Friday 1 June 2012

The Great Taliban Jailbreak

When the stranger unbolted the cell door and whispered for them to hurry, Rahim assumed that somewhere in the prison a fight must have broken out. It was the middle of the night, and normally the heavy metal door remained locked until the morning call to prayer. For the past five months, Rahim had shared this cell, in Kandahar's Sarposa Prison, with five other captured insurgents, two of whom he'd fought alongside in the fiercely contested district of Panjwai. Now, from where they lay on old blankets and cushions on the floor, all five gazed uncertainly at the man standing in their doorway. "We are your friends," the man said. "There is a tunnel over here. Come quickly and get inside it."
Rahim and his cellmates stepped into the prison's dimly lit lime green corridor. At the passageway's far end, a metal gate sealed the cell-block entrance. Every ten feet or so, solid black doors led to more communal cells. Nearly 500 Taliban occupied this part of Sarposa, called the political block. Some were military commanders and shadow-government officials, others hardened foot soldiers and young recruits. Their arrests represented years of effort by coalition forces to quell a resuscitated insurgency and impose some semblance of law in one of the least stable regions in Afghanistan. Following the stranger down the long hall, Rahim noticed that most of the cells were now empty...
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