The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (28 page)

Although the deputy warden defended the honour of the men who stood guard that day, he harboured suspicions about his own boss. He had warned the warden several times about strange activity in the jail beforehand, he said, but his superior showed a curious lack of interest about his reports. In fairness, we had all heard rumours of a possible jailbreak; the story circulating two years earlier had been that the Taliban planned to slip through the gates with an ambulance full of gunmen. That was the summer of 2006, before Operation Medusa, when the Taliban dug trenches in the fields near the western outskirts of the city and such rumours seemed plausible.
Now, in 2008, the insurgents had again established strongholds near the city—this time just south of the prison. The international forces knew about those Taliban hideouts but lacked the numbers to solve the problem. Nor did the prison staff seem ready to deal with the growing unrest inside their walls; as the deputy warden toured me around the ghostly halls, and we met the few staff and prisoners who remained, their stories made it sound like the inmates had been running the place in the weeks before the jailbreak.

It started with a mysterious committee of seven prisoners, in the wing that held people accused of murder, kidnapping and terrorism. This cabal somehow seized control of the best rooms, the more comfortable cells on the north side of the wing. Those cells looked untouched when I arrived: half-eaten plates of food and forgotten sandals remained strewn across the straw mats on the floor, suggesting a hasty exit. Somebody had posted a sign on the door of the biggest room: “No interruptions from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.” The committee apparently met during those hours every afternoon. After emerging from their conclave in the evenings, they preached to their fellow prisoners, scolding anybody who insulted the Taliban or its leadership, and again when they failed to wake up for morning prayers. Somebody painted an Arabic slogan on the wall of their meeting room: “Jihad is mandatory.” The committee also enjoyed an unusual degree of luxury: their rooms had televisions, weightlifting equipment, even an improvised knife with a handle fashioned from masking tape, darkened with opium tar, suggesting that the Taliban prisoners were getting high. An empty gin bottle contained fragrant spices. Smuggled cellphones were apparently common in the cells, and these prisoners had obtained a more dangerous kind of contraband, too; near a window with a view of the central guard tower, small brass casings lay scattered on the floor, showing that somebody fired a handgun during the escape. This explained the false
reports, initially, that the insurgents broke through the jail perimeter in two places. No guards had died in the central tower that night, but the shots coming from an unexpected direction likely added to the confusion among prison staff.

It seemed notable that the guards had taken no action as the most dangerous captives in the prison sat around, smoked drugs, chatted on their phones, enforced religious rules—and prepared an escape. It’s possible, however, that they felt cowed by the insurgents. Prison guards ranked among the lowest-paid Afghan security forces, below even the police, and the Taliban had been growing stronger in the rural areas within view of the prison watchtowers. The inmates had appeared docile on my other visits, but they had grown restless before the jailbreak. They had organized a hunger strike in the previous month, refusing to eat solid food. Many of them had languished for months or years without a conviction from the special judge who heard political cases, and the prisoners claimed this lack of due process meant they could be jailed indefinitely. The protest ended when local authorities promised to send a judge to the prison to rule on their cases, but that never happened. Instead, the problems escalated. A week before the jailbreak, guards sat down together for their evening meal of stewed mutton and some of them noticed a bitter taste in the food, like tobacco. Dozens started vomiting, bleeding from the nose and mouth, falling unconscious. Several went to hospital, where doctors said they were victims of poisoning. None of them died, and no prisoners escaped during the confusion, but it was a sign of trouble ahead.

The director, a colonel in the prison service, responded to the rising tensions by holding regular meetings with three members of the prisoners’ committee. He described these meetings to the rest of the staff as a way of mediating problems, but he conducted them in secret. I never did find out what happened during those sessions; one of the prison officials who helped arrange the meetings was shot in the head, execution-style, during the jailbreak, and the colonel
himself was jailed soon afterward. A female officer who oversaw the women’s section of the prison said she happened to see the colonel in front of his office on the day of the attack. He smiled at her and said: “Something might happen tonight. If any of the prisoners owes you money, collect it. If you owe them money, pay it.” She wasn’t sure if he was joking, because he seemed untroubled by his warning. When mayhem erupted later that evening, the colonel was safely at home; he got a flurry of calls from security officials when the truck bomb blew open the prison gates, but he apparently told them that the tanker exploded by accident and didn’t affect the prison. This could have been an innocent mistake, but probably wasn’t. My translator later spoke with an insurgent who escaped, a twenty-eight-year-old fighter who bragged about how the escapees got help from insiders. “Important officials from the jail helped us bring in pistols and mobile phones, and we also bought some explosives for the bombing,” the fugitive said. I heard something similar from a nineteen-year-old inmate who escaped but then returned to jail because he had only a short time remaining on his sentence and didn’t want to live as a fugitive. The Taliban fighters who broke him free and shepherded his group of prisoners into the darkness had explained that jail staff had assisted with the operation. “The Taliban had a secret meeting with the prison director, one week before the attack,” the prisoner said. “Maybe they paid him money, I don’t know.” (The colonel eventually got out of jail; in 2011, he was serving as a police commander for a small neighbourhood in the city.)

Either way, it’s hard to see how the Afghan forces could have done anything about the well-coordinated assault. In the hours beforehand, Taliban messengers circulated a warning in the neighbourhood, telling residents to evacuate, and the stretch of highway leading west from the city grew quiet as people slipped away. Nobody told the eight policemen who lived in a bunker only six hundred metres east of the prison, and nobody passed word to the large police barracks about twenty-two hundred metres to the west. Officers at both
of those positions said they were caught by surprise when insurgents started shooting bullets and rocket-propelled grenades at their outposts around 9:10 p.m. Policemen initially considered it a routine, if unusually intense, bit of harassment; the insurgents often hit government outposts at night, killing or wounding a few officers and disappearing. The officers nearest to Sarpoza prison responded with sensible caution, hunkering behind their sandbags and firing back. With the local security forces pinned down, the insurgents drove a fuel tanker up to the prison gates. The driver hopped down from the cab and ran away: insurgents later suggested that a suicide switch in the truck had failed, so the tanker did not immediately detonate, but it was more likely that the driver just wanted to save himself. The Taliban quickly improvised a solution, firing rocket-propelled grenades at the tanker. The first shot whistled high and missed, but the second ignited a huge explosion. Windows and mirrors shattered a kilometre away, and a ball of white light rose over the prison. One of my acquaintances, a Western security official, felt the tremor running through the city and looked at his watch; he later climbed to a spot overlooking the scene and noted the timeline:

The aftermath of the blast was a time for prayers in the rattled city. At a business across the street from the jail, damaged by the explosion, a seventy-year-old watchman with a long grey beard and a shaved head took up his green plastic prayer beads and started reciting holy words as he listened to the gunfire. Inside the jail, a guard climbed into a cupboard and silently appealed to Allah. A short
scuffle in the Taliban wing ended as the prisoners overwhelmed a few guards and waited for their comrades to save them, calling friends on their cellphones and holding the handsets into the air as they shouted to the sky, “
Allahu Akbar
!” Their rescuers arrived a few minutes later, shooting their way down the central corridor that runs toward the national-security wing and blasting the locks with belt-fed machine guns. They timed the raid with unnerving precision, arriving before the prisoners returned to their cells for the evening, but late enough to enjoy the advantage of darkness. They seemed anxious to get away quickly, yelling at prisoners to hurry.

Hundreds of inmates streamed across the smoking rubble where the front gate once stood. Most escaped gleefully, but a few lingered behind—including a beautiful twenty-year-old woman named Rukiya. She had served two months in prison for running away from her husband, a crime under Afghanistan’s version of
sharia
law. Her husband was jailed in a separate wing on charges of beating her, and during the chaos of the jailbreak he ran through the smoke calling her name. A witness said he forced Rukiya to run barefoot across the jagged rubble of the gateway and into the street. She struggled, trying to escape, and her husband appealed for help from a nearby Taliban commander. The insurgent leader, his identity concealed by a scarf wrapped around his head, instructed the woman to obey her husband. She refused. The insurgent gave her husband his Kalashnikov rifle and permission to execute the unruly woman. “He put many bullets in her; I watched her die,” a witness told me. “She lay on the road until the next morning. I don’t know what happened to the body.”

The murdering husband escaped with the rest of the mob, which broke into smaller groups under Taliban guard and scattered among the houses to the south of the prison. They ran down alleys, through vineyards and wheat fields. Their Taliban guides told them to hit the ground when they heard aircraft overhead, but this precaution was futile because it was impossible to hide the teeming mass of
escapees from NATO surveillance. Some prisoners kept running all night, but many flopped down in the fields one or two kilometres from the jailbreak, half-expecting to get rounded up again. To their surprise, security forces captured almost none of the fugitives. Hundreds of Afghan police, reserve units and intelligence officers approached from the east, but they moved slowly toward the insurgents who continued covering the retreat. When they did reach the jail, some Afghan security forces contented themselves with looting instead of searching for escapees; guards told me that the worst ransacking of Sarpoza was not committed by insurgents, but rather by the police who first arrived at the scene. Stepping over the bodies of their colleagues, Afghan policemen spirited away whatever valuables remained in the jail: money, clothes and weapons. The police stopped thieving when the foreign troops arrived, the so-called Quick Reaction Force, stationed only six kilometres away but so late to reach the scene that the shooting had already died down when the troop carriers rolled up. The Canadian commander responsible for the province, a thoughtful officer named Brigadier-General Denis Thompson, later explained why he did not send his soldiers there more quickly.

More to the point, the Canadian commander expressed doubts about whether it would have done any good to send NATO soldiers into dense terrain in the middle of the night. He worried that a bad situation could have become far bloodier.

He was right: the tools at his disposal, soldiers trained to kill, were not the correct implements for the task. What would have happened if a platoon of US or Canadian soldiers had chased down a bunch of dirty men in a field? How would they have figured out the difference between fugitives, insurgents and villagers? It could have gotten messy, especially because international forces later disarmed five bombs planted as traps for pursuers. That didn’t prevent Afghan officials from complaining about the lack of backup from their foreign allies, however. Two days after the attack, the provincial council held a private session that criticized the international troops, saying the jailbreak had revealed their weakness. Kabul fired the three top security officials in Kandahar afterward; I later ate dinner with one of them, the former police chief, who expressed amazement that blame for the incident fell on the Afghan forces. Between bites of lamb and chicken, the stubble-bearded veteran said NATO soldiers should have unleashed their firepower on the jail-breakers. “Who came to release the prisoners?” he said. “It was the Taliban. What is NATO doing here in Afghanistan? They are fighting the Taliban.” He paused to look at me, as if waiting for an explanation. Afghan forces don’t have the foreign troops’ night-vision goggles and modern weapons, he said, so how could the international forces expect his men to charge into the fray that night?