Miami Herald

Published Monday, November 19, 2001

Smugglers witness U.S. commandos in action

BY JUAN O. TAMAYO jtamayo@herald.com

QUETTA, Pakistan -- Sekie Pehlawan and 11 other Afghans in a convoy of five tanker trucks and two four-wheel-drive vehicles were about 20 miles from the Pakistani border in southeastern Afghanistan when U.S. commandos appeared out of nowhere.

It was close to midnight and the gasoline smugglers were rounding a sharp turn on a twisting mountain road when some 20 soldiers wearing camouflage uniforms, helmets and night-vision goggles suddenly blocked their way, Pehlawan said. Far behind them, he said, stood another 20 to 40 soldiers and three tanks.

He knew they must be Americans, he said, because neither the Taliban nor their Afghan foes wear helmets.

After they were questioned, one of the Americans told them to move away from their trucks and spoke into ``something that looked like a cellular phone with a long antenna,'' said Mullah Kareem, another driver.

There were several blasts from a previously unseen American position on a hill nearby, Pehlawan and Kareem said, and rockets smashed into the tankers, destroying the convoy.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has confirmed that U.S. commandos in southern Afghanistan are ``interdicting'' roads in search of senior officials of the Taliban regime and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network.

BRITONS ALSO PRESENT

The British government has confirmed that it, too, has commandos operating in Afghanistan.

Pehlawan's tale suggests that American special forces are watching escape routes from Afghanistan into Pakistan, and his reported sighting of armored vehicles would suggest a more extensive American ground deployment in Afghanistan than previously known.

Asked whether he was certain he had seen tanks, Pehlawan said, ``I am an Afghan. We have been at war for 23 years. I know such things.''

He and the other smugglers had been driving for several days from Iran and had planned to smuggle their cargo into Pakistan, where gasoline sells for 50 percent more than it does in Iran, he said.

Kareem said he and the other men were handcuffed with their hands behind them as one American who spoke Farsi, the Persian language spoken by some Afghans, interrogated them about their identities and business.

ACCUSATIONS

``They said, `You are terrorists; you are the Taliban,' '' the 48-year-old Pehlawan recalled of the encounter, the first incident in which civilians claim to have seen U.S. soldiers in Taliban-controlled territory.

The soldiers searched them and their vehicles and questioned them about their long Taliban-style beards, Kareem said.

``We told them we cannot travel in Afghanistan without beards, and that it was only because of fear of the Taliban.''

Pehlawan and Kareem said the Americans eventually released them, but only after taking their photographs with a small camera. Pehlawan said his group hitched a ride aboard a farm tractor to the Afghan town of Spin Boldak, 12 miles to the east, and reported the incident to the Taliban garrison there, but the fighters made no move to go after the Americans.

``Now the tankers' owners want us to pay them,'' said Pehlawan, breaking into tears as he and Kareem spoke Sunday with reporters in the Pakistani border town of Chaman, eight miles from Spin Boldak.

Pakistani soldiers and not border police were manning the border crossing on Sunday, apparently because of fears that Taliban or al Qaeda fighters would try to slip over the border as their forces retreat or defect across much of Afghanistan.

Reporters saw 17 men detained at the Pakistani checkpoint in Garang, seven miles west of Chaman, on suspicion of having crossed into Pakistan without proper documents.

Most said they were Afghans trying to escape the war in their homeland, like the estimated 150,000 Afghan refugees who have slipped illegally into Pakistan since the U.S. bombing campaign began on Oct. 7.

DECLARING LOYALTY

Three men who admitted they were Taliban fighters said they had no intention of defecting and insisted that they were only trying to visit relatives in Pakistan before returning to the front lines.

``I am Taliban soldier. I am loyal to Taliban leadership and after one month with my family I will return to the Taliban militia,'' said Mohammed Zabit, 28, who said his family lives in an Afghan refugee camp in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar.

Shefiullah, 32, a Taliban member who like many Afghans uses only one name, said he has been stationed for several months in the vicinity of Kandahar and was heading to the Pakistani city of Quetta to visit relatives for a week.

OPENLY PRO-TALIBAN

Mohammed Salem, 29, from the Pakistani part of Baluchistan, a region that straddles the frontier, was more brazenly pro-Taliban, even in the presence of Pakistani security officials whose government has joined the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

``I am still loyal to the Taliban leadership,'' Salem said, adding that he was going home to visit his sick mother. ``They are mujaheed [holy warriors] not terrorists. Osama is not a terrorist. America is the big terrorist because it is bombing innocent people.''

Mushtaq Minhas contributed to this report from Chaman, Pakistan.

-- Anonymous, November 19, 2001