Times, UK

The Taleban deserter from East London

BY DANIEL MCGRORY

Our correspondent hears of frontline 'chaos'

DISILLUSIONED with life on the front line, a British deserter from the Taleban is warning other young Muslims that if they go to Afghanistan seeking glory or martyrdom they will only find themselves at the mercy of “lunatics and liars”.

Abu Mindar, 26, from London’s East End, considers himself lucky to have survived his baptism of fire this week with a crew of raw recruits of many nationalities, none of whom had ever fired a shot in anger.

“Maybe I was naive but I was told there would be proper training and I would be joining an organised military unit and it was just chaos,” he said.

The impression being given by militant Muslim groups is that there is a slick and successful recruiting drive in British cities after which volunteers are shepherded by its emissaries to Pakistan and on to training camps run by the Taleban. The reality, says Abu Mindar, is different.

After days of delay, discomfort and lies he was driven into the desert with about 25 others, somewhere near Kabul, and handed a Kalishnikov by the “commander” of his group who gestured for him to fire at an enemy he could not see through the swirling dust.

“There were other Taleban around and suddenly everyone started firing,” Abu Mindar said on the telephone from Pakistan.

He laughed nervously as he described how, as he was not used to handling a gun, the ricochet nearly tore the AK47 from his grasp.

“It arced up in the air, took off the top of a tree and nearly decapitated some of the others in our group. Before I knew it the other side — whoever they were — started firing back and there was nowhere much to take cover. Everyone was shouting, some got shot, I didn’t know what to do.”

Abu Mindar is not sure how many casualties his group suffered in the 20-minute gunfight but he was taken back to their makeshift barracks sharing a four-wheel-drive truck with three wounded.

“Some of the others were shouting victory slogans but we hadn’t done anything except get ourselves shot,” he said.

“It wasn’t the danger I minded because I expected shooting. It was the recklessness of the Taleban and their complete disregard for the lives of those fighting for them.”

He is reluctant to say much about himself or to state his present whereabouts, except to admit that he is in Pakistan, as he is afraid of being punished by the Taleban if he is found there or jailed if he returns to East London after ministers threatened that British Muslim volunteers could face charges of treason. Abu Mindar is the name by which he is known in Pakistan. He said that he ignored the pleas of his wife and his father and gave up his job as a motor mechanic to fly to Pakistan at the end of September because of the anger he felt about the allies talk of war against Afghanistan.

“I was a Muslim, I did pray regularly at mosque but I wasn’t some kind of zealot,” he said. Among friends he would talk about the war and he was persuaded to go to a meeting called by al-Muhajiroun, the British Islamist group headed by Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad.

Several speakers urged the young men to “do their duty” but it was outside the meeting that a man approached him with a contact number of someone in Lahore who would arrange their military training.

Abu Mindar flew to Karachi, where he has family. From there he travelled to Lahore, where in an office next to a bicycle repair shop he met his contact, who was vague about the group to which he was affiliated. For the next 12 days Abu Mindar was moved around the border areas, mostly at night, sharing cramped rooms with people he had never met and none of whom spoke much English.

Late one night he was put in a truck, covered with rugs and piles of clothes and driven on a potholed, bone-shaking journey into what he was told was Afghanistan. His final destination was a bare room on the edge of a mosque complex.

“I could see on the horizon far off some tall buildings and was told that was Kabul but as I had never seen it before how was I to know where I was?” There was little food, no clean clothes, and at nights the men could hear bombing raids. He was not offered weapons training, although many men around him carried guns.

“Then at the start of this week someone came rushing into our room while we were still asleep, screaming at us to cram ourselves into the back of a pick-up truck. We were driven for miles to what looked like the middle of nowhere but they said was their front line.”

Only now does Abu Mindar realise that there are rival factions — in Britain and in Pakistan — plotting against each other and claiming credit for recruiting UK volunteers, when all they do, he says, is “shoot their mouths off”.

Abu Mindar said that he would like to return home to warn other young men against the recruiters, but he had decided to remain in hiding, fearful of retribution from the Taleban or Britain.

-- Anonymous, November 02, 2001

Answers

Too bad, too sad, you've been had.

-- Anonymous, November 02, 2001