Al Qaeda's mule trail to Pakistan

Upper Pachir is unlike most Afghan villages. Several of the males are plump, and the children look healthy - in contrast to the people just up the road, toward Jalalabad.

Until about a week ago, many of the villagers in Upper Pachir say they were on Al Qaeda's payroll. Some of them worked with sophisticated rock-cutting equipment to carve out caves and tunnels. More recently, some of them say they were instrumental in aiding several hundred Al Qaeda members escape the nightly barrage of US bombing. They helped them slip down on mule back into the Afghan lowlands and move into Pakistan.

A village headman arranged for four mules to ferry our party up the mountain, retracing the smuggling route used by Al Qaeda fighters and their families. Villagers and Al Qaeda operatives say some 600 Al Qaeda members have been smuggled through this mountain trail over the past four weeks.

Our trek began in Upper Pachir - the same village where, at a mud-brick "safe house," a Saudi financier explained last week to the Monitor how Osama bin Laden had, himself, chosen a slightly more difficult, but maybe less treacherous, exit out of Pakistan over the White Mountains and into the Parachinar area of Pakistan. The Saudi had been only one of dozens to pass through the home of a village leader, Makmud, a former Al Qaeda machinegunner, who was not available yesterday, but who other villagers say has helped many Al Qaeda members escape. But another village headman helped arrange our trek.

Marmine Khan, a young man, saddled up the four mules, which were adorned in bright bangles and colorful blankets.

With about 20 villagers running alongside, we crossed a small plain that fed into the parched hills that, while scarred and pitted by Russian and US bombs over the past 20 years, still held their timeless, undulating form.

The first village that we entered moving toward Tora Bora was Garikhil, which had been a stopping-off spot for the fleeing Al Qaeda fighters. It is also the same path that nearly 2,000 Al Qaeda members used to flee to Tora Bora from Jalalabad shortly before it fell. Mr. bin Laden, according to the Saudi financier, had arranged a meeting that night with members of the Ghilzi tribe, whose own villages straddle the Pakistani border.

Hundreds of abandoned trucks left behind by the Arabs in Garikhil have now been stripped by Afghan warlords. At the top of the village, a wooden home had been shattered by an airstrike. Small children played in the rubble as we passed.

As we dipped into another valley and climbed higher into the White Mountains, our guide, Marmine, explained that it was in the next village, Nasar, that Arabs hoping to escape the inferno of Tora Bora most often spent their first night in the "underground railway" out of Afghanistan.

"Of the 600 Arabs who escaped, most of them were men, though there were also 15 complete families, including their children," he said.

Marmine said he was fairly sure of the rough number of 600, because he and his fellow villagers regularly traveled into Tora Bora to get wood for their fires.

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