Thread: 500 Taliban flee in daring Afghan jailbreak...

Nearly 500 Taliban flee in daring Afghan jailbreak

Apr 25 08:56 AM US/Eastern

Almost 500 Taliban fighters and commanders escaped from a prison in an audacious jailbreak in southern Afghanistan which the government admitted Monday was a security "disaster".

The Taliban said it sprung the inmates out of the prison in Kandahar through a one-kilometre tunnel that took five months to dig, and claimed all those who escaped belonged to the militia, including over 100 commanders.

The daring breakout in the Taliban's heartland, the second from the prison in three years, threatens to undermine recent gains claimed by NATO forces in the area after a US-led troop surge, just as the annual fighting season begins.

It is also a major embarrassment for Afghan forces who are due to take on greater responsibility for security in their country ahead of the planned withdrawal of foreign combat troops in 2014.

Tooryalai Wesa, the governor of Kandahar, said that 488 people had escaped, the vast majority of whom were thought to be Taliban.

He added at a press conference that intelligence cells and security forces at the prison had "failed in their duties" in not detecting the tunnel, which he later said was a kilometre long.

A total of 26 inmates have now been recaptured and two others were shot dead after resisting arrest by security forces near Kandahar city, Wesa added.

The escapees, who represent over a third of the prison's total population, came from its political section.

Kandahar prison is the largest in southern Afghanistan and holds Taliban captured on nearby battlefields, which are among the country's bloodiest.

An AFP reporter who visited Kandahar prison after the jailbreak said journalists were shown a hole in a cell about half a metre wide and three metres deep which officials said was the mouth of the tunnel.

Clothes and personal belongings were scattered nearby, apparently abandoned by inmates before they made their escape.

Confirming the breakout, President Hamid Karzai's spokesman Waheed Omer described it as a "disaster".

"This is a blow, it's something that should not have happened," he said.

"We're looking into finding out what exactly happened and what's being done to compensate for the disaster that happened in Kandahar."

Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi said the Islamist militants were responsible for the mass breakout, which took place over several hours.

A separate Taliban statement said they had started digging the tunnel from a nearby safe house five months ago and that it passed under several government checkpoints and a major highway.

Prisoners at the jail are kept in communal cells and have some freedom of movement.

"They started getting out of the prison at 11:00 pm (1830 GMT) last night and by early morning today, 541 prisoners escaped the prison," Ahmadi said.

"They all have made it safe to our centres and there was no fighting."

Foreign forces say they made significant gains in Kandahar during 2010 amid a US troop surge announced the previous year which focused on the south.

But the jailbreak could provide the Taliban with a fresh injection of commanders and fighters at the start of this year's fighting season, which Western officials see as a critical test of their efforts to end the war.

In 2008, around 1,000 prisoners including members of the Taliban escaped from the same jail after militants used a truck bomb to blow open the gates.

The jailbreak is the second major security breach in Afghanistan in a week. Last Monday, three soldiers died when an attacker dressed in a military uniform got inside the defence ministry in Kabul.

And 10 days ago, the Kandahar police chief was killed by a Taliban suicide bomber dressed in police uniform, dealing another serious blow to security in the province.

Western analysts say Afghanistan's prison and justice system is riddled with corruption.

In a report last November, the International Crisis Group said the Afghan justice system was "in a catastrophic state of disrepair" and that most Afghans thought justice institutions were the most corrupt in the country.

There are around 130,000 international troops in Afghanistan, two-thirds of them from the United States, battling the Taliban and other insurgents.

Limited withdrawals from seven relatively peaceful areas are due to start in July ahead of the planned end of foreign combat operations in 2014.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id ... _article=1

Some of the escapees were Taliban commanders

April 25, 2011

Taliban's 'Great Escape' frees hundreds of prisoners

Rick Moran

Real life imitated art in Afghanistan's troubled Kandahar province as the Taliban took a page out of Steve McQueen's playbook, dug a tunnel underneath an Afghan prison where hundreds of high value detainees were being held, and 478 prisoners waltzed out of jail -- free men due to the incompetence of Afghan security forces.

Hard to overstate the disaster this is. Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/ ... O420110425

Hundreds of prisoners escaped from a prison in Afghanistan's south on Monday through a tunnel dug by Taliban insurgents, officials said, a "disaster" for the Afghan government and a setback for foreign forces planning to start a gradual withdrawal within months.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai's chief spokesman said the incident, in which many Taliban commanders were said to have escaped, exposed serious vulnerabilities in the Afghan government.

"This is a blow, it is something that should not have happened ... We are looking into finding out ... what exactly happened and what is being done to compensate for the disaster that happened in the prison," spokesman Waheed Omer told a news conference.

"It shows a great vulnerability in the Afghan government."

Tooryalai Wesa, governor of volatile southern Kandahar province, told Reuters 478 prisoners escaped due to the negligence of Afghan security forces at the province's main jail. He said the start of the tunnel had been traced to a house near the prison.

The Steve McQueen movie - The Great Escape - was a dramatized account of allied POW's digging a tunnel to freedom for 76 men - most of whom were eventually recaptured (50 escapees were murdered by the Gestapo.) The Taliban had considerably more success and few of the prisoners will probably be recaptured.

It is even money that the prisoners had help from some in the Afghan army who were guarding them. That kind of corruption is common place in a country that continues to show it is unworthy of the expenditure of treasure and blood by the US military.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/201 ... es_hu.html