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The cars, minibuses and armored vehicles the CIA used to wage its shadow war in Afghanistan had been lined up and cremated beyond identification before the Americans left. Beneath their ash-gray remains, pools of molten metal had solidified into permanent shiny pools as the blaze cooled.
The fake Afghan village where they trained paramilitary forces linked to some of the worst human rights violations of the war had been slaughtered on its own. Only a high concrete wall still stood above the piles of mud and crumpled beams, once used to train for the widely hated nighttime raids on civilian homes.
The vast ammunition depot had exploded. Many ways of killing and maiming human beings, from rifles to grenades, mortars to heavy artillery, arranged in three long rows of double-height sea containers, have been reduced to twisted metal shards. The explosion of the huge bang, which came shortly after the bloody bombardment at Kabul airport, rocked and terrified the capital.
All were part of the CIA compound which, for 20 years, was the dark and secretive heart of America’s “war on terror,” a place where some of the worst abuses to poison the mission in Afghanistan were to be found.
The sprawling hillside compound, spread over three square kilometers northeast of the airport, became infamous early in the conflict for torture and murder in its “Salt Pit” prison, named Cobalt by the CIA. The men held there called it the “black prison” because there was no light in their cells, the only occasional illumination coming from the headlamps of their guards.
It was here that Gul Rahman died of hypothermia in 2002 after being chained to a half-naked wall and left overnight in freezing temperatures. His death prompted the first formal CIA directives on interrogation under a new torture regime, eviscerated in a 2014 report that found the abuses did not provide useful intelligence.
The base has been for two decades a well-kept secret, visible only on satellite photos, covered by the testimonies of the survivors. Now the Taliban special forces have entered and recently, briefly, opened the secret complex to reporters.
“We want to show how they wasted all these things that could have been used to build our country,” said Mullah Hassanain, a commander of the elite 313 Taliban unit, who led the tour of the destroyed complexes and torched, “” and cremated cars, buses and military armored vehicles.
Taliban special forces include suicide bombers who recently marched through Kabul to celebrate the capture of the capital. Vehicles now bearing their official “suicide squad” logo escorted journalists around the former CIA base.
It was a grimly ironic juxtaposition of the most cruel and ruthless units on both sides of this war, a reminder of the suffering inflicted on civilians by all fighters in the name of higher goals, for decades.
“It was martyrdom seekers who were responsible for the attacks against important places of the invaders and the regime. They now control important places, ”said a Taliban official, when asked why suicide squads were escorting journalists and whether they would continue to operate. “It’s a very big battalion. He is responsible for the security of important places. They will be enlarged and better organized. Whenever there is a need, they respond. They are always ready to make sacrifices for our country and the defense of our people.
They planned to use the CIA base for their own military training, Hassanain said, so this brief overview of the complex will likely be both the first and the last time the media is allowed in.
The men guarding it had already transformed into the tiger-striped camouflage of the former Afghan National Security Directorate, the spy agency once tasked with tracking them down.
The paramilitary units operating here, based in barracks right next to the site of the former Salt Pit prison, included some of the country’s most feared, mired in allegations of abuse that included extrajudicial killings of children and victims. ‘other civilians. The barracks had been abandoned so quickly that the men who lived there left the food half-finished, and the barracks’ floors were littered with goods overturned by empty lockers, cleaned in an apparent frenzy.
Most of the time they had taken or destroyed anything with names or ranks, but there were 01 patches and a book full of handwritten notes from weeks of training.
Nearby, the Salt Pit prison site had apparently been razed a few months earlier. A New York Times a satellite investigation revealed that since the spring a cluster of buildings inside this part of the CIA compound have been razed to the ground.
Taliban officials said they had no details of the salt works or what happened to the old prison. Rahman’s family are still searching for his body, which was never returned to them.
Other torture techniques recorded at the site included “rectal feeding”, leading prisoners to bars over their heads and depriving inmates of toilet “privileges”, leaving them naked or wearing adult diapers. .
Construction machinery was abandoned on the site, along with half-poured concrete slabs. Next door, a building that had once been fortified with gates and high-tech equipment had apparently been set on fire, its interior as totally destroyed and burned to ashes as the cars outside.
The destruction of sensitive equipment at the base would have been complex, and there was evidence of several combustion pits where everything from medical kits and a leadership manual were burned, along with larger pieces of equipment. .
Taliban officials were nervous about letting reporters enter areas that had not been officially cleared. They had found several bomb bombs in the rubble of the camp, Hassanain said, and feared there would be none left.
For days, helicopters transported hundreds of people from the base inside the airport, where men from Force 01 – aware they were likely prime targets for retaliation – helped to secure the perimeter in exchange for an evacuation in the last hours, as part of an agreement. struck with the United States.
Nearby, a recreation room with billiards, table tennis, darts and table football collected dust. A box in the corner contained puzzles. It was unclear what the Taliban, once so austere that they even forbade chess, would do with Western military time-out traps.
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