AT THE FRONT
Three Minutes From Death

BY JIM WOOTEN

We crossed into Afghanistan in the dead of night before Thanksgiving -- accompanied by heavily armed mujahedeen sent by the military commander of Jalalabad and the country's eastern region.

"I thought the Taliban were all gone," I told him when we arrived.

"Not quite," said Haji Zaman, "and also there are bandits."

"How do we tell the difference?"

"The bandits don't kill you," he'd said.

He'd served us dinner at his headquarter-compound -- ropy bread, roasted goat with radishes and fresh lettuce from his garden -- and had promised we could accompany his men to the mountains the next morning to cover either a Taliban surrender or a continuation of the fighting there. Either one was fine with me -- getting close to the war was why we were there -- but I was even more fascinated with the place we were going. It was called Tora Bora, precisely where U.S. and Pakistani intelligence had recently placed Osama bin Laden.

It was a long shot, of course, but one hell of a story, and I was exhilarated enough by the prospects not to have minded sleeping that night on a hard couch in a scabrous little hotel that could find only one room -- and that after an outrageous bribe to the clerk -- for the nine people in our crew.

The place was crawling with reporters, correspondents, cameramen, photographers, engineers, satellite technicians, and translators from all over the world, most of whom were packing that morning, getting ready to leave for Kabul, which was our ultimate destination as well, but not before we had a run down to Tora Bora.

Keith Richburg of The Washington Post was in the lobby, also headed for the capital.

"So," he asked, "what are you guys up to?"

Not much, I lied.

But as it turned out, it was the truth. We kept our rendezvous at Haji Zaman's compound -- on the dot -- only to be told we would not be allowed to go with the mujahedeen to the mountains.

"You promised," I reminded him.

"Too dangerous," he said.

"What about the surrender?"

"No surrender today."

"Tomorrow?"

"Perhaps." He shrugged and disappeared into his house, leaving his aide, an enormous fellow, to tell us that it would also not be possible to provide an escort for us when we traveled on to Kabul.

"You promised," I reminded him.

"Too busy," he said.

"What about the road?"

"The road is perfectly safe."

The hotel was humming when we returned. Satellite dishes were being disassembled and somehow fitted back into their big trucks. Afghan drivers with vans and cars were competing for jobs, haggling with reporters over the price of the trip, arguing with each other about deals already made. A huge, rattletrap bus sat in the portico, crammed to the gills with equipment and gear. Painted in English on its door was "Welcome with Pleases. Good Your Trip." A couple of bellmen were struggling with several huge metal cases, trying to fit them into an already full Land Rover. It was clear that a collective journalistic judgment had been made. For the moment, at least, the story in Jalalabad was over. There would be plenty of room in the inn that night.

We decided to join the crowd. We grabbed a late breakfast, set up the sat-phone, called New York to let them know our plans, and began re-packing the old white bus we'd arrived in. It was no small task. Network news does not lightly go to war. Our contingent consisted of three producers, a two-man camera crew, two translators, the driver, and myself. In addition to our personal paraphernalia -- books and maps, lap-tops and printers, back-packs and bed-rolls, a jacket we'd been asked to deliver to a fellow with Reuters in Kabul -- our cargo included camera, tripod, lights, spare bulbs, microphones and audio-mixers, fuses and batteries and chargers, a hefty generator, boxes of video-tape, satellite video-phone, cases of food and cartons of water, flak-vests and helmets and enough electrical cable and cord to connect Hoboken to Queens, all this leaving precious little space for passengers. We paid the bill and I squeezed into a narrow niche in the rear, slightly nostalgic for my old newspaper days when all I really required was a notebook, a pen, and a few coins for the payphone.

Still, I was right where I wanted to be, and as we pulled out of the hotel driveway, trailing most of the main media convoy but ahead of some of our colleagues, I was pleased to be on the road. We had struck out on Tora Bora but we were three hours from Kabul, a city I knew was overflowing with stories.

For a country almost totally destroyed by a generation of war, the highway west from Jalalabad was in surprisingly good condition, narrow but smoothly paved -- for about fifteen miles. After that, it became a rough-and-tumble, rock-and-gravel, wilderness road, thick with dust from passing vehicles. Yet each time the visibility returned, the landscape was breathtakingly stark. Both to the north and the south, beyond desolate plains stretching flatly for miles, dark mountain ranges disappeared into an infinity of shadows. We were following the Kabul River, which, despite three years of drought in most of Aghanistan, was flowing rapidly enough to create occasional crests of whitewater -- and here and there the dun-colored land would suddenly turn green with little oases of new corn and cauliflower, sprigs of young wheat and rice, growing next to tiny villages. Afghan farmers have been famous for centuries as masters of irrigation, a necessity for survival in such a barren land.

I yelled up to Tim Manning, our South African cameraman. "You see anything you like," I told him, "stop the bus and shoot it."

"Anything?"

"Beauty shots," I said. "Or ugly shots. Whatever."

He was busy teaching James, the British sound-man, how to talk dirty in Afrikaans -- but in a moment, he asked the driver to stop, left the bus, shouldered his camera and began filming a group of young girls trying to persuade a half-dozen camels to move in a direction they clearly did not wish to go. The girls eventually prevailed and headed off with their charges, gradually diminishing in the distance, finally disappearing over a hill.

Wonderful, I thought. I had no idea how I would use it in a story but I knew I would damn well try.
 
Several cars passed us, going toward Kabul, and the dust they kicked up forced Tim to stop shooting for a moment. He spotted a man dragging a recalcitrant goat toward his herd and rolled a few frames on that. When he finished, we climbed back onto the bus and resumed our journey.

It was about to end.

A few miles farther on, a car suddenly appeared, heading toward us at high speed. The driver's arm was out the window, waving frantically, apparently flagging us down. As we passed, I saw him draw his finger across his throat. He skidded to a stop, leaped from the car and began running after us.

We shouted to our driver to stop. Gasping for breath, the man from the car yelled through the windows. "Ambush! Ambush!" he screamed. "They killed five journalists! Turn around! Turn around!"

There were four dead, not five, but Khalid Kazziha, a cameraman from Lebanon, had quite probably saved our lives. We were three minutes behind the victims' cars, and had Tim not decided to film the little girls and the camels, we would have been ten minutes ahead.
 
Back at the hotel that afternoon, most of those who had left earlier had returned and heard three Afghan witnesses -- a translator and two drivers -- recount the grim details.

Several men armed with assault rifles had stopped two cars in the convoy on a bridge near a village called Tangi Abrisham, some fifty miles from Kabul. In the first one were Harry Burton, a Reuters cameraman from Australia; Azizullah Haidari, a Reuters photographer from Pakistan; the translator, and the driver. Maria Grazia Cutuli, an Italian reporter for Corriere della Sera, and Julio Fuentes of El Mundo were in the second, along with their driver. The men shoved their weapons through the windows, ordered the Afghans out and told them to leave, warning them not to assist Western journalists again, not to drive them to Kabul or help them in any way. "If you think the Taliban are finished," said one of the men, "you are wrong. No one can destroy the Taliban."

The journalists were dragged from the cars and ordered to walk into the nearby hills. When they resisted, the men began pelting them with large rocks and stones, then beat them savagely with the butts of their guns. The three Afghans fled but, hearing a volley of gunfire, looked back over their shoulders and saw their passengers lying motionless on the road. Khalid, the AP cameraman, arrived and also saw the bodies. The four of them began warning approaching vehicles -- and Khalid drove back toward Jalalabad to intercept others, including us.

After the witnesses had told their stories, a delegation of reporters went to the offices of the provincial governor, Haji Quedeer, and asked him to send militia to the scene of the ambush to investigate. When he seemed skeptical and reluctant, two of the journalists commandeered an ambulance from the local hospital and set out on their own. The governor finally dispatched several pick-up trucks of mujahedeen, but so late in the afternoon that there was no possibility they would arrive at the scene before dark. In any case, they turned back and the reporters in the ambulance were refused permission to go much beyond the end of the good road. Too dangerous, they were told. There were snipers in the hills, firing down on passing vehicles.

There were several reports that passengers in cars and buses arriving in Jalalabad from Kabul had seen the bodies in the road -- and that is where they remained through the night.

Haji Zaman's aide came to the hotel to say that he believed the ambush had taken place beyond the boundaries of the commander's authority. Haji Quedeer later appeared and told the journalists he did not really believe there were any bodies. (The governor is the brother of Abdul Haq, a legendary hero of the resistance to the Soviet occupation and a potential political power in the country. Haq was lured from Pakistan into Afghanistan by the Taliban and assassinated in mid-October.)
 
I told the story on video-phone to our morning broadcast, then began putting together a piece for that evening. With ten hours' difference in time to New York, and five hours to London, British and American correspondents, print and broadcast, had plenty of time before their late deadlines. Several ate dinner in the hotel restaurant, among them Tim Weiner of The New York Times, a veteran of Afghanistan's violence. "It's unthinkable for Westerners or anybody else to drive that road without security," he said. "It's only luck if you get through without getting into trouble."

The satellite dishes had returned and were up and running by each evening and we transmitted a story that included pictures of the road shot by Tim during his interlude with the little girls and the camels, a few words from the witnesses and the reporters who'd tried to find the bodies -- and an on-camera closing in which I suggested that although the deaths were a grievous loss to the journalistic fraternity, Afghans for whom such violence is commonplace had hardly blinked an eye.

The bodies were finally recovered on Tuesday afternoon and driven to the border the next morning. I had spent the night there and watched their arrival. As a dozen men from the Khyber Rifles, a regiment raised by the British in 1878, formed an honor guard, a pair of Red Cross ambulances drove slowly through the frontier gates and stopped. The rough pine coffins were unloaded from each and hefted up into the empty chamber of a refrigerated truck. The lids were loose, the nails still showing, not completely driven. I wandered over to a gray van that had come with the ambulances. In the back were four pieces of luggage and a pile of gear and equipment, including expensive cameras and lenses belonging to Aziz. On the back seat was Harry Burton's Ikagami video camera, untouched and undamaged, worth at least $75,000.

I remembered Haji Zaman's words.

"The bandits won't kill you," he had said.

I remembered his aide's assurance.

"The road is perfectly safe."

I remembered that the fleece jacket we were carrying belonged to Harry.
Three reporters had been killed previously when the Northern Alliance armored personnel on which they were riding was attacked by the Taliban. They were, by any definition, like thousands of others, military and civilian, casualties of the war. The four who died on the road to Kabul were, by any definition, the latest victims of terrorism, although all of them were clearly willing to accept the risks of their assignment. There is perhaps some comfort in knowing that no journalist goes into harm's way involuntarily. No media organization, including my own, would dare send its people in without their consent -- and those who do go in believe their survival depends not merely on their skills, their instincts and their experience, but ultimately on their stars.
Three minutes and the kids with the camels.
 
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Jim Wooten is the senior correspondent for ABC News.