IT WAS the first night of Ramadan and Abdullah was fast asleep on the soft desert sand by his fuel tanker when he was woken by a cold gun barrel poking into his neck. “Bandits,” he thought with a flash of fear as a pair of knees pinned his chest to the ground.
Blinded by panic, he tried to struggle away before the gun could be fired. But to his surprise, his assailant turned him over roughly and tied his hands behind his back before hauling him off behind a nearby sand dune.
Then, in the moonlight, he caught his first proper glimpse of the attackers. Six American soldiers, all kneeling on the ground, each holding another terrified driver.
Abdullah recognised his friend and co-driver, Habibullah, struggling as a soldier in body armour and nightvision goggles handcuffed him with plastic restraints.
“Their glasses were green and glittering,” Abdullah said, “and they kept talking on the radio.”
The men who descended on the sleeping tanker drivers were members of US special forces, sent into enemy territory to identify targets for aerial attack. A convoy of tankers carrying fuel through Talebancontrolled territory proved to be a prime target.
One of the soldiers began questioning the drivers in what they described as “very bad Persian”.
“He asked: ‘Who are you?’ ” Abdullah recounted. “We said we are drivers. These are our trucks. We are taking fuel from Iran.
“But they said: ‘No, these trucks belong to terrorists and you are providing help to terrorists.’ ” The soldiers then marched them up another sand dune, away from the tankers and began talking into their radios. “They told us: ‘Don’t try to run. We’re going to hit your tankers.’ ”
Minutes later, they heard the sound of helicopter blades cutting through the sky. “We started to panic,” Habibullah recalled. “We couldn’t understand what was going on.”
The helicopters let loose a barrage of rockets on the tankers, which erupted in a huge fireball, lighting up the night sky. One of the soldiers ran forward and let rip a round of automatic machine-gun fire, peppering the side of the tanker.
A week later, the acrid smell of burning fuel still hung in the air over the mangled remains of the tankers in the middle of the desert plain near Tungi village, ten miles from the Pakistani border. Blackened barrels that had once held petrol and paraffin lay scattered around a charred lorry. Bullet-holes perforated the side of one of the tankers.
Near by were the plastic hand restraints that the soldiers had cut from the drivers’ wrists before letting them go free. Abdullah pointed out tyre tracks made by the soldiers’ Humvees and footprints apparently made by rubber-soled boots. The tankers’ owner, a Pakistani businessman, shook his head in disgust as he surveyed the wreckage.
“This is cruel and excessive,” Aktar Mohammed said. “It’s farmers and ordinary people who buy our oil, not the Taleban. In the name of Osama and the Taleban, they are just penalising the common people.”
More than a dozen other oil tankers had been attacked by American special forces in the province in the past two weeks, he said. In most cases the drivers were ambushed and removed just like Abdullah, Habibullah and their workmates. But while their lives were spared, their livelihoods were not. Without the money to replace the tankers, the drivers are out of work. “How will they feed their families now?” Mr Mohammed asked. “What is the point of this?” The Pentagon says the point is to deprive the Taleban of the fuel it needs to fight a war. With most of the Taleban’s military targets now reportedly obliterated, the Americans have turned their attention to cutting off its supply lines.
Earlier this week, the Pentagon showed video footage of a similar operation in which a US warplane obliterated a tanker on the western approach road to Kandahar.
The drivers’ accounts and the evidence on the ground provide a rare first-hand account of special forces operations inside southern Afghanistan, suggesting that units are now active in a large swath of Taleban territory all the way up to the Pakistani border.
As a result, Afghan tanker drivers are adapting to the new realities of war. Before setting off on their journey from the Iranian border, many try to camouflage their garishly painted trucks with branches and tumbleweed found in the desert. Once they would drive all night to make the cross-country journey along the bone-jarring roads in under three days; now, as darkness falls, they draw up to the side of the road and switch their headlights off before bedding down for the night to avoid drawing attention to themselves.
Abdullah is grateful to have escaped with his life, but he gives no credit to the Americans’ efforts to avoid civilian casualties by removing the drivers from the convoy. He believes that a higher force intervened that night, the first of the Muslim holy month, to save him and his friends from the enemy.
“It’s because of the grace of Allah,” he said, “that we are alive today.”