Article: MY ESCAPE FROM THE DARK AGES; For two weeks, the Mail's Ross Benson has been with the anti-Taliban fighters in north Afghanistan. Now safely out of this benighted land, he reveals how the iron grip religion exerts on these men of war means they will forever detest the West and all that it stands for.

Byline: ROSS BENSON

FOR more than two decades I have reported on wars all over the world, yet never before have I been in a conflict where the belief systems of the two sides are so utterly and fundamentally opposed - and that includes my experience in the Middle East and Northern Ireland.

And from where I stayed, in a position overlooking the Taliban strongholds in the Afghan hills beyond, the chasm looks as unbridgeable as one of the cascading-mountain gorges that divide this feral country.

Every time another Allied bomb or missile was targeted on this benighted land, the explosion simply managed to peel back another layer of the illusion that ...

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