As governments and human-rights groups debate the conditions for America’s prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, more than 3,000 men are crammed into frigid cells at a remote jail here, far from any publicity.
The men, Afghans and Pakistanis, wrap themselves in thin blankets and huddle against the cold or mill about the unheated concrete cellblocks, where barred windows are open to the freezing winds of the northern Afghan plain.
Many are sick or have festering, unhealed wounds.
The “deplorable conditions” here have caused “epidemic illness and deaths,” the Boston-based group Physicians for Human Rights declared last month, after inspecting Shibergan. Because U.S. forces helped set up the prison, the United States is partly responsible for the conditions at the prison, it said.
The prison warden, Gen. Jurabek, has conceded that conditions are poor. This week, he said 10 to 15 detainees had died, although he did not say when.
“They’re weak,” he said of the prisoners. “They don’t have enough vitamins in their bodies.”
With Afghanistan’s United Nations-backed interim government unable to control the countryside, the local warlords who are the real authorities in their fiefdoms hold unknown thousands of prisoners from the U.S.-led war against the Taliban. The detainees are held in conditions that are almost certainly poor, likely harsh and for the most part unknown.
In recent months, Western journalists and international relief officials have found evidence that some warlords are treating their detainees–notably the Pakistanis–as hostages, holding them for ransom.
At Shibergan, Physicians for Human Rights said U.S. forces helped set up what is one of Afghanistan’s largest prisons and turned it over to a local militia that does not have “the resources to support a prison population of this size.”
In November and December, U.S. intelligence officials and troops were based here, fingerprinting detainees and interviewing them about their histories.
In late December, U.S. troops trucked away those captives–20, according to Jurabek–they wanted for further interrogation.
Those men were flown to Kandahar, and some are believed to have been flown on to Guantanamo Bay.
Because of its role in setting up Shibergan’s prison, “the United States cannot wash its hands of responsibility” for the detainees, said Jennifer Leaning, a doctor and Harvard University professor who was part of the Physicians for Human Rights team that inspected the jail.
Like the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the approximately 3,200 captives in Shibergan, about 2,000 of them Afghans and the remainder Pakistanis, are in a legal limbo. They have not been formally charged with any crime, and it could be months before their fate is determined.
The warlord who controls this prison is Gen. Rashid Dostum, the dominant leader of northern Afghanistan, who holds the title of deputy defense minister in the interim Afghan government.
Officials are trying to distinguish low-ranking Taliban soldiers among the prisoners from “killers and dangerous people” who “must be brought to justice,” Dostum said.
As for how long the process will take, he said: “We will see.”
The men held here were captured in November, when Dostum’s forces and others defeated Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters at the city of Kunduz. Many were sick or wounded when they arrived.
The prison is a mud-walled compound in which three low, concrete cellblocks surround a freezing, muddy courtyard.
Prisoners tell visiting reporters they must sleep sitting on the concrete floors because, with 50 or more men per room, there is not enough space to lie down.
