Northern Alliance fighters surround a slain foreign fighter inside the prison
All of the approximately 800 foreign Taliban volunteers taken to the Kala-i-Jangi fortress were eventually killed in three days of air strikes and ground attacks by U.S. and British special forces and Northern Alliance troops. But in the close-quarters battle, one air strike on Monday turned into a friendly-fire incident, and eyewitnesses told Perry that two American soldiers died in the explosion. U.S. officials assert, however, that no U.S. troops were killed by that misguided bomb; Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said in Washington Monday that five soldiers had been wounded but that none of their injuries was life-threatening.
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The prisoners at Kala-i-Jangi were primarily foreign Taliban volunteers who had surrendered Saturday to the forces of Northern Alliance commander General Rashid Dostum. They had been taken to the fortress outside Mazar-i-Sharif for questioning to determine whether they had links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. On Sunday, the Taliban prisoners overpowered their guards and seized weapons from the fort's armory, taking over the southwest corner and exchanging fire with Northern Alliance soldiers both inside and outside the compound. Two Americans were trapped inside; one of them, CIA officer Spann, was quickly killed, witnesses told TIME's Perry.
Soon after, about a dozen U.S. Special Forces and British Special Air Service troops arrived to coordinate Northern Alliance fire and U.S. air strikes to provide cover for those remaining inside the fort. Six of the Special Forces soldiers took up position in the northeast corner of the compound to act as spotters for the air strikes, while the rest exchanged fire with the Taliban from outside the compound. The remaining trapped American managed to escape over the dirt walls of the fort overnight, while the soldiers who had come to his assistance remained in position.
A stray bomb
Monday morning, a detachment from the U.S. 10th Mountain Division arrived from Uzbekistan. Perhaps in order to prepare the way for an assault by the 10th Mountain, the Americans inside the fort called in an air strike to pound the Taliban position shortly before 11a.m. — with disastrous results. Perry reports that a massive bomb, later identified by officials as a U.S. JDAM smart bomb, missed the Taliban position by around 600 feet, detonating barely 30 feet from the Northern alliance position and almost on top of the spotters who had called in the strike.
The bomb blasted dust and debris hundreds of meters into the air and created a hole in the fort's 60-feet high dirt walls "big enough to drive two or three tanks through," says Perry, who witnessed the attack. The explosion flipped over a Northern Alliance tank, trapping the two soldiers inside, and buried the Americans under rubble. According to eyewitnesses, two American soldiers were killed in the incident. Nik Mohammed, a 24-year-old Northern Alliance soldier, told Perry that he had helped carry one injured and two dead Americans out of the fort. The soldiers were identified by their uniforms as belonging to the Special Forces unit that had been in the fort for the past 24 hours.
A rescue mission
Outside the compound, the American retrieval mission quickly turned into one of rescue, as the 10th Mountain forces drove their seven light vehicles into the fort to evacuate the stricken U.S. and British troops. Northern Alliance commanders were spitting with rage. "Call it off!" shouted one general as Alliance soldiers streamed out of the fort. "Call it off! You've hit the wrong people!" Perry can confirm that at least three Afghan soldiers were killed and four injured by the stray bomb; one Northern Alliance commander put the numbers far higher, at 30 killed and 50 wounded.
Northern Alliance forces, meanwhile, continued to bombard the Taliban fighters with cannon and mortars throughout the day, while the prisoners returned fire. As of late Monday, approximately 50 Taliban still held their corner of the fort, a far cry from the 800-strong group that had surrendered two days before. "It's pretty much a matter of time, at this point," Perry had said Monday. "The Taliban have nowhere to go." A day later, it was all over.