http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/02/international/asia/02FORT.html?todaysheadlines
December 2, 2001

THE SURRENDER
Taliban Holdouts Give Up at Fort, Looking Desperate
By CARLOTTA GALL

ALA JANGI, Afghanistan, Dec. 1 — Wounded, starving
and near collapse after a week of relentless bombardment,
more than 80 Taliban fighters, the last holdouts in a
deadly prison uprising that began last Sunday, emerged
from their bunker Friday night and today after Northern Alliance
forces flooded their basement refuge.

Most of the men were non-Afghans — from Arab countries,
Pakistan and other parts of Central Asia — who had gained a
reputation as the fiercest of the Taliban forces. Today they were
merely bedraggled, desperately thirsty and hungry, shivering and
shaking. Many were soaking wet. At least 20 were brought out by
stretcher.

"We gave up because there was nothing left, we had no
ammunition, no weapons, no food," said Abdul Jabar, 26, from
Tashkent in Uzbekistan, as a doctor dressed a foot wound. "And
then they started filling up the basement with water. The water
came up to our waists. Our commander decided we should
surrender, but we all decided we should surrender."

Mr. Jabar said there were many bodies still in the basement.
Nearly 200 bodies were counted by the International Committee
for the Red Cross during the week. While many Afghan Taliban
soldiers in the war have simply defected or been allowed to
surrender and go home, the non-Afghan fighters here expected no
mercy at the hands of the Northern Alliance. It was not clear what
would happen to the group from the fort.

Several of the holdouts gave up on Friday night. The rest of them
yielded this morning to alliance soldiers, who led the men, from an
inner compound of the vast fort. They were the remnants of about
400 Taliban who last week surrendered the garrison at nearby
Kunduz, the last major Taliban stronghold in the north.

As the men came forth today, they were searched for explosives
and their hands were bound behind them. The guards placed them
in a metal shipping container in the central compound.

The wounded lay in the mud beside the container, pleading for
bread and water as the Northern Alliance backed in two trucks to
take them away to a more secure detention. Red Cross officials
arrived with water, bananas and oranges, and dressings for the
prisoners, who drank and ate hungrily.

The Northern Alliance commander, Din Muhammad, who whose orders were to extract the holdouts from the basement of a Soviet-era classroom building in the fort, had been firing rockets into the basement for two days. But the Taliban continued firing back when anyone approached. So on Friday afternoon he decided to divert an irrigation ditch into the basement and flood the underground rooms.

Weak and wounded, the prisoners knew they could not survive the water and the cold temperatures, they said. Thirteen prisoners gave themselves up at 10 p.m. on Friday. One of them ventured out of the bunker and told alliance soldiers on guard that they were ready to surrender.

This morning the 13 — 12 Pakistanis and an Afghan — were being locked up in the shipping container when they saw a journalist. One had a cardboard box over his head, apparently in an effort to keep warm. Another lay on the floor of the container, part of his face shot away, shaking uncontrollably.

One man said that they had wanted to surrender two days ago but that a group of seven Arab fighters had refused to let them.

But at 8 a.m. today, the rest of the group including a large number of Arabs, shouted that they, too, would surrender, said Mr. Muhammad. There were many Arabs among them, some with wild tangled hair and thick beards, and several who said they were Yemenis.

One thin Pakistani boy, Ijaz Latif, said he was 16 or 17 and had been in Afghanistan only two months.

There was also one Arab who said he was born in the United States, in Baton Rouge, La., he said.

Mr. Jabar, the Uzbek, said that the fighters had survived the bombings by hiding in ditches and trenches out in the open, and then moved into the deep basement of the classroom building to take cover from the Northern Alliance gun and tank fire. But two days ago the Northern Alliance poured diesel fuel into the underground rooms and set fire to it.

"The smoke was so bad, you could not breath," he said. "And the rocket explosions were really bad. We survived that but then it turned cold and they poured the water in, and none of our weapons worked."

There were a lot of dead still in the basement, he said. The Red Cross collected 188 dead bodies this week from among the 400 fighters who originally surrendered. Today, 85 fighters, by a rough count, surrendered. Some others are thought to have escaped and scores more may be dead in the basement.

Mr. Jabar said the 400 foreigners had left Kunduz and surrendered to the Northern Alliance last week because they had been told that if they gave up their weapons they would be allowed to go free and sent to the southern Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. But when they were taken to the fort as prisoners some of their group decided to fight.

"Our commander began it," Mr. Jabar said of the prisoner uprising that began last Sunday when prisoners rushed their guards and seized their guns. "He said, `It is better to die a martyr than be in prison.' Our commander said we should fight to the last drop of blood," he said.

But Mr. Jabar clearly did not want to. He accepted apples and water gratefully from Red Cross workers. "I am not against Americans," he said, adding that he thought the attacks of Sept. 11 in in New York were wrong because they targeted ordinary people.

Mr. Jabar said he had been in Afghanistan for a year, working in the Kabul office of the militant Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a group of 150 men in Afghanistan, which was led by the Uzbek commander Juma Namangani.

Mr. Namangani is believed to have been killed in fighting in Mazar-i- Sharif. Mr. Jabar said that Mr. Namangani's deputy, a man named Ahmad, took over, and was killed in the fighting in the fort.

Mr. Jabar said he feared being deported back to his home country. "Only God knows what will happen, but if they send us back to Uzbekistan that will be the end," he said.