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Kabul Dispatch
Thursday, November 15, 2001
(Issue date November 26, 2001)
By Elizabeth Rubin / The New Republic

"Hurry hurry hurry. We can destroy the enemy. Advance."
"Hit hit hit the Taliban."
"Hit him hit him hit him. Fire, fire."
"We're arriving in Khalakhan."
"Take care about the troops."
"The Taliban are surrendering."
"Bring them to me."
"One hundred of them are coming to you."
"El Ham captured a pickup with their weapons."

These were the voices on the radio of the Northern Alliance commanders we have been visiting for weeks. Several other journalists and I were standing with some Afghan soldiers on the roof of a command post--a mud house with a tank's turret and gun jutting out of the roof--just outside a village called Qala-I-Zai, on the road to Kabul. An American B-52 looped around overhead. The ground trembled and giant charcoal cyclones of smoke curtained the sky above the Taliban front line, maybe a kilometer to the east. "It's like an atomic bomb," someone said. A pickup sped by carrying a body covered in a gray, woolen blanket, and the Afghan soldiers clicked their tongues and shook their heads. It was one of their own. Thin sand squalls rose across the desert plain. The soldiers fired giant rockets from an old Soviet multiple-rocket launcher, sending birds into flight over our heads. Nineteen- and twenty-year-old soldiers waiting for orders to advance broke into hysterical laughter every time another Taliban mortar crashed around us and someone rose from the ground with dust covering their lips and eyelashes. Later, a CNN cameraman showed up. He was filming every journalist he encountered, just in case, he said, "because you know three were killed yesterday."

After weeks and weeks of waiting, of commanders complaining about ammunition shortages and about the inexplicable delays of their leaders, early Monday morning the Northern Alliance soldiers lined up on the old and new roads to Kabul in front of their tanks. It was a moment of solemnity before finally setting off to take back their capital. A soldier sang melancholy Koranic verse. The men prayed to Allah for victory, and to destroy the foreign terrorists in their country, to capture back their villages and towns, and to stay alive.
(More: The New Republic News Source)
2001 © The New Republic.

Dan