The Pentagon said Monday that five U.S. military men were seriously injured by "friendly fire" in a misguided airstrike called in against the uprising by Taliban prisoners held in the Qala-e-Jangi fortress, near the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif. The wounded Americans were airlifted to Uzbekistan. The death toll was estimated in the hundreds among the revolting Taliban prisoners in two days of fighting with Northern Alliance forces.
U.S. News correspondent Bay Fang witnessed the airstrike. Her report:
QALA-E-JANGI, AFGHANISTAN–The four Americans in desert camouflage and crew cuts crouching behind a mud-brick wall seem like part of the landscape. They hardly move and their eyes do not waver from the imposing fortress about 500 feet away. Yet they are not at all indigenous. They wear khaki backpacks, thermoses around their necks, and night vision goggles around their heads. They are from the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division and rushed in Sunday along with British special forces to aid their Afghan allies.
The fortress belongs to Northern Alliance General Abdul Rashid Dostum, whose forces have been battling a revolt by some 700 Taliban soldiers–mainly Arabs, Pakistanis and Chechens–held as prisoners inside the fortress. These Taliban, who supposed surrendered, overwhelmed their guards the day before and rearmed themselves from the weapons cache inside the compound.
Overhead, an American F-18 jet is barely visible against the blue sky. “The plane is coming in from the west,” one American soldier shouts. He grabs his radio, and says, “B-5. Danger close. Bombs coming.”
From the radio, one of the forward spotters inside the fortress replies: “Roger. We are danger close. We are approximately 100 meters from the target.”
“We think you are probably too close, over.”
The urgent reply: “We’ve got to be close enough to lase the target [to identify the location with a laser].”
More details, and the spotter reads off the coordinates of the Taliban positions. “Can you see the pink house from your location...There is an ammunition dump next to the wall in the center.”
One of the soldiers notes down some numbers, and an officer checks them on his hand-held Etrex Venture global positioning system and then yells, “Pull back, pull back at this time, over.”
The answer comes from inside, “We’re pulling back.”
At 10:49, the fighter pilot radios, “Two minutes.”
Thirty seconds later, the spotter calls in urgently to correct the coordinates, and they are relayed to the plane.
“Okay, guys, get down,” the officer orders, and we all crouch down behind the wall. And then, a few shots, a tense second of silence, the whistle, and a huge eruption of fire and dust. It grows and grows from just inside the fortress, and blocks out the sun with its menacing cloud.
Almost immediately, Northern Alliance soldiers gathering around the American team begin to shout, “That was wrong! Wrong! Wrong!”
A commander named Alim Razm gestures frantically with his radio. “Cut it, please, cut it! This is very wrong.”
An American officer looking shocked says, “It was inside, in the south center. There is a building inside where the Taliban are. I am sure we hit that.”
“Why did you give the wrong directions?” Razm persists.
A stream of Northern Alliance fighters, blood smeared across their faces, comes trailing up the road from the fortress. They wear six coats of dust. Some look dazed and glassy eyed, supported by fellow soldiers on both sides.
A young translator named Hafis pulls himself up shakily from behind a mud hedge near the fortress. He is caked in mud and his clothes are soaking wet from diving into an irrigation channel alongside a field. “They hit the corner of the fort, but all the Taliban are inside under the trees,” he says.
As the dust clears, the fortress becomes visible again. Only now it has a hole in the wall facing the road.
The American officer says he has lost contact with the spotters inside, and realized something must have gone wrong. “We’re going in,” he says to his team. They jump into their cars and zoom off along the road leading around to the back gate of the fortress.
I follow them across the field, past nervous Northern Alliance fighters pacing along the walls, and stand outside the 50-foot tall, whitewashed gate as they run in. The Americans run along the walls, carrying what looks like bodies on stretchers. “One down, semi-conscious, no external bleeding,” shouts one American soldier inside the fort.
A British special forces officer in turquoise jeans stands just outside the gate talking with another plain-clothes British soldier. Both are completely covered in dust.
The injured are loaded on seven vehicles–unmarked vans and white Land Rovers, one with an open top and swiveling gun turret–which speed off on toward Mazar-e Sharif, down a road stained with fresh blood.
