KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - If a picture is worth a thousand words, the art on the walls inside this former Taliban prison must speak volumes.
Childlike charcoal depictions -- everything from ornate drawings of horses and birds, streetscapes and flowering plants to darker images of tanks, jets and gun battles -- line this former fruit cannery warehouse at the Provincial Reconstruction Team headquarters in the heart of Kandahar city.
The floor is dotted with dozens of black spots and the walls scorched black in spots, the remnants of fires lit for cooking and for warmth in the cold Afghan winter. Scratches on the wall indicate where prisoners counted down their days and months of captivity.
Interspersed among it all are scribblings in Pashto from the men, women and children who were likely locked up in this cold, cavernous building by their Taliban captors in the 1990s -- scribblings that speak, according to translators, of typical Afghan perseverance.
"It was explained to us that some of the translations are, 'We are going to be free,"' said Warrant Office Mike McClement, a Canadian combat engineer based at CFB Gagetown who recently provided visitors a tour of the building.
The structure was originally a prosperous fruit cannery built by Czech investors in the early 1970s, a time of prosperity in Afghanistan. As many as 1,400 workers showed up for work each day to can pomegranates, apples and grapes for export.
The operation was scaled back when the Russians invaded in 1979 and shut down for good when the mujahedeen warlords took over in 1992.
In 1994, the Taliban marched from Maywand district in southern Afghanistan to capture Kandahar city and the surrounding provinces. By 1996, the Taliban had captured Kabul, from where they ruled the country for the next five years.
Once the Taliban took control of Kandahar city, the former fruit cannery was turned into a prison.
"When the Taliban came here they made a prison over there -- it was a big place, so Taliban made that as a jail for themselves and when they brought in prisoners they would keep them over there," remembered Fida Mohammed, who has worked as a handyman at the facility for nearly 40 years.
"They held almost 800 prisoners over there. It was used as storage before -- just the Taliban used it as a prison ... there were other Afghans, so many were from the north. There was mujahedeen and there was Taliban and they were fighting."
Mohammad Ishmael, an Afghan National Police officer stationed at the PRT, said not everyone being held at the Taliban prison was at war with the group.
"They just threw people in here. At that time somebody was going to cough and they would just throw them inside and lock the big doors and nobody's going to jump in," he said. "The drawings are from a long time ago."
A plan had been in place to turn the warehouse, which remains structurally sound, into a vehicle maintenance bay for the PRT. That plan has since been scrapped, however, in order to preserve what advocates call an artifact of Afghanistan's conflict-plagued past.
McClement said he was fascinated by the experience of seeing the building's walls, but admitted that the thought of the room being filled wall to wall with prisoners gave him goose bumps.
"It would have been really nightmarish if you didn't know if you were going to live tomorrow or not."
