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National Geographic : 2004 Dec
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"Whoever betrays [Osama], why, his life wouldn't be worth an onion." were hiding near the town of Wana, but these reports later proved false. When we arrived a few weeks into the fighting, the Pakistani Army's offen sive wasn't going well, and it had taken dozens of casualties. Convoys were ambushed. Garrisons came under rocket attack, and a dozen Pakistani soldiers who had fled into a mosque were dragged out by al Qaeda fighters and slaughtered. With Waziristan in flames, Brigadier Shah wants us out of the crossfire. So Reza and I set out instead for Kurram, a long river valley fac ing Tora Bora that is bounded on one side by snowy mountains. Guiding us is Rahimullah Yusufzai, a schol arly frontiersman with a white beard and owl ish glasses who is the voice of BBC Radio in these parts and the doyen of Pashtun journalists. He had interviewed bin Laden twice and the Taliban chief, Mullah Mohammad Omar, several times, and knows the physical and cultural contours of Bin Ladenstan as well as any man alive. (He had also helped National Geographic track down Sharbat Gula, whose haunting green eyes were familiar to readers all over the world; see "Found," in the April 2002 issue.) And then we have our six bodyguards, scruffy frontier militiamen whose AK-47s often seem to be nonchalantly aimed at us. For our own protection, of course. Our first destination is Dandar Kili, a village of woodcutters where a group of 50 al Qaeda fighters, many of them frostbitten and wounded, had staggered over the mountains from Tora Bora in December 2001. Sipping green tea in the house of a 100-year-old tribal chieftain, Tajmir Daradar, we ask about that story and are met with stony silence. Later, in the next village down the valley, we find out why. "Did you notice that in Dandar all the houses were new?" says one villager, Noor Mohammad. "That's because we burned the old ones to the ground." Apparently the al Qaeda fighters had indeed spilled into Dandar and were sheltered in the village mosque. Then the old chieftain Daradar himself had rushed in, warning that the Pakistani Army was on its way and urging the fugitives to stash their guns and hide. The al Qaeda men complied. "It was a trick," explains Noor Mohammad. "The people of Dandar robbed the Arabs of everything, all their belongings, their dollars. The Arabs came to us limping barefoot through the snow. Even their socks had been stolen." This mistreatment of al Qaeda was seen as such a violation of the Pashtun code of sanctuary that the surrounding villages gathered a 4,000-man army, or lashkar,and attacked Dandar, burning down the houses, killing their livestock. And what happened to the al Qaeda fighters? "You have to understand," says Noor Moham mad, eyeing me coolly. "If an American soldier comes to my house asking for protection, I will give it to him. And if Osama comes, I will also give him refuge. This is our Pashtun way." That was as close as I got to an answer. On the road back to Peshawar, at twilight, we stop at the hillside grave of an al Qaeda man. His body had been found by a shepherd boy and buried by villagers. Flags on sticks-signifying a martyr's burial-snap in the wind, and jagged spears of lightning crash around us with supernatural accuracy. I feel like an intruder, and half-expect bin Laden himself to come gliding down the hill. During our travels, we saw over a dozen al Qaeda graves. They have become places of pilgrim age for the Pashtun: Women pray there to give birth to brave sons; others honor the fallen fighters in florid poetry,just as they did the mujahideen who died battling the Soviets in Afghanistan. That decade-long conflict, sparked by the 1979 Soviet invasion, was a tipping point of modern history. To fight its Cold War arch enemy, the U.S. made a covert alliance with Pakistan's intelligence services to run the war. Pakistan funneled guns, money, and eventually Stinger surface-to-air missiles to a group of Afghan rebels, who saw the struggle as a jihad, or holy war, to expel the Soviet infidels from Muslim lands. Soon other Muslim countries, ON THE TRAIL OF BIN LADEN 15
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