Deep in Taliban country
A reporter embeds with the Taliban to see the brutal evidence of war in Greshk. From IWPR.


I had come to Hassan Khan Kalay with the Taliban. It was the only way of getting there, as this village near Hyderabad in the Greshk district is under their control, and journalists cannot go there without their permission.
The negotiations took about a week. First we called Qari Yusuf, the Taliban spokesman, and he passed us on to others, who referred us in turn to the local commanders.

Finally we got the go-ahead. But our Taliban contact told us on the phone to be very careful about what we filmed and who we talked to in Hyderabad.

"If they don't like what you are doing, you won't live," he said simply.

According to our driver, we were in a place called Gaamash. We could see large numbers of American military vehicles on the desert floor – tanks, armored personnel carriers and jeeps – all of them destroyed, burnt out. There were also oil tanker trucks marooned in the desert.
Meanwhile, our escort, Mullah Khaled, was eager to tell of his exploits.

"When a convoy of British troops was passing this way, I set off a remote-controlled mine," he said. "Three NATO soldiers were killed. The others removed the dead bodies, then put a mine in the vehicle and blew it up."

Khaled said that at one point he had been captured by the British and later released.

"I told them I was just a traveller," he laughed. "Thank God I threw my walkie-talkie away before they got me."
Well we better add that name to "The List"