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Read The Village Where Nothing Happened

[Read the next post first - Sing The Village Where Nothing Happened. What follows is the version which I dictated to the copy taker by phone, rather than the edited version eventually printed in the newspaper. There may be small differences.]

Printed in The Independent on 4th December 2001, under the headline, 'A village is destroyed ... and America says nothing happened'

By Richard Lloyd Parry in Kama Ado, Eastern Afghanistan

The village where nothing happened is reached by a steep climb at the end of a rattling three-hour drive along a stony road. Until nothing happened here, early on the morning of Saturday and again the following day, it was a large village with a small graveyard, but now that has been reversed. The cemetery on the hill contains 40 freshly dug graves, unmarked and identical. And the village, so obscure that no one can agree on whether it is called Kama Ado or Mado, has ceased to exist.

Sing The Village Where Nothing Happened

The single newspaper story of which I am most proud was published in The Independent on 4th December 2001. It was a month after the fall of the Taleban, and I was in the Afghan city of Jalalabad close to the border with Pakistan. Anti-Taleban mujahideen, friends of the Americans, were fighting a ragged battle against a remnant of al-Qaeda fighters holed up in the Tora Bora caves in the Spin Ghar mountains to the south. There were a few commandos of the American and British special forces on the ground, but allied support was largely limited to massive air raids on the mountains by B-52 bombers.

I was staying with a group of foreign reporters in a hotel in Jalalabad. Every few hours, the ground shook with the explosion of the massive bombs, 40 miles away. At night the horizon was illuminated with orange fire. We all wanted to go to the mountains to see the battle for ourselves. But the mujahideen, who more or less tolerated us as a necessary and amusing nuisance, said that it was too dangerous.

Then one morning, we were summoned to the Jalalabad residence of one of the mujahideen commanders. I remember arriving there by taxi to see a pick up truck pulled up in the drive. It was full of dead, dusty bodies - young mujahideen fighters in their thin pyjama-like robes and sandals. It was explained that they had been staying in a house, close to Tora Bora which, out of the blue, had been struck by a bomb from one of the B-52s. I remember the face of Haji Zaman, the mujahideen commander as he told us this. He was a hard, sarcastic, unlikeable and wholly untrustworthy man, but as he spoke he seemed to be close to tears.

The same thing happened the next day. Then at the beginning of December, we were told that an entire village had been destroyed by the Americans. From the safety, and relative comfort of our hotel, we reported these claims. They were flatly denied by the Pentagon, in the least ambiguous terms: "it just didn't happen".

We asked once again if we could go down and see for ourselves. Haji Zaman agreed.

Three others went, apart from me: Chris Tomlinson of AP, the photographer Yola Monakhov, and a CNN correspondent whom, for reasons which will become clear, I will not name.