Fleeing Before The Storm

By Tim McGirk With Reporting by Hannah Bloch/Islamabad and Ghulam Hasnain/Inside Afghanistan

Kandahar had become the most dangerous place on earth. Within hours of hearing on the radio about the suicide hijackers who crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Barasna knew she had to flee. Her town had housed both Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden; surely it would soon be a target of whatever retribution the Americans were planning. "It's suicide to stay here," a neighbor shouted to her as she hurried inside to pack. "Look, even the Taliban are running." A Land Cruiser roared past, kicking up dust, heading for Pakistan. That same night, Barasna, in her early 30s, donned her head-to-toe burqa, or veil, padlocked her house and headed out into the night with her husband, five children and whatever provisions they could carry.

Her family was lucky. They made it across the Chaman crossing before the Pakistanis sealed the 995-mile frontier. But millions more have been turned away, and are hemmed in at the border in makeshift, unsanitary camps. Even before Afghanistan became the focus of the U.S. war on terrorism, the country had been in the grip of a crushing famine that had caused hundreds of thousands of Afghans to flee their homes.

Add to that the millions more who have fled afoot, leaving cities and towns before the anticipated U.S. attack, and Afghanistan is in the throes of a humanitarian crisis that could be more devastating than the air strikes to come. Already, more than 2 million refugees are in Pakistan, and a million more are poised to flood in. Some 500,000 may descend on Iran and the Central Asian republics.

The refugees also pose a military obstacle for any U.S.-led coalition. Taliban forces moving about with the multitudes of refugees would be more difficult to isolate without inflicting civilian casualties. The coalition is now struggling with whether to tackle the refugees before a major military campaign, to which Britain is partial, or keeping the focus on capturing Osama bin Laden even if this exacerbates the refugees' problems, which Washington has advocated. Outside Kandahar, the Taliban are stopping families at gunpoint and turning them back from the border road. U.N. officials say the Taliban are letting some women and children through--after they forcibly conscript the men. But few Afghans are willing to wait until the bombs fall before they make their dash to safety. Relief officials have coined a new term for these people, the "internally stuck." And nobody wants to be stuck in a raging war.

--By Tim McGirk. With reporting by Hannah Bloch/Islamabad and Ghulam Hasnain/Inside Afghanistan