had taken place.
But Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations on the military’s joint staff, said he could not confirm the man’s name and did not know his location. “The only thing that I can say about this individual is that this is somebody who claims to be an American citizen”, Stufflebeem told a Pentagon briefing.
“He is in control of US military forces. It appears that he is injured or has sustained some injuries and is receiving medical attention.”Stufflebeem said it had “not yet been defined” whether the man was considered under arrest or a prisoner of war.