WashPost By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 16, 2001; 12:01 p.m. EST

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 16 – Even as Heather Mercer's Taliban guards treated her like a sister, allowed her to sing and pray and occasionally sent meals prepared by the commander's cook, she often listened as Afghan women prisoners in the same jail were beaten until they bled.

"That was one of the hardest things about the whole time, seeing the discrepancies between the way we were treated and the way the Afghans themselves were treated," said Mercer, 24, a native of Vienna, Va., and one of eight foreign aid workers who escaped Afghanistan in a U.S. air commando rescue two days ago.

"We saw some pretty atrocious things happening to the prisoners," Mercer said in a press conference here today, providing the first public accounts of the two American women's escape and rescue after more than three months in Taliban prisons on charges of spreading Christianity.

"Women were being beaten until they bled," said Mercer, "women who were arrested because they ran away from their husbands who beat them. . . . Prisoners in Afghanistan aren't treated very well."

The eight foreigners – two Americans, four Germans and two Australians – were evacuated from their prison by Taliban forces on Tuesday when Kabul fell to the opposition Northern Alliance. They were then locked in a jail in a city about 60 miles southwest of Kabul, released by local soldiers when the Taliban fled and helicoptered out of Afghanistan by U.S. Special Forces.

For Mercer and Dayna Curry, 30, of Thompson's Station, Tenn., imprisonment under the Taliban was a series of stark and sometimes unexpected contrasts.

Although they were jailed by the world's harshest Islamic regime, the prison guards who oversaw their day-to-day lives "looked after us as though we were their sisters," said Mercer.

"They said we were a guest in their country and they wanted to treat us that way as much as they could," said Mercer, who like each of the jailed aid workers was employed by the German-based organization, Shelter Now International when they were arrested Aug. 3. "There were days that were a very difficult time, but I would say, all in all, the Taliban really tried to look after us."

In their first comments about the charges brought against them, both women admitted that they were guilty of at least some of the charges brought against them by an Islamic government that considered evangelism a severe crime.

"After we saw the list of our charges, we were completely flabbergasted," said Mercer, "because 80 percent of the charges they had against us were completely false."

The other 20 percent, Curry conceded, were valid.

"We had been in an Afghan home," Curry said, adding she made a copy of a Farsi and English book of stories about Jesus and "gave it to them."

"They found that in the home; that part was true," she said. "We also showed them parts of a Jesus film."

Although the two women described their meetings with the family as part of "natural discussions" about Islam and Christianity, they broke two serious laws imposed under the Taliban: bans on spreading information about Christianity and on foreigners visiting the homes of Afghans.

While the eight foreign aid workers most likely would have been evicted from the country if found guilty of the charges, the 16 Afghan aid workers arrested with them faced death if convicted.

The detained Afghans were freed by Northern Alliance troops that took over Kabul Tuesday.

-- Anonymous, November 16, 2001