More than 80 holdouts – one claiming to be an American – surrender at fortress

By BURT HERMAN
Associated Press Writer

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan – A man claiming to be an American was among more than 80 Taliban fighters who straggled out of a flooded basement days after their prison rebellion was crushed at an Afghan fort. Some of the captives were being treated in hospitals Sunday, a health official said.

"U.S. military forces in Afghanistan have in their control a man who calls himself a U.S. citizen," Army Lt. Col. Jim Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said in Washington. "He was among the al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners held by the northern alliance in Mazar-e-Sharif."

Cassella said the man was injured and was being given medical assistance by U.S. forces. He could not provide further details about the man, nor would he immediately confirm whether the man was indeed a U.S. citizen.

Northern alliance soldiers flushed the holdouts from their basement hiding place in the sprawling fort on Saturday by flooding it with water, said Dr. Arif Salimi, head of the local health office in the nearby city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

"The soldiers poured water into the basement and it was very cold so they all came out," Salimi said. "They couldn't take it any longer."

Three came out first and offered to surrender, and then the rest emerged, he said. There were more than 80 of them in all.

The men had been hiding since the ferocious battle at Qalai Janghi fortress, outside Mazar-e-Sharif. On Nov. 25, Taliban prisoners rose up against their alliance captors. Alliance fighters backed by U.S. special forces and airstrikes took three days to put down the revolt, killing most of the prisoners.

Many of the prisoners who emerged from the basement were injured, Salimi said. Some were being treated in hospitals and others imprisoned again.

Video tape from the fortress Saturday and acquired by Associated Press Television News showed the prisoners, many of them visibly weak and thin after days without food or water.

One man, who appeared to be near death, was carried on a stretcher into a truck for transport along with the weakest prisoners. Others appeared to be in pain.

Two of the prisoners said they were from Yemen, and when one was asked what he was doing in Afghanistan, he answered "jihad," or holy war.

"The conditions (of the prisoners) are what you can expect from people who have been without food or drinking water for six days, in a basement, traumatized, shocked," Olivier Martin, of the International Committee for the Red Cross, said in an interview on the APTN video from the scene.

There were several conflicting news accounts of the man who claimed to be an American among the newly captured prisoners.

CNN said he identified himself as John Walker, 20, of San Francisco. The network said the man, who said he was born in Washington, D.C. and a convert to Islam, was being treated Sunday by the Red Cross in Mazar-e-Sharif for grenade and bullet wounds. Newsweek magazine said an American who identified himself as Abdul Hamid, also 20 and originally from Washington, was among the prisoners. The New York Times, quoting northern alliance commander Din Muhammad, said the captives included an Arab who said he was born in Baton Rouge, La.

Foreign militants – mostly Arabs and Pakistanis – have fought alongside the Taliban against the northern alliance, some of them members of the al-Qaida network of Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, the chief suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

In Geneva, the Red Cross said it had begun registering some of the Taliban prisoners. "Registering for us is a key thing," spokeswoman Kim Gordon-Bates said. "Once a person exists, they can't disappear."

Gen. Rashid Dostum, the northern alliance warlord whose headquarters are in the Qalai Janghi fortress, had said Wednesday that there could be a few remaining prisoners hiding in part of the compound.

Afghan health workers had already begun collecting the dozens of bodies of those killed in the fighting. But on Thursday, at least two health workers were shot and wounded while trying retrieve bodies from the prison basement.

A CIA agent was also killed in the battle, the first American to die in combat in the war the United States launched against the Taliban Oct. 7 after they refused to hand over bin Laden.

AP-WS-12-02-01 1853EST