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CNN Live At Daybreak
Nic Robertson Reports from Taliban Controlled Compound
Aired October 31, 2001 - 06:27 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: Right now it's 27 minutes after the hour. Right now we want to check in with our Nic Robertson. We have been trying to track him down. He's got a video phone and he's actually been in a Taliban controlled compound on the outskirts of Kandahar, which is in southern Afghanistan, and which has been getting pounded seriously by these overnight air strikes.
Let's check in now with Nic, who is live with us -- hello, Nic. What's the word there?
NIC ROBERTSON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, morning Leon.
It was about 11 hours ago we were woken this morning when a loud explosion went off very close to this compound. It shook the windows, rattled some of the glass out of some windows here. But through today it's been a relatively quiet day in Kandahar. At least some fighter activity over the city, we've heard.
But the Taliban have taken us on a tour of this area and of the city. Now, the Taliban are not allowing us to visit military facilities, but what they are allowing us to do and what they -- and the places they are taking us to are some civilian premises that have been damaged. We were taken this morning to that place that was bombed, the bomb that we heard falling earlier this morning.
There we met a man. It was, his house, he said, had been completely destroyed. It had been virtually reduced to rubble. It had been quite a large building. The building next door had also been damaged.
We said to him, so why was your building targeted? And he said, he told us he had no idea. He said it was not a military facility, anyway, and that he had no idea why it had been targeted.
The Taliban also took us downtown to a ministry building there, in fact, three ministry buildings they showed us that had been completely demolished by bombs right in the center of downtown. One of those buildings belonged to the ministry for religious police, a very feared ministry, a very harsh police force here in Afghanistan.
But, just across the road from there, what the Taliban also wanted to show us was a tailor's store completely demolished and there we talked to survivors of that bomb blast who said that their shop had been completely demolished and that several people had died inside. The Taliban also took us to various other facilities inside and outside of Kandahar -- Leon.
HARRIS: Well, Nic, we have been hearing from the Pentagon here stateside that the Taliban have been either putting some of their military personnel or material in these civilian areas and that that may be an explanation for some of the civilian casualties that have been reported of late.
Now, have you seen any evidence of anything like that there since you've been there on the ground?
ROBERTSON: Certainly, Leon. That has been one of the things that we have been looking for while we were here. One of the things we did see on our travels today was an armored personnel carrier that had been completely destroyed, shot up, we were told, by fighter aircraft. That was in a civilian area.
We also went outside of the city and we saw evidence of what the Taliban say is their effort not to confront the United States forces head on but to disperse their military forces. And what we saw were anti-aircraft guns, armed personnel carriers and other heavy military equipment out in the countryside under trees, up against the mountains, but dispersed, not congregated in central areas.
As far as downtown and military equipment and assets downtown, that's not something that we've been able to see. We have driven around fairly extensively. And probably the other thing to note here, Leon, is that the city appears to be returning to some kind of normality. There is food in the stores. There were plenty of people out on the streets, both this morning and this afternoon, and people here at least now do not appear to be living in fear.
Our staff who have been here for some time say that people are returning to the city now. They say in the first few weeks people were very afraid of the bombing but now they're beginning to return to the city to try and get some normality back into their lives -- Leon.
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