The Guardian du lieu suivant : London, Greater London, England • 33

04.12.01 3 John Walker (facing right), alias John Philip Walker Lindh, alias Abdul Hamid, one of the survivors of the revolt at Qala-I-Jhangi; right, hundreds of Walker's Taliban comrades died in fighting at the fort full view of the world, PHOTOGRAPH: JAMES IMAGES wounded by enemy His mother, Marilyn Walker divorced, commanders surrendered to the Uzbek militia which is the Marin County way- reacted in the manner mothers are supposed to, even if they have seen their son convert to Islam. "He's a good, sweet, shy boy," she said. "If he got involved with the Taliban, he must have been brainwashed. He was isolated. He didn't know a soul in Pakistan.

When you're young and impressionable, it's easy to be led by charismatic people." to not few one April. icans, cooler be reported. the if spoken "He for questions. less, moving their the said to This his son her he Most does summer," was mother had son somewhere beg Amer- going been since had she a within a thousand miles of Pakistan or Afghanistan without a word over the past few months, would have been halfway up the wall with worry long before now. These are not dim people: Lindh's mother works in healthcare; his father is an attorney with the local gas and electricity company.

They have another son and a daughter. Yesterday, having given their side of the story to journalists from Newsweek and CNN -the first news media to break the storythey decided to consult lawyers of their own. But some further details did come out last night: the boy was named after John Lennon, murdered just before he was born; in 1998 Frank Lindh, his father, took him to Ireland where John insisted on wearing his white robe and turban everywhere; and there also came the most telling detail of all in October 2000, when the USS Cole was bombed in a Yemeni harbour, father and son had an uncomfortable exchange of emails. John told his dad that the ship's presence in an Islamic port was an "act of war" John Lindh assuming it is John Lindh said he came into contact with the Taliban while studying in one of the Koranic centres of the North West Frontier Province. "The people there in general have a great love for the Taliban," he said on camera.

"So I started to read some of the literature of the movement. My heart became attracted to them." He added that he went to training camps, where he came into contact with Osama bin Laden, and fought with Muslim activists in Kashmir. Then he walked more than 1,000 miles and fought with the Taliban during the two-week siege of Kunduz, before the local Pass notes No 1,967 Bobby Fischer action but lucid enough to act as a compelling witness to the horror of war: the kind of event that starts to sap a nation's enthusiasm for faraway battles. They did not expect their boy to be a Taliban fighter and their own prisoner. There was another surprise.

All along, Americans have known there were Taliban sympathisers and supporters in their midst: the FBI has been focusing on little else for the past three months. However, it expected they would be of Arab descent, part of the huge wave of immigration from Lebanon, Yemen and Palestine of the past 20 years, living in one of the big, ambivalent Islamic communities, perhaps round Detroit or New York. No one bargained on a 20-year-old white kid with a Swedish name, Irish descent, a strict Catholic father and a Buddhist mother. Admittedly, he comes from Marin, the area north of San Francisco which has been the dope-growing heartland of both flaky religious experimentation and activism against the US military since before John Lindh was born. Even so, the nation was left completely shocked yesterday.

"There's gut to be some kind of explanation why he hates America so much," clucked Paula Zahn, the CNN anchorwoman. She spoke for the country. This kid has broken the ultimate wartime taboo. The US is used to people opposing its military activities, even if in the current mood of national unity the number of dissidents is tiny and the level of tolerance fragile. But to be discovered fighting against your own country's troops is to leap straight across the barrier that separates dissent from treason.

Lawyers yesterday were trying to work out what crimes he might have committed. But John Lindh came to al-Qaida long before this war began. He spent his first 10 years of life in the suburbs of Washington DC before the family moved to California. His father, Frank Lindh, said that when John was 16 he read a biography of Malcolm the black American Muslim leader of the 1960s, then came home from high school one day and announced that he was converting to Islam and wanted to be a Koranic scholar. A year later, he left for Yemen to learn Arabic.

Though he returned to California for a time and worked with a Muslim humanitarian group in San Francisco, John left for Yemen again last year and has not been back home since. His parents thought he was in Pakistan studying the Koran. under General Rashid Dostam. Along with 400 other Taliban fighters, he was taken to the Qala-i-Jhangi fort on the muddy outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif. Only 85 survived the bloody battle that broke out in the fort.

The rest died in ditches, in thickets of willow and in the open courtyard where the Taliban began their rebellion 10 days ago. As Americanpiloted planes unleashed rockets on the Taliban compound, Lindh retreated underground. By Wednesday of last week all of the men above ground had been exterminated. Dostam's troops felt confident that they could finish off the handful of survivors they knew to be hiding in the basement of a military classroom. They fired rockets down drainage channels leading to the subterranean rooms.

They poured oil down the crevices and set it alight. And just in case the Taliban fighters down there concluded that it was safe to get out, guards fired warning shots down the stairwells every few minutes. The complex was freezing. The Taliban fighters had nothing to eat for six days. They had a little water, but that soon ran out.

Some of the fighters killed a horse and dragged it downstairs to eat, it seems. Lindh appears to have survived by hiding in one small room. Most of his fellow volunteers did not: their bodies were yesterday still bobbing in two feet of watery grime. The last men finally decided to surrender after troops poured water into their hiding place, turning it into a freezing lake. Lindh was lucky: several of the other Taliban fighters lay dying in the cold after emerging from their basement.

There was a man with no face; another with a bullet hole in his shoulder; and a gangly Arab with his jaw blown away. Lindh was loaded with his fellow prisoners into a blue shipping container parked on the back of a lorry on Saturday afternoon, then ferried to Shiburgan prison, 70 miles away, next door to General Dostam's kitsch -style palace. It was here, it seems, that the US special forces finally caught up with him and spirited him away. The other Taliban prisoners are still there. "US military forces have in their control a man who calls himself a US citizen," a Pentagon spokesman announced blandly.

Now the Pentagon and the whole of the US, a country that has struggled to penetrate the minds of any of its enemies, have to work out what it was that motivated one scholarly kid from Marin County to join them. Age: 58. Distinguishing features: Bearded, mad-eyed, reclusive; makes only rare appearances to denounce crimes committed by "world Jewry and the Jew-controlled United Does he live in a cave by any chance? Possibly. No one seems to know precisely where he is, though he was recently spotted in Japan. How on earth did he get out of Afghanistan? Ah, I see your error.

Bobby Fischer is a great chess player, not a Kalashnikov-wielding maniac, despite his comments about September 11. Go on: "I applaud the act. The US and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians for years. What goes around comes around." Gulp. Where did he make these remarks? Al-Jazeera? No, Radio Bombo in the Philippines.

Why does he hate the US? Fischer, who was born in Brooklyn, believes it is part of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to destroy him. He is being pursued for back taxes; the FBI issued an arrest warrant for playing a match against Boris Spassky in outlawed Serbia in 1992; and, worst of all, the government raided a storage depot in Pasadena and confiscated his possessions, including a large collection of comics and a signed photograph of President Nixon. Spassky, that name rings a bell. Fischer beat him in Reykjavik i in 1972 to win the world title and smash half a century of Soviet domination. The match was so sensational that Tim Rice wrote a musical about it.

A great future beckoned. Indeed, except that Fischer refused to defend his title, citing 179 objections, and left the US for exile in Budapest. Why? He was dating a Hungarian teenager called Zita Raiczanyi. Likes: "Vivacious girls with big suicide bombers, Hitler. Dislikes: Jews, Americans, journalists (one ran off with Zita).

Curious fact: Fischer's mother was Jewish..