How Gizab's Good Guys ran the Taliban out of town

GIZAB, Afghanistan —

The revolt of the Gizab "Good Guys" began with a clandestine 2 a.m. meeting. By sunrise, 15 angry villagers had set up checkpoints on the main road and captured their first prisoners. Their ranks soon swelled with dozens of rifle-toting neighbors.

Gunfights erupted, and a panicked request for help was sent to the nearest U.S. troops, but residents of this mountain-ringed hamlet in southern Afghanistan held their ground. By sundown, they managed to pull off a most unusual feat: They kicked out the Taliban.

"We had enough of their oppression," Lalay, a one-named shopkeeper who organized the uprising, said about the late April battle. "So we decided to fight back."

U.S. diplomats and military officials view the rebellion as a milestone in the nearly 9-year-old war. For the first time in this phase of the conflict, ordinary Afghans in the violence-racked south have risen to reclaim territory under insurgent control.

It is a turnabout that U.S. and Afghan officials were not certain would ever occur. One U.S. commander called it "perhaps the most important thing that has happened in southern Afghanistan this year."

Although Gizab long had been used by the Taliban as a rest-and-resupply area for fighters traveling to Kandahar and Helmand provinces, losing access to the area represents at best a tactical blow for the insurgency. It will not, by itself, change the course of the war.

But U.S. officials say they have heard concern voiced by Taliban commanders on intercepts of telephone conversations. Several rank-and-file fighters, and even a few midlevel leaders, have put down their weapons and reintegrated into the community. Residents of neighboring towns have told Gizab elders that they also want to rise against the insurgents.

"The Taliban thought this place was untouchable, and what the people here showed them — and everyone else — was that they could stand up and break free from that grip," said Brig. Gen. Austin Miller, the top U.S. Special Operations commander in Afghanistan. One of his Special Forces teams moved here after the uprising to train the self-appointed local guardians, whom American troops christened the Good Guys.

The insurrection did not draw immediate attention in Kabul or Washington, D.C., because Gizab is in a remote area largely ignored by the Afghan government and international forces. But as word of the rebellion has trickled out, U.S. and Afghan officials have scrambled to understand how it started and how it can be replicated.

The uprising appears to have been the result of a combination of Taliban overreaching, U.S. encouragement and local resentment.

"We're looking for the patterns," said a State Department official in southern Afghanistan. "If we can find it, we'll be on the verge of a breakthrough."

Taliban "used to be nice"

The first wave of Taliban commanders moved into Gizab in 2007. The residents initially were acquiescent, and unemployed young men in the area were eager to sign up as fighters for hire. Police presence was nonexistent.

Gizab, about 100 miles north of Kandahar, sits at the apex of a capillarylike infiltration network that connects western Pakistan's lawless tribal regions to key parts of southern Afghanistan. Daikundi province is considered so insignificant by U.S. and NATO commanders that fewer than 50 international troops are stationed there. Unlike the rest of Daikundi, Gizab is made up primarily of ethnic Pashtuns, as are the Taliban.

But the Taliban began to wear out their welcome over the past year. They commandeered the health clinic, destroyed the school and started seizing trucks, often to steal cargo or levy taxes.

"They used to be nice to people, but then they changed," said Abdul Rab, a farmer.

The spark for the rebellion was ignited in mid-April, after Lalay received $24,000 in compensation from the Afghan government to distribute to relatives of a dozen villagers killed by a Taliban-planted roadside bomb. A Taliban commander told him to hand over the money, saying it was against Islam to accept funds from the government. "If it is haram" — forbidden — "for me, then it is haram for you," Lalay recalled replying.

The insurgents detained his brother and his father, a tribal leader. Lalay decided to plot the revolt.

He and a few other men had met weeks earlier with members of a Special Forces detachment that has organized young men into armed local defense groups in two towns to the north. In both places, the detachment is funding development projects that have provided much-needed employment.

"We made it clear we would offer them the same things," said the detachment leader, who cannot be named under U.S. military rules.

The kidnapping of Lalay's relatives prompted villagers to act without waiting for the Americans.

But as soon as the villagers set up the first roadblock and captured the first two insurgents, they sent a messenger to the detachment asking for help. A flooded river prevented American troops from coming that day, so a team of Australian special-forces soldiers was sent in by helicopter. When they landed in Gizab, they found Lalay and his men in a full-on firefight with Taliban fighters.

The Australians soon were joined by a different U.S. Special Forces detachment. To tell friend from foe, the Gizab Good Guys were given reflective orange fabric to tie around the muzzles of their rifles.

The fighting subsided by the next day, in large part because a few hundred villagers decided to stand against the insurgents. Lalay's credibility had been enhanced in the eyes of fellow residents because of the way he treated the first three Taliban prisoners.

All three were executed before the Australians arrived.

Talibs "in hiding"

Lalay's force has grown to 300 men. The force conducts foot patrols and operates checkpoints in and around Gizab. The revolt has spread to 14 nearby villages, which each have 10-man defense squads.

The Special Forces detachment that had been based to the north has moved to Gizab, where its members are training the local defenders and watching over them to prevent other extrajudicial killings.

Insurgent attacks and intimidation have ceased. "There are still Talibs in the mountains, but they're in hiding," Lalay said. "They don't dare to come outside and fight us."

The insurgents who have emerged have sought to surrender. This month, a midlevel commander who was an assistant to the Taliban chief in Gizab district asked to be forgiven. "He told me he couldn't do anything else," said Ahmedullah, Lalay's brother.