'They took our sons and daughters'

Hezeeba Gul is angry and heartbroken. The elderly woman sits slumped against a wall in a school run by the Afghan Women's Council. Spitting with rage and wailing in grief, she has just arrived after crossing the mountainous frontier from Afghanistan into Pakistan and she nurses a swollen knee, the result of a thrashing from a Taliban youth. Her husband has been forced to stay behind.

She fled her home in Wardak, near the Afghan capital Kabul, when it was damaged by an American bomb. But her anger is reserved for the Taliban and the "Arabs and other foreigners" - by whom she means Osama bin Laden's Arab, Pakistani and Chechen followers in his al Qaeda terrorist group. Among their many crimes against her she rates most highly the use of her husband, Ahmed Razaq, 70 as a "hostage".

The Taliban gave him a gun and ordered him to fight, says Hezeeba, who guesses her age at about 60. "They told him directly - if we die, you die," she says. "Now I guess he's sitting at home with a gun and no food.

"Nobody wants them. We don't know who Osama bin Laden is, we don't know Mullah Omar [the Taliban's supreme leader]. They say we are safe with them, but what kind of a system cuts the hands and legs off thieves and forces men to grow long beards?"

Surely she feels some anger towards the Americans? "They are bombing us, yes. But it's the Taliban's fault. They brought this danger to us," she says with a dismissive sweep of her arm.

Zorhana, who sits silently nearby, nods her head. We discover later that she accidentally killed her baby boy when diving for cover from a US bomb.

"Three of my sons have been killed fighting," says Hezeeba. "The last, Bibi Malakar, was forced to fight the 'jihad' against the north. They brought his body back three weeks after he went, and walked away without a word." Her eyes redden and tears begin to flow, then she coughs and continues.

"I fled to the border at Torkham. But when we arrived the Taliban would not let us leave. Young men with rifles rushed into the crowd and beat us with sticks, they hit me on the knee and forced us all back to Kabul. We escaped again, but only by walking through the mountains and that's why my knee is a mess.

"The first time they beat me was a year ago when I was on my way to hospital to get a small piece of a shell removed from my stomach. My hands were showing, so they whacked them. They are lunatics and don't understand about respect for elders."

At the same time, she continues, her son Zmari, aged 15 or 16, was smashed in the face by a Taliban because his hair dropped on to his forehead. "He had to come to Pakistan for treatment. We're running from the Taliban as well as the Americans."

She tells of how people in Kabul and Wardak have been ordered on to the streets to chant anti-Pakistan slogans and burn effigies of George Bush.

"They want us to call for jihad, but they don't understand Islam. They are double-dealers. The Arabs don't belong here. They just beat us and try to marry our daughters. Thank God I married my three off to Afghans. It's the only way to protect them." Another woman, Shazia, who says she's "about 35" joins in from among about 50 women being given medical care and food supplies after their flight from the bombing and to freedom from the Taliban.

"I could come here with my husband, Ahmed. He lost an arm fighting in the Mujahideen [against Soviet occupation which ended 10 years ago] so they didn't need him for their jihad," she says. "But they took my son, Ali Ahmad. He had just got married. They arrived three weeks ago and took him away for their war."

The Taliban make much of their deeply held Islamic values. She is having none of it. "They beat us if we went shopping without men with us, they beat us if we worked the fields. But their stealing has been the worst.

"Our neighbours in Kabul, Shakeer and Salim, ran away after the bombing started. When they went, the Taliban or the Arabs, whatever they are they are the same, came to their house and took everything."

Then Shazia and Hezeeba break into a denunciation of women's treatment at the hands of the "Arabs", the 10,000 Bin Laden followers who are part of al Qaeda. "They are not part of our culture and they look down on us," says Shazia, throwing back her allenveloping burkha robe in defiance. "They think we can be bought and sold like donkeys.

"They come to our homes and give families who are starving money for the girls to marry them. Usually, the girls come home divorced after the Arabs have finished with them. They are ruined.

"Or they take them back to their homeland, use them, and send them back," says Hezeeba. Whatever the truth behind these allegations, there is no doubting the contempt these Afghan women have for their oppressors.

"The Taliban have denied women and girls any chance of education," says Hezeeba.

At this point Nafisa Ahmed Zai, 21, joins the group. She is the eldest of five children whose father lost both legs in a landmine explosion. Their mother "suffers psychological disorders". Neither parent could work, and so it fell to Nafisa, who has a degree from Kabul's College of Administration and Economics, to provide for her family.

"Two years ago I was beaten because I was laughing with my mother on a bus," she says. "But the worst that happened was that I could not work using my qualifications. Women are not allowed out to work, so I could not provide for my family until I got an illegal cleaning job in the house of a businessman.

"I had to sneak out to work, and sneak back to my family. My little brothers did the shopping. Being a woman under the Taliban is like being a prisoner, subjected to permanent humiliating punishment from illiterates who want to turn the world back 1,000 years or more.

"Here in Pakistan, we have freedom at least. Now I can look for a job, teaching maybe. I want to care for my family. We're staying with friends in their house, but they cannot feed us. We didn't want to leave, but the American bombing and the Taliban made life impossible, so we came here - it took three weeks to push my father from Kabul to Khost into South Waziristan."

Zorhana has been silent until now. She agrees the Taliban are dreadful. She suffered firsthand for the sins of Bin Laden.

First, Jalalabad where she worked a small farm with her husband Janara, was bombed. They fled to the border but were turned back. Somehow she lost contact with Janara, and returned to find their home, which was close to a Taliban check- point, reduced to rubble.

"We fled into the mountains to come to Pakistan," she says. "We had been walking for about three hours when another bomb came down. I was terrified and fell on the ground with my son Jamal in my arms and my two small children at my side. When we got up, Jamal was dead. I killed him. He was a month old."

The rest of the group falls silent. Zorhana, whose two other children are aged two and three, continues in a slow, steady monotone. "I carried my dead child to Pakistan. Now I live with friends but they have nothing and I am ashamed to take from them. I need to feed my children. That's why I came to Fatana Gailani [director of the Afghan Women's Council].

"I think of my husband and what is happening to him every day. Please, you have to stop the bombing. It's just the poor people who die. It was my son, not the Taliban who died. Is there no way to find peace for us? For my children?"

With that, the small group breaks up. The women sigh in unison, collect hand-outs of beans, flour and cooking oil, and step back on to the crowded streets of Peshawar.