Ordinary Afghans grieve loved ones, 'collateral damage' in a worldwide struggle

By MORT ROSENBLUM
AP Special Correspondent

QUETTA, Pakistan – Fazal Mohammed, a cart-pusher from Kandahar, missed the televised briefing where U.S. generals apologized for accidental bomb damage, which included his 5-year-old son, Taj.

"I don't know about Osama bin Laden," Mohammed said, in a hospital here. "The Taliban says he is our guest. What can we do? I don't care about politics, whoever is in control. I only pray for peace."

U.S. warplanes struck an ammunition dump at the edge of Kandahar on Wednesday, right on target. But secondary explosions from rockets and shells inside crumpled Mohammed's two-room mud hut nearby.

Taj died instantly at 9 p.m., his stomach torn out with searing metal. Mohammed, still conscious despite shrapnel in his right eye, buried him five hours later. By sunrise, the grieving family was on the road.

Only a few bombing casualties have arrived from Kandahar, but those who make it say that is because Taliban authorities make crossing to Pakistan extremely difficult. And destitute Afghans can't pay the fare.

Mohammed earned the equivalent of $1.50 a day when he found work, enough to keep his wife and three kids in spicy potato soup. Some nights, like Wednesday, the family went to bed early to alleviate hunger pangs.

By sunrise, after burying his son, he handed his savings of 1.3 million Afghanis, about $20, to a transporter who drove the family to the border at Chaman.

Late in the day, he said, Taliban guards at the border relaxed their controls for about 30 minutes, allowing some of the wounded to cross into Pakistan.

Mohammed finally reached Quetta, 180 miles from Kandahar, late on Friday and went to the eye hospital. On Monday, when a doctor returns after the weekend break, he will know whether he has lost his eye.

Down the road at Quetta's main civilian hospital, Faiz Mohammed lays groaning in pain, with a large white bandage around his head. Much of his body is pocked with deep burns and lacerations.

Still partly in shock, he is not sure which day it happened, but he is clear about what hit him. He and three other men were building a wall in a village an hour's drive from Kandahar, he said, when a plane flew over.

"We looked up because you don't see planes like that," he said. Suddenly, he added, there was light and noise.

"Why us?" he asked. "We're all poor men, daily laborers. We have nothing to do with fighting, or politics."

As he spoke in brief phrases, his father, Sayed Ahmed, and two of his seven brothers sat grimly by his bedside.

"We have no interest in the Taliban," the 70-year-old family patriarch said. He wore the jauntily tied turban and long goatee of Uzbeks who people northern Afghanistan. "Why do they bomb innocent people?"

At the eye hospital, Fazal Mohammed estimated that 40 percent of Kandahar residents had fled to seek refuge in outlying villages. Those who remain include people too poor or sick to be mobile.

After five years of drought, he said, some people are barely surviving on water and wild grasses.

But, he added, the Taliban is firmly in charge, with no opposition in their Kandahar stronghold. With television banned and radio strictly controlled, he said, people have little idea of the outside world.

Mohammed said most Afghans think that it would be impossible for a person living in their remote mountains to be responsible for such sophisticated acts of violence at the other side of the world.

He has heard Mullah Omar describe American plans to destroy Islam, with the help of certain anti-Muslim wealthy nations and Israel. Until the rhetoric cost him his son, he didn't think much about it.

"I don't know," he said. "I'm just a daily worker who tried to support a family. I have some sympathy for the Taliban, but maybe someone else could do better. We only pray to God almighty for peace."

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