Zeeshan Haider, Khorum | Monday
AN old man deferentially removed his turban as he spoke. ”We are poor people, don’t hit us,” he said. ”We have nothing to do with Osama bin Laden. We are innocent people.”
”I lost my four daughters, my son and my wife in this attack,” said Toray, a distraught farmer, who was out of his house when the bombs struck.
To underline his point, he held up a piece of shrapnel with the words ”fin guided bomb” stencilled on it – virtually all he recovered from the debris of his flattened home.
‘I lost my four daughters, my son and my wife in this attack’ There are not many witnesses to say what happened to Khorum village in eastern Afghanistan last Wednesday night; there are not many survivors. One thing is clear. The simple collection of mud huts and livestock pens in this village, around 38 miles from the east Afghanistan town of Jalalabad, was hit by a devastating firestorm.
Villagers said 20 to 25 bombs or missiles rained on the area in two waves of attacks.
Taliban officials say Khorum was flattened in an air raid by US warplanes and as many as 200 people may have been killed. Officials say 160 bodies have already been pulled from the rubble, and villagers from neighbouring hamlets were scrambling around yesterday looking for more.
The stench of death enveloped the village. In the rubble of one house, the remains of an arm stuck out from beneath a pile of bricks. A leg had been uncovered nearby. There was also a bloodstained pillow.
The carcasses of livestock – by which many Afghan farmers measure their family’s wealth – lay bloated in the surrounding fields, attracting swarms of flies.
When our group of reporters – the first foreign nationals to be allowed into Afghanistan since all foreigners were ordered to leave just days after the September 11 suicide plane attacks – arrived in Khorum we saw villagers still sifting through the rubble of houses pulverised by the attack from the sky.
We were besieged by more than 100 students from a nearby Islamic school, chanting ”Down with America,” ”Long live Islam” and ”We are ready for jihad (holy war)”.
It was not easy to tell if the protest was spontaneous or or chestrated, but it was clear that their feelings were genuine.
”We have brought you here to see the cruelty of the Americans,” Maulvi Atiqullah, director of the Jalalabad information department, said before our Taliban-organised trip to Khorum began.
However, some questions remained unanswered last night. Reporters saw only a dozen or so freshly dug graves that officials said included the bodies of children killed in the raid.
What happened to the other bodies which officials say they have recovered is unclear, but Muslims generally observe Koranic requirements that the dead are buried before the next sunset.
Many training bases operated by Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network were known to have previously been situated around Jalalabad, although residents of Khorum insisted there were none there now.
”I ask America not to kill us,” said Hussain Khan, who said he lost four children in the raid and survived only by racing out of the house when he first heard a plane overhead.
Pentagon officials have said at least one of its bombs had missed its target since air raids in pursuit of Osama bin Laden began last week. But that was near Kabul. Washington has so far declined to comment on reports from Khorum.
Zeeshan Haider is a Reuters correspondent. His party of journalists was accompanied by the Taliban to Khorum
– The Guardian
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