AMY GOODMAN: Renowned British journalist Robert Fisk was severely beaten by a crowd of people in an Afghan village just two days ago, barely escaped with his life. He wrote this just after the incident.

“Some of the Afghans in the little village had been there for years, others had arrived — desperate and angry and mourning their slaughtered loved ones — over the past two weeks. … [W]hat happened to us was symbolic of the hatred and fury and hypocrisy of this filthy war, a growing band of destitute Afghan men, young and old, who saw foreigners — enemies — in their midst and tried to destroy at least one of them.

“Many of these Afghans, so we were to learn,” Robert Fisk writes, “were outraged by what they had seen on television of the Mazar-i-Sharif massacres, of the prisoners killed with their hands tied behind their backs. A villager later told one of our drivers that they had seen the videotape of CIA officers 'Mike' and 'Dave' threatening death to a kneeling prisoner at Mazar. They were uneducated — I doubt if many could read — but you don’t have to have a schooling to respond to the death of loved ones under a B-52’s bombs. At one point a screaming teenager had turned to my driver and asked, in all sincerity: 'Is that Mr Bush?'”

Robert Fisk went on in his Independent piece, “I thought I should write about what happened to us in this fearful, silly, bloody, tiny incident. I feared other versions would produce a different narrative, of how a British journalist was 'beaten up by a mob of Afghan refugees.'”

We were able to reach him on the telephone yesterday to tell his story. I began by just asking Robert Fisk how he was feeling.

ROBERT FISK: Mother of all headaches, as Saddam Hussein might say. But, no, I’m feeling — I’m feeling better. Obviously, at the time, when you see yourself covered in blood, it’s a very disturbing experience, also because you realize that here were people who wanted to hurt you and, indeed, wanted to kill you. You know, it does bring you face to face with the — you know, the reality of the way people feel when they’re — when they feel humiliated and oppressed, I suppose, is the old socialist word, and the way in which — when they feel that they’re being, their families are being killed. You can see the brute force of a whole people who feel that they’re being destroyed by the West, if you like. And obviously, I was, so to speak, the symbol of the West in this incident, and my colleague Justin, to some extent, the — came out to get on the bus, and he tried pull me onto it, a bus where the driver was trying to rescue us.

But I think, as, you know, I wrote in my article in The Independent of London this morning, that if I had been them, if I had been encouraged to fight the Russians with weapons and money from the West, and then ignored, and then endured civil war, and then asked to fight the Taliban, and then had my home bombed by the Americans, and then lost members of my family, I mean, I would try to beat up any Westerner I came across. I’d try to attack Robert Fisk, too.

So, you know, it is impossible for me to feel anger against the people who did this. I mean, they shouldn’t have done it. But that’s not an argument that works in the kind of brutal landscape that we have helped to create out here. So, my overall feeling is that, you know, who can possibly blame them for striking back against the terrible things that happened to them?

AMY GOODMAN: Robert, can you tell us exactly what happened and when it happened?

ROBERT FISK: Yes. It was Saturday afternoon. I was traveling from the border town of Quetta in Pakistan down towards the frontier post at Chaman, towards a mountain chain that runs parallel with Afghanistan. And at a village called Killa Abdullah, which, by great misfortune to us, houses many thousands of Afghan refugees, the boiler started to boil over in the car, the radiator, and steam started to come out of the radiator as the car stopped in the middle of the road, in the middle of this crowded village, full, of course, of angry people, angry, as we learned later, not only because they had lost many relatives in the Kandahar, which is only about 90, 80 miles away as the crow flies from the village, but also because they’d been outraged by the film of the prisoners in Mazar-i-Sharif, most of whom were Pashtuns, as the refugees were in this village. They had seen also the videotape, so we were told later, of the CIA agents Dave and Mike interviewing, or rather interrogating, the Muslim man kneeling on the floor with his hands tied behind his back.

So, obviously, when two Westerners, Justin Huggler and myself, suddenly turned up with a broken car in the middle of the village, we became — well, first of all, actually, we became friends. We went around. People came around the car. We said, “As-salamu alaykum,” “Peace be upon you,” “wa-’alaykum s-salam.” And we shook hands, and people gave us a sort of two-handed handshake. And everything was all right for about a minute. The driver went off to get a new — you know, a fresh car, a taxi. The translator stood next to us.

And then we decided there was too big a crowd. A lot of the men were bearded. They were not smiling anymore. We moved towards the center of the road, very crowded road, because, you see, we had blocked the road when the car broke down. So, a lot of people, a lot of traffic. And let’s just move out of here in the center of the road, get away from the crowd. But the crowd followed us. And as we walked, a little boy sort of snapped his finger against my wrist rather hard. I thought — I hoped — I hoped that it was just, you know, a joke. Then a pebble spun over my shoulder and hit Justin on the shoulder. And we looked — we looked at each other, Justin’s eyes full of concern, and we realized something was going wrong there.

We then found ourselves being jostled, pushed, punched — not very much, but a little bit. And we suddenly saw a bus driver beckoning us to get on. It was heading back to Quetta. Justin made it onto the bus. I put the first step up. Boys and young men grabbed the blue satchel that was around my shoulder, the satchel in which I carry my passport, credit cards, papers, etc., and tried to pull me back. Justin reached out his hand, and I grasped it. But he tried to pull me on. The crowd were pulling me back. And in the end, [inaudible] did let go of his hand.

And they were shouting. I don’t know what they were shouting. I don’t speak Pashto. I can speak Arabic. And then they started, really hit me, first of all, on the back, then the shoulders, and then I had fists on the face, and then stones sort of bouncing off my shoulders and bouncing off my head. And then two men came up and started to bash me on the face and the head with stones. And very quickly, there was blood running down my face. A man came up and smashed my glasses into my face. There was blood in my eyes. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t — I was short-sighted, and I couldn’t see at all. I felt my shirt going wet with blood. My pullover was drenched in it. It began splashing on my shoes and trousers. And I was obviously in a difficult situation, because although there were 60 at the beginning, I thought there were around a hundred people by the time I was bleeding. You know, it was like a bloody horse being slaughtered. It sort of attracted people in an animal-like way, which I don’t like to think about.

And I was then on my own. Justin and I had lost our grip of each other. And I remembered Lebanese always said, “If you’re in danger, whatever you do, don’t do nothing.” So, the next man, well, actually, he had already hit me once. There was a man with a stone who wanted to bash it into my face again. So I hit him with my fist, and I just saw out of the corner of my eye he spat his tooth out. In fact, on my right wrist now, I’ve got a big scar from the tooth which I knocked out. And then I went for three other people. I missed one and hit two others and started running. And just for a moment, the crowd held back, because, you know, the dying creature, so to speak, had suddenly come alive again, and that was obviously what I intended. And then I ran down the road.

And at one point a figure came out. I was standing in the road. The glasses had gone. They’d ripped off my spare pair. I had actually — unfortunately, they also, I later discovered, taken my contacts book away with 25 years of names and telephone numbers around the Middle East that had dropped out of my bag when they were trying to seize it. And I was trying desperately with my fingers to push the blood out of my eyes. And I saw this figure come that took me very gently by the right arm, a man in a robe with a kind of turban and a beard. I didn’t really see his face. I couldn’t [inaudible]. I kept saying, “Help me! Help me! As-salamu alaykum. Peace be upon you.” And I think he was some kind of religious person, a cleric, a mullah perhaps, a Muslim, of course. And as he led me away, the crowd sort of paused, and they sent stones after me, but skittering along the road, not at me, in case they hit the man. So he must have been important in the village.

And he put me on board a little police truck we found, and they were too terrified to move. And I was on the truck. I climbed up towards the back of the cab, a little window, and I kept banging on it, saying, “Help me! Help me!” And I remember my blood was just streaming down the window behind them. And they drove about 15 meters forward. Then the religious man came back and obviously told them to help me more, and they then drove about 300 meters. And there, like a miracle, incredibly, was a Red Cross, Red Crescent convoy.

And two Bangladeshi Muslim doctors immediately took me out of the back of the police vehicle and started to pour water over my wounds, because my hands were just crimson. I mean, it looked like a scene from, you know, Christians to the lions in the Colosseum. And they quickly put a bandage around my head, and they started, you know, putting wads of bandages on all the wounds I had, and told me to lie on the floor of the ambulance, and threw a blanket over me so that when the first people arrived, which they quickly did, didn’t recognize me. And then they got me out.

And Justin, my colleague, very fortunately, he was — he got out of the bus. The people there didn’t help us, but they didn’t hurt him. And he eventually found himself close to his car and in his car, protected by a very stout man belonging to an organization called the Balochistan Levies, obviously originally raised under the British mandate. And he was there with a rifle and just threatened back the crowd to keep away from Justin. And in due course, in fact, we were reunited further down the road when I was still with the Red Cross convoy.

So, we then came back, very much tail between our legs, of course, to Quetta, where we were able to have our wounds dressed again and washed, and where two — well, not ours. I had wounds. Justin was just pushed around a bit. And two doctors came and considerably painfully managed to sort of clip off bits of my hair, which were caked with blood, and put bandages on me.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk describing what happened to him just — how many days ago was it?

ROBERT FISK: It was a day and a half ago. It feels like a week now, but it was a day and a half ago.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, how did you ultimately end up where you are right now?

ROBERT FISK: Well, I’m still where I got back to, in Quetta. I’m in my hotel room. I obviously spent the next day sleeping somewhat fitfully, because the — merely to turn 'round in bed. The crowd of people were kicking me, as well, so I've got bruises all over my back and my shoulder and my legs and my sides. So, even to turn around in bed is actually quite painful. But you quickly get your appetite back if you’re going to be all right. And I must say, I refused a tetanus injection, refused stitches, because I somehow hate those things. But I’ll have a couple of scars on my face. But, otherwise, the doctors, the Pakistani doctors who came here, said I would be all right. And so, I will. So I’m carrying on reporting as best I can.

AMY GOODMAN: So, do you plan to leave, Robert?

ROBERT FISK: Not at the moment. I think our job is to — is to go on reporting. I was actually planning to go on holiday several days ago, and it was only when Kandahar fell that I decided to stay on. So, I’m perfectly entitled if I want to leave at this minute, but I don’t intend to, in fact.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, speaking to us from Pakistan. He was beaten up in Afghanistan, just having come out, was the only Western reporter in Kandahar province. You are listening to The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’re going to hear about some of the other stories he has reported on while in Afghanistan. Stay with us.