The fall of John Walker Lindh

One of the ranking al Farooq trainers, Abu Mohammad al-Misri, an Egyptian also known as "Shaleh," had been named in a federal indictment for his alleged participation in the 1998 embassy bombings. Again, Lindh knew nothing of him. Regardless, he turned down the offer to leave Afghanistan, saying again that he had come to help the Taliban. Lindh left the camp in June or July at the end of his training, and soon joined a group of about 30 other Ansar volunteers headed north to fight Northern Alliance forces, who were then clinging to a tiny corner of Afghanistan in a losing war.

Lindh arrived on the front lines in the war's eleventh hour. His group flew in on one of the last troop lifts from Kabul to Konduz on about Sept. 6, 2001. In Konduz, Lindh was given a Kalashnikov and two grenades, a vest with pockets for his ammunition, and some warmer clothes since winter was already coming in the mountains. A Taliban commander told Lindh and the others in the group that they were officially members of the Afghan army, even though there was not an Afghan among them. With that, Lindh saw himself as a sworn servant to the Taliban's Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, a soldier not a terrorist -- a distinction that would come to mean little, if anything, in the eyes of most Americans.

Lindh's unit was then sent toward the front lines in Takhar, where the group was ordered to take up defensive positions on two hills opposite Northern Alliance forces. Lindh was told his group would make no attacks; their mission was simply to hold the hills, essentially guard duty at a position that weathered only the occasional volley of Northern Alliance mortar fire. His long-anticipated jihad consisted of touring a remote corner of the front line where the Northern Alliance forces were so far away that the Taliban rarely, if ever, saw them. Lindh never managed to squeeze off a shot across the front lines, and his unit suffered no casualties while protecting the lonely hills. He mostly read and eyed the empty landscape, rotating with others in two-week shifts in and out of foxholes.

Word of what happened on Sept. 11 spread by word of mouth from others in his unit who listened to radio broadcasts. With no access to a radio himself, much less a television or newspaper, he was unsure what to think of the attacks and the speculation that bin Laden was behind them. In any case, Lindh saw bin Laden and any conflict he had with America as separate from the Taliban's fight against the Northern Alliance. He was tragically wrong in many ways.

Eventually Lindh and others began to suspect that bin Laden was indeed behind the attacks, a troubling revelation for some on the remote front. The moral, ethical and religious reasoning that had drawn Lindh and many of his jihadi comrades to fight in trenches against fellow Islamic believers in Afghanistan did not call for the attacks like those unleashed on Sept. 11. And whatever misconceptions Lindh had about bin Laden, one thing was clear: the Taliban supported him. Many of the foreign fighters in the trenches alongside Lindh began to question the Taliban and its support of bin Laden as sketchy details about the thousands of civilian casualties reached them in their lonely post.

Some considered defecting, looking for ways to flee Takhar. But U.S. airstrikes, which had begun on Oct. 7, had frozen all transportation to and from the area. Slipping away on foot seemed out of the question. A walk back to the nearest town of any size, Konduz, would take more than two days over frigid steppe supposedly roamed by bandits. There seemed to be no way out, so Lindh never really considered abandoning his position. But eventually he and his colleagues were forced to, as the airstrikes were breaking up Taliban positions elsewhere along the front, and Lindh's unit was ordered to fall back.

By mid-November, they moved from their positions and the entire front line folded; all the Taliban in the area broke into a full retreat toward Konduz. By the time they reached it, the town was controlled by the Northern Alliance and the Taliban soon accepted defeat -- at least officially -- and entered into surrender talks.

Around November 24, Lindh and several hundred other foreign fighters were ordered by Afghan Taliban commanders to turn themselves over to the Northern Alliance soon after they arrived in Konduz. Lindh and others were told by a Taliban commander that they would be let go after being disarmed. Whether the Taliban commander believed that or not, Northern Alliance Gen. Rashid Dostum had no plans to free any of the surrendering foreigners. Instead, Dostum's men trucked them to his fortress on the outskirts of Mazar-e-Sharif called Qala-i-Jangi. There Northern Alliance troops crowded Lindh and roughly 400 other captives into a basement for overnight keeping ahead of interrogations. The packed cellar was a din of fighters speaking in no fewer than half a dozen languages echoing off the cement walls. Lindh crouched on the dirt floor near a corner used as a toilet because there was no room to lie down anywhere else.

Lindh's brief time as an armed Taliban fighter was over. But he would not escape the brutalities of war.

Next Page: Distrust of an American CIA agent

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