How Taliban sprang 450 terrorists from Kandahar's Sarposa prison
in Afghanistan

By Tom Coghlan in southern Afghanistan and Colin Freeman Telegraph.co.uk
June 15, 2008

With the latest outrage, the insurgency has shown that its ability
to stage 'spectaculars' is undiminished by setbacks in the field

Overlooking the dusty road into one of Afghanistan's most lawless
cities, the newly-painted guard towers of -Kandahar's Sarposa prison
are supposed to be a reminder to local people of how justice has
finally come to town.

In recent years, coalition -officials have spent millions turning
the 60-year-old building into a showcase facility for Afghanistan's
new government, issuing guards with crisp new uniforms and giving
them lessons on how to treat their charges humanely.

Rather less attention, however, seems to have been spent on the
jail's most basic function - security.

Yesterday, Sarposa's entire population of 1,100 inmates - including
murderers, bandits and about 450 hardened Islamic militants - was
enjoying freedom after an audacious Taliban attack engineered one
of the biggest mass jail breaks in history.

In a spectacular raid which confounded hopes that the Taliban was
now on the back foot, a group of about 30 heavily armed insurgents
launched an assault on the prison on Friday evening, using two
suicide bombers to blow open the gates and then massacring at least
15 dazed guards as they tried to put up a fight.

The inmates fled into the night through the lush pomegranate groves
that surround the building before coalition troops could arrive
from their base on the far side of the city. Convoys of Taliban-driven
getaway minibuses were waiting nearby with engines running.

Yesterday, as coalition and Afghan officials launched an urgent
review of security in every jail in the country and declared a state
of emergency in Kandahar, Taliban supporters around the region began
slaughtering sheep in anticipation of being reunited with their
jailed relations.

The militant faction's excitable media spokesmen - normally prone
to wild exaggerations of their military successes - for once had
no need of hyperbole. Unable to contain their glee at such a
propaganda victory, they spent much of the day issuing taunts to
the Western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai, and making
blood-curdling threats of similar actions for the future.

"We released all the prisoners, including 450 Taliban, we killed
most of the guards, and we blocked the roads into the city so that
our fighters could escape," crowed Qari Yusuf Ahmadi, a Taliban
spokesman for southern Afghanistan. "This was our first attack in
the very heart of Kandahar, and this is a signal to the puppet
government of Hamid Karzai and the infidel government of the West
that they should not forget the Taliban."

Witnesses said that the attack began at around 9pm, when a suicide
bomber driving a water tanker laden with explosives careered towards
the main prison gates.

As another suicide bomber on foot blew up the jail's rear gate,
masked motorcyclists armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled
grenades streamed into the jail's four main courtyards, breaking
open every cell door in sight.

Of particular interest to them was the prison's high-security
political section, which was home to a large contingent of
medium-ranking Taliban suspects handed over to the Afghan government
by American forces.

"First we exploded two suicide attacks and then our mujahedin riding
motorcycles entered the prison and killed the remaining security
guards,"

said Mr Ahmadi. "We successfully freed all prisoners including our
jailed Taliban."

The operation and the ensuing gunbattle with prison guards and
police lasted nearly an hour, during which eight prisoners were
killed.

The Afghan government claimed that the prison's police and guards
had managed to keep hold of about 200 inmates, but local officials
said later that the jail had been emptied.

"It was an unprecedented attack and together with foreign forces,
an operation has been launched to track down and arrest the prisoners,"
said Mohammad Qasim Hashimzai, Afghanistan's deputy justice minister.
"We are trying to find out if there was any inside help."

He said the prison's senior manager, Abdul Qabir, was under
investigation, although he stressed that was a routine measure in
such cases.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the head of Kandahar's provincial council and a
brother of President Karzai, disclosed that the escaped Taliban
included commanders, trained assassins and volunteers who had
undergone grooming for suicide bomb missions. "It is very dangerous
for security," he said. "They are the most experienced killers and
they all managed to escape."

Witnesses described seeing other inmates running along the roads
and scattering into nearby villages before the Canadian troops, who
are part of the Nato-led force based outside Kandahar, could arrive.

Disappearing along with them, meanwhile, was any lingering notion
that the Taliban are still a rag-tag force incapable of much more
than unsophisticated skirmishing.

Only as this month began, British forces in southern Afghanistan
claimed the movement was on the brink of military defeat after
losing more than 7,000 fighters in combat.

But costly encounters in conventional battle have focused Taliban
commanders' minds on developing more sophisticated tactics, conserving
their resources for better-planned "spectaculars".

The first of these took place in Kabul in January, when a combined
suicide squad of gunmen and fighters blasted it way [sic] through
security at the city's Serena hotel, a five-star facility favoured
by Westerners, killing six people.

Then in April, marksmen managed to breach security at a parade
attended by President Karzai and Western diplomats, opening fire
on the crowd and killing three. "We are changing tactics and the
foreigners won't see what is coming," said Mr Ahmadi.

Yesterday a roadside bomb exploded near a US Humvee in western
Afghanistan, killing four Marines in the deadliest attack against
American troops in the country this year. Last month, the total of
American and allied combat deaths in Afghanistan exceeded for the
first time the total in Iraq, with 19 fatalities in Afghanistan
compared with 14 in Iraq.

Sarposa Prison has recently been accused of torture by inmates, who
claim to have been whipped and electrocuted by their Afghan jailers.

Last month, about 40 prisoners stitched their lips together as part
of a hunger protest by several hundred inmates over being held for
up to two years without trial. They will now be free to air their
grievances more widely, which is likely to increase support for the
Taliban cause.

Kandahar province was where the Taliban first emerged in the 1990s
under the leadership of Mullah Omar, the one-eyed preacher whose
hardline Islamist vision for Afghanistan still has strong support
in the area. However, unlike the rural areas surrounding it, the
city of Kandahar is supposed to be firmly under Afghan government
and Nato control.

Sarposa Prison was until now one of the showcase development projects
for the Canadian government, which is one of only four countries
that has a sizeable troop contingent in Taliban-infested southern
Afghanistan, along with the British, Americans and Dutch.

Canadian prison officials were sent to train guards and teach them
about human rights, until now a largely unheard of concept within
the Afghan penal system.

Their funding of the jail programme is just a tiny part of the
mounting bill that foreign governments have incurred through their
efforts to support Afghanistan's fledgling democracy.

Last Thursday, international donors pledged another #10?billion at
a conference in Paris, despite mounting concern that much of the
money is disappearing through corruption and sheer incompetence
within Afghanistan's government.

Yesterday Canadians reacted with dismay at seeing their prison
project in ruins.

"The message this attack sends is that the insurgents can act with
relative impunity even into downtown Kandahar," said Colin Kenny,
the head of the Canadian senate's committee on security and national
defence, and a campaigner for more Nato troops to join the Afghan
mission.

"The other message it sends is to the insurgent rank and file: if
you get captured, we'll get you out."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/2131235/How-Talib
an-sprang-450-terrorists-from-Kandahar's-Sarposa-prison-in-Afghanistan.html

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