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'10,000 a Day' Flee Press-Gangs in Kabul
Tuesday, September 25, 2001
By Ian Traynor / The Guardian

DENAU, Uzbekistan
The Taliban press gang arrived in their Datsun pickups in the small hours of Sunday morning, striking terror into every family in a block of flats in north Kabul.

On the fifth floor Wahidullah, a 30-year-old ethnic Tajik, comforted his two young children and looked on fearfully as the building was shaken by the howling and shrieking of mothers and sisters.

The gunmen moved through the first few floors of the block, seizing all males aged between 18 and 30 and dragging them away, the hostages were told, to fight America.

"That was when I decided to leave. I thought they were going to take me too," said Wahidullah yesterday, after a 12-hour trek with his family out of Kabul to the other side of the lines in Afghanistan's civil war.
(More: Guardian Unlimited News Source)

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