The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (69 page)

“We released all the prisoners, including 450 Taliban, we killed most of the guards, and we blocked the roads into the city so that our fighters could escape,” Qari Yusuf Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman for southern Afghanistan, announced to the press. “This was our first attack in the very heart of Kandahar, and this is a signal to the puppet government of Hamid Karzai and the infidel government of the West that they should not forget the Taliban.”

Supporters of the Canadian involvement in Afghanistan were disheartened by the success of the Taliban operation. “The message this attack sends is that the insurgents can act with relative impunity even into downtown Kandahar,” said Colin Kenny, the head of the Canadian senate’s committee on security and national defence. “The other message it sends is to the insurgent rank and file: if you get captured, we’ll get you out.” The facility was rebuilt as a result of the raid, with several million dollars spent to ensure that there were no further breaches of security. Three years later, Sarposa prison was the cause of fresh embarrassment for the Coalition.

The Iraqi city of Tikrit was the scene of another mass breakout, with 109 prison officials and guards detained after sixteen prisoners were able to escape from a bathroom window in a palace that used to belong to Saddam Hussein. Just before midnight on 24 June 2009, they pried open the window and made their getaway down a twelve-foot-high concrete wall before the guards noticed. Although the police didn’t believe that any of the guards were actively complicit in the escape, there “was great negligence” on their part.

House-to-house enquiries located two of the missing men and military working dogs were provided by the US Army to assist with the search. Five of the prisoners had links to al-Qaeda, and all of these were recaptured along with at least two others (one Iraqi news source suggested that all bar four were eventually caught). The location of the prison was moved to Tasfirat.

Such escapes weren’t uncommon. In November 2009, thirteen inmates, including three key Taliban commanders, tunnelled out of the facility at Farah Prison; nine workers at the jail were arrested in connection with the breakout. Only one of the fugitives was recaptured, who revealed that the tunnel had taken ten days to dig, and they had hoped to empty the prison, which housed around 300 detainees, even though it was only designed to hold eighty.

Twenty-three suspects were able to get through a brick wall in Mosul, in northern Iraq on 2 April 2010 between being served breakfast at 6 a.m. and midday lunchtime. They had begun work the previous day, but used a blanket to cover the hole in the wall. The guards had noticed that it was unusual, but not taken any action, and as a result found themselves under suspicion.

Farah was the site of another jailbreak on 17 July 2010 which took a leaf out of the Kandahar Taliban’s book. At 11 p.m., a suicide bomber attacked a police patrol but was killed before he could explode his device; police therefore rushed to the scene. An hour later, the Taliban attacked four security checkpoints, diverting police further. Then at 3 a.m., they blew up the prison gate; at the same time Taliban prisoners blew the locks off their cells using explosives that had been smuggled into the jail. One policeman was killed and four inmates were injured by the explosions. At least fourteen prisoners were able to get away.

Six months later, on 14 January 2011, twelve militants linked to the Sunni insurgent group, the Islamic State of Iraq, simply walked out of a prison in Basra in southern Iraq. They took the precaution of obtaining police uniforms first, but had no problems in passing the prison guards. They were the only prisoners held there, so one might have expected them to be spotted. In a statement of the obvious, Ali Ghanim al-Maliki, head of the security committee at Basra’s provincial council, said, “Of course, there was collusion from within the compound, but we do not know who is involved at the moment.” None of the guards was charged with any offence.

(According to a Reuters report of this incident, the militants were smuggled out by one of the guards who claimed there was an order to transfer them to another prison. This may, however, have been conflating accounts with an escape from Karkh prison in Baghdad in the summer of 2009, when the warden drove the insurgents out of the facility, which was referenced in local reports of this escape.)

April 2011 however, saw one of the biggest propaganda coups for the Taliban, when nearly 500 prisoners were released after the Mujahadeen were able to tunnel their way into Sarposa prison, the supposedly escape-proof jail in Kandahar. Despite the millions lavished on it, it wasn’t as impregnable as the Coalition believed – Afghan president Hamid Karzai described the escape as a “disaster”.

At around 4 a.m. on 25 April, the Governor of Kandahar, Tooryali Wisa, was notified that around 487 Taliban prisoners, including some of their senior commanders, had escaped. For five months a team of eighteen men had dug a tunnel that stretched over a thousand feet, seven feet underground, beneath the main Kandahar-Herat highway. It was five feet high, with battery-powered lights, and small fans providing air.

According to an account of the escape in the Arabic-language magazine
Al-Somood,
the Mujahedeen involved in the digging rented a house opposite the south corner of the prison, and refitted a room within the building, bringing in various concrete-making machines. At night they dug, and moved the dirt out in wheelbarrows attached to children’s bicycles, and then sold the soil. They hit a snag when they realized that they hadn’t been digging on a true course towards the prison – so they downloaded a map off the internet! They needed to bring people out from two separate locations, so they first dug to the arrest room, and confirmed that they were on target by raising a blade into the room through the dirt floor. They then continued the tunnel onto the main room, which held over 500 prisoners. When they had ascertained that they were in the right place (having first tried to come up a room early!), they passed the word to their contacts within the prison that the escape would be happening that night.

Four Taliban Mujahedeen went down the tunnel taking carjacks and solid iron poles to break through the floor. The arrest room was easy to access, but the floor of the political ward was heavy-duty concrete, and it took some time for them to break through it. However, once they had cut a huge hole, they passed guns and daggers up to the three inmates who had been aware of the tunnel’s existence. They then went from cell to cell, inviting their comrades to join the escape. Some of these were freed from their cells with keys provided by “friends” within the prison, and around a third of the prison population made their way slowly along the tunnel over a four-and-a-half-hour period. Fresh clothes were waiting for them at the far end, as were vehicles to disperse them around the area. The Taliban claimed that they had a “martyrdom-seeking group” on standby in case there was any difficulties with the guard, but they weren’t needed. According to them, 541 prisoners escaped; the operation cost around $20,000.

The first that the authorities knew of it was when a guard came on duty the next morning to find a completely empty building. Information on the escape had deliberately been kept to a minimum within the prison, to avoid any betrayal – the Taliban noted that known informers were knocked out during the escape.

Sixty-five of the prisoners were quickly caught, with a further two killed while resisting arrest. The majority, however, were quickly able to rejoin the fight. As one of the escapers told the press, “We had the full support of the people of Kandahar, who provided us with clothes and safe places to go. We have proved that whatever we want to do in Kandahar or anywhere else in the country, we can do it.”

The Taliban didn’t confine audacious plans to Iran and Afghanistan; in the early morning of 15 April 2012, hundreds of militants attacked the prison in Bannu, in north-west Pakistan. For more than two hours, they laid siege to the prison, entering the complex in at least fifty cars and pickup trucks, and throwing grenades. They were able to free 384 of the 944 inmates, including twenty-one who were on death row – although the authorities weren’t exactly sure who, to begin with, since the Taliban destroyed the prison records during the attack. According to a BBC report, the guards called for help, but no one came for more than an hour and a half. Around a hundred of the escapees turned themselves in.

A couple of months later, on 7 June, the Taliban set off a bomb outside a prison in the northern Afghan province of Sare-Pol, which destroyed the walls. Prisoners promptly started to make their way out, although, for once, the guards were being attentive, and opened fire. Three inmates were killed in the subsequent gun battle, and many were quickly recaptured, although around fourteen evaded arrest. The Taliban claimed that 170 prisoners were freed. Sar-e-Pol police chief Abdul Yaqoob Zabuli and prison director Colonel Mohammad Aslam were both sacked the next day.

Fifteen Afghan field commanders who had been sentenced to death escaped from the Pul-e-Charkhi Prison, east of Kabul on 20 August. According to a report in the Russian press, “a large group of death-row prisoners ‘vanished’ from the third cell of the sixth block of the penitentiary”. However, a couple of days later, the authorities said that there had been an attempted escape, but it was foiled by the guards. “To respect Eid, we wanted to provide a facility for the prisoners to congratulate each other during the Eid days and we opened the doors of the cells,” the Central Prison Directorate Chief General Amir Mohammad Jamshid explained. “Taking advantage of this, eight prisoners managed to reach the prison yard but they were then identified and detained by the security guards.”

Suicide bombers paved the way for another Taliban attack, this time at Tasfirat prison in Tikrit on 27 September, killing sixteen guards and freeing around 102 inmates. A plan to free prisoners the previous April had been foiled, but this time a group of gunmen was ready to storm the prison to liberate their comrades. They also destroyed personnel files, and stole papers which identified informers. Weapons had been brought into the prison during family visits, and the authorities were certain that some warders had deliberately left some locks open. Twenty-three prisoners were caught within twenty-four hours of the raid.

Sources:

Washington Post,
24 August 2005: “In Iraq Jail, Resistance Goes Underground”

New York Times,
14 June 2008: “Taliban Free 1,200 Inmates in Attack on Afghan Prison”

Daily Telegraph,
15 June 2008: “How Taliban sprang 450 terrorists from Kandahar’s Sarposa prison in Afghanistan”

New York Times,
25 September 2009: “Qaeda Members Escape Prison in Iraq”

CNN, 26 September 2009: “Death row Iraqis among 8 escapees recaptured”

Washington Post,
28 November 2009: “Inmates escape prison in western Afghanistan”

New York Times,
18 July 2010: “Prison Break Precedes Afghan Conference”

BBC News, 14 January 2011: “Iraq seeks militants after Basra jail breakout”

Reuters, 14 January 2011: “Twelve insurgents escape from prison in Iraq’s Basra”

IraqiNews.com
, 7 July 2011: “Judiciary had not charged any officer with Basra prison escape last year, official says”

Christian Science Monitor,
25 April 2011: “Taliban tunnel: Five prison escapes in Iraq, Afghanistan”

Daily Telegraph,
25 April 2011: “Hundreds of Taliban escape from Kandahar jail”

The Guardian,
25 April 2011: “Taliban tunnel breakout outwits Afghan jailers”

The Guardian,
25 April 2011: “Afghanistan’s great escape: how 480 Taliban prisoners broke out of jail”

Daily Mail,
25 April 2011: “500 Taliban prisoners freed through Great Escape-style tunnels in Afghanistan”

al-Šumid
(Steadfastness), 5th year, volume 60, Jumada al-Thaniya 1432AH/May-June 2011} “Kandahar Prison Escape: the Taliban’s Tale” (translated at
http://www.alexstrick.com/2011/05/kandahar-prison-escape-the-talibans-tale/
)

CNN, 15 April 2012: “384 prisoners escape after Taliban raid on Pakistan prison”

BBC News, 15 April 2012: “Militants free hundreds in attack on Pakistan jail”

AllVoices News, 15 April 2012: “Nearly 400 prisoners fled Bannu jail after Taliban’s pre-dawn raid”

Associated Press,
8 June 2012: “Fourteen criminals, Taliban militants escape prison in N Afghanistan”

Tolonews,
22 August 2012: “Authorities Deny Pul-e-Charkhi Prison Break Saying Guards Foiled Attempt”

A spot-check of Google News on 28 November 2012 reveals that in New Orleans the day before, a trio of prisoners were recaptured after injuring themselves on razor-wire during their flight. Dozens of prisoners escaped from Tete Provincial Prison in Mozambique on Sunday 25 November, after sabotaging the electricity supply and plunging the compound into darkness. Three inmates went on the run from Kamfinsa prison in Zambia the same day. A week earlier in India, four remand prisoners stabbed a warder, scaled the Kochi prison wall and escaped. Around the same time, in Jackson County, Oregon, a convicted bank robber was able to stand on another prisoner’s shoulders, remove some metal mesh from a roof covering, and jump into a nearby tree. The trees have been cut down; despite a $6,000 reward there is no sign yet of Bradley William Monical . . .

Even if prisons are built like the ones that John Carpenter envisaged in his movies
Escape from New York
and
Escape from L.A.
(where Manhattan Island and Los Angeles respectively are turned into federal penitentiaries), the men and women incarcerated there will try to escape. As Emmanuel Goldstein said, “The primary obligation of any prisoner is to escape.”

“If someone is determined to escape, it will be difficult to prevent him from doing so without making life virtually impossible for all concerned. There is room for a great deal of research and thought into the main factors which make people want to escape. In many cases a prisoner will make a cold and rational estimate of the position and will then decide whether or not it is worth taking the risk. Perhaps, in that sort of case, we must accept that one needs to watch him like a lynx. If a man is given such a long sentence and in such conditions that he has nothing to hope for, one cannot be surprised if he breaks out.