Death on a Hill

By PAUL McGEOUGH
KALAKATA HILLS
Tuesday 13 November 2001
(From The Age Newspaper, Melbourne, Victoria)
Commander Amer Bashir got his prize yesterday morning — he stood atop the Kalakata Hills, which he had been trying to wrest from Taliban control for 14 months.

It came after a bloody night. The Northern Alliance claimed it had killed about 100 Taliban fighters who “fought to the death”, according to an alliance officer. The alliance lost 10 men, with 20 injured.

And for the press corps covering this front in the Afghan war there was a terrible cost too — three, possibly four, dead.

When Bashir tried to claim this vital ridge on Sunday night, reporters jumped on his armored personnel carrier to witness his reward.

We careered off into the darkness of the silenced hill. It seemed that, after a week of sustained US bombing, the tenacious Taliban unit that had taunted Bashir for more than a year had been routed in assaults by the alliance.

After a late afternoon of heavy tank fire and a radio exchange with the alliance leadership, in which Bashir undertook to redeem himself for winning and losing the ridge the previous night, several of his armoured personnel carriers had driven to the top of the hill, pausing to flash their lights back at us in Bashir’s command bunker.

That was at 5.45pm. About 45 minutes later we set out. We arrived at the first line of Taliban trenches. They were abandoned.

In the excitement of the evening, Volker Handloik, a reporter for the German magazine Stern, yelled to me over the roar of the engines: “Have a close look at that – your first Taliban trenches.”

We pressed on, headlights blazing. One hundred metres up the hill it became dramatically and violently clear that the Taliban had not quit the ridge. There was an explosion of fire from three directions. It was a coordinated attack, which they had time to set it up while we were powering across 1500 metres of no-man’s-land.

Later Bashir told me: “I saw a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher being pointed at us from a trench about 25 metres away.”

That was when he doused the lights and ordered the driver to charge down a slope that took us south. Suddenly the carrier, with maybe 20 journalists and soldiers sitting on top of it, was being pelted with fire from PKA guns and Kalashnikov rifles.

The grenade ricocheted off the back of the machine, exploding harmlessly.

The carrier lurched violently, causing some on board to fall off while others chose to jump.

The last I saw of Volker Handloik was his body in full flight, going through what I took to be an expert soldier’s roll so he would land properly when he hit the dirt.

Handloik had been sitting right beside me. But when we returned to the ridge yesterday morning, again on Bashir’s carrier, it became clear what I had seen was his death roll. His body lay in grotesque pose exactly where the carrier track marks had stopped before that violent lurch. He was killed by a bullet to the head. As the carrier ploughed down incredible slopes on Sunday night, I had hung on for grim death. My decision-making was split second, but looking back, I feel as though time stopped, giving me hours to weigh up my options.

Would I stay on the carrier, which itself was a target? Or would I attempt to escape on foot, as Handloik’s interpreter had managed to do.

In the end, I decided that I would stick with Bashir. If he jumped, I would jump.

The carrier charged on, into darkened and unfamiliar territory, until the driver became disoriented. We paused in the hollows, with Taliban tracer fire arcing over our heads, to call out the names of those who no longer were with us.

They were Handloik, aged 35, and French radio journalists Pierre Billaud, 31, who worked for Radio RTL, and Johanne Sutton, 35, who reported for Radio France International.

Those who remained glued to the carrier with me were another French radio reporter, Veronique Rebeynotte of Radio France Culture, and a Canadian reporter whom I know only as Levon.

A few soldiers straggled out of the night. When it was clear that we were lost, they set out on foot to scout for a route back to Bashir’s camp. But not before screeching arguments between the soldiers as to what was the right direction.

The scouts found a rocky river bed that thankfully cut through a deep gully. We made it back to the camp after a nightmare that had lasted 90 minutes. Bashir was confident that the three would be rescued. We had passed dozens of his men in the dark. But then the body of Sutton was brought in with multiple bullet wounds.

The soldiers who had retrieved her body reported that there was another body near where she lay. But they had come under renewed enemy fire, forcing them to abandon their mission. We hit the satellite telephones, calling New York, Berlin and the alliance leadership to see if a US search and rescue mission could be mounted. But the only US visit to this air space on Sunday night was an 11pm bombing run along the length of the ridge. There has to be a measured response to the death of these colleagues.

We are here by choice and we all took the calculated risk of riding off into the night with Bashir. I didn’t really know any of the three, but in this business you instinctively come to rely on some people.

I might have come to rely on Handloik. He was a man of statuesque build, with long golden curls, who strutted peacock-like through the press pack in his green and brown chapan – a coat resembling a dressing-gown worn by the men of Central Asia in winter — flowing behind him.

He was an enthusiastic journalist who was aloof until he had sussed you out. The thaw that followed promised a warm professional relationship.

He had been the first of the reporters to jump up on Bashir’s armoured personnel carrier on Sunday night. While he lay sprawled on the grass after we were attacked, Bashir’s men completed the task of taking the ridge. Their job was done by about 3am yesterday. At first light, Bashir stood in silhouette at the top of the hill as one of his tank commanders chanted his reading from the Koran.

In sign language he told me that Handloik and Billaud were dead and that he was preparing a carrier to retrieve the bodies.

Four of us headed out with him, but this time hundreds of his men could be seen in what had been the Taliban trenches. Taliban dead lay in the trenches, though not as many to support the alliance claim of 100 enemy deaths.

We collected our dead, whose bodies had been looted of all valuables, and headed back.

Already Bashir’s camp was being folded. The alliance was moving to its next battlefront.

Comprehension Questions
Write your responses to the following questions ;

1. Define:
a) corps
b) doused
c) ploughed
d) grotesque
e) calculated

2. What is the main event discussed in the article?

3. Who were the main participants in the event?

4. Who is the author of the article?

5. Why was Commander Bashir happy about what had taken place?

6. How were the press reporters killed?

7. Who was Volker Handloik?

8. What suggested that ‘it was a coordinated attack’?

9. Why would his ‘decision-making (have been) split second’?