After a nightmare of some three months duration, Peter Bunch and Diana Thomas (Australia), Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer (USA), Georg Taubmann, Katrin Jelinek, Margrit Stebner and Silke Durrkopf (Germany) are safe. Personally I did not have hope that any, let alone all of them would live through the war. I am ecstatic to be so absolutely and totally wrong.
Although it was American Special Forces who extracted them, according to CNN it was the Northern Alliance who rescued them:
Taubmann said the eight were freed from the prison by anti-Taliban forces. “The Massood people came, and others from the alliance, and broke into the prison and just opened the doors … We were really scared, and then the alliance people came in … and we were free and we got out of prison and we walked through the city and the people came out of their houses and hugged us and greeted us, and they were all clapping …
We should note that far from hating them for being citizens of western coalition nations, the people of Ghazni were happy to see them safe and out of the hands of the hated Taliban. Far from gaining the enmity of the people of Afghanistan as many in the media would lead you to believe, they see us a friends taking common cause with them. We have both suffered terribly from the Taliban and their al Qaeda friends. The Afghans even more so than us.
I think if Afghans are the least bit angry at us, it is over one question only:
“What took you guys so long?”
