Massacre in Afghanistan: Was the US complicit?

Democracy Now! reports on “Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death,” a documentary film that has received significant screenings in Europe, but which has been ignored by the US press. According to Democracy Now:

In Europe, this is old news; UK papers were talking about this back in September. There not much doubt that the massacre occurred. What’s at issue is whether or not American soldiers witnessed or were aware of the massacre our Afghan allies committed. The US has denied that any US soldiers were present. However, Andrew McEntee, the former head of Amnesty International, says “There are questions for the Americans to answer. I believe there is clear evidence the Americans were there.” (Press Association News, 11/08/02). And according to an article in the Guardian (3/25/03), the German paper Die Zeit, after conducting an investigation, wrote “No one doubted that the Americans had taken part. Even at higher levels there are no doubts on this issue.”

Is it true? Heck if I know; I have no reason to doubt McEntee and Die Zeit, but nor do I know what evidence they’re drawing their conclusions from. What’s required is serious press attention, to either document or debunk the film’s claims. But we all know that won’t happen in the US, where serious criticisms of the Pentagon fall into a media black hole.

Thanks to Blueheron and Politics in the Zeros for pointing out this story..

The most detailed press accounts I’ve read of the massacre are the Guardian’s story from back in September, and the Sunday Herald Sun’s story from early February. Click on the link below for the full text of those articles.

The Guardian (London), September 14, 2002

Afghan massacre puts Pentagon on the spot

By Luke Harding

The dead are not hard to find. Turn left into the desert after the town of Shiberghan and they lie all around – some in shallow graves, others protruding from the sand.

The clothes they wore are still there: decaying black turbans, charred shoes, a prayer cap, even a set of rusted car keys. In the nine months since they were buried the sun has bleached their bones white. But the jaws, femurs and ribs scattered across the desert are unmistakably human. We found teeth, thick black human hair and bits of skull.

There are a few clues to the prisoners’ final moments: the site is littered with spent bullets. There are thick jackets lying above ground, which would have seemed useful to their owners last November, during the freezing desert nights. Nobody knows exactly how many Taliban prisoners were secretly interred in this mass grave, a short distance from the main road. But there is now substantial evidence that the worst atrocity of last year’s war in Afghanistan took place here; most controversially, during an operation masterminded by US special forces.

A 10-minute drive away is Shiberghan prison, where about 800 Taliban fighters who surrendered late last November at the town of Kunduz are held. The Afghan warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum controls the prison; his mansion is nearby.

It was his commanders who transported the Taliban captives to Shiberghan. “It was awful. They crammed us into sealed shipping containers,” a 24-year-old survivor, Irfan Azgar Ali, told the Guardian. “We had no water for 20 hours. We banged on the side of the container. There was no air and it was very hot.

“There were 300 of us in my container. By the time we arrived in Shiberghan, only 10 of us were still alive.”

The prisoners still in Shiberghan – half of them Afghans, and half Pakistanis – estimate that about 400 people suffocated to death during the journey. Other sources say the figure is between 900 and 1,000. The Physicians for Human Rights group from Boston, which identified the mass grave earlier this year and later sent out a forensic scientist to carry out further tests, suggests that 2,000-3,000 of the 8,000 prisoners taken to Shiberghan died on the way.

But the Guardian has obtained harrowing details which suggest that their death was not a tragic accident but a deliberate act of revenge.

Some of the first Taliban fighters to surrender made the initial part of the journey in open lorries, their faces caked with dust. When they reached Mazar-i-Sharif, 90 miles from Kunduz, they were taken to Qala Zaini, a mud-walled fortified compound on the outskirts of the city.

There Gen Dostum’s soldiers crammed them into shipping containers. When they protested that they could not breathe, the soldiers told them to duck down, then fired several Kalashnikov rounds into the containers.”I saw blood coming out of the holes,” an eyewitness who refuses to be identified said.

A driver who made four trips to Dasht-i-Leili said not all the prisoners in his lorry were dead when they arrived: some were merely unconscious or gravely injured. The guards laid the dead and the still living out on the desert.

“They raked them all with bullets to make sure they were dead,” the driver said. “Then they buried them.”

Last week Gen Dostum, now deputy defence minister in the new Afghan government, angrily denied accusations of human rights abuses, and pointed out that the Taliban had used shipping containers on numerous occasions to murder their enemies. He admitted that 200 prisoners had died, but said that most of the deaths were “due to wounds suffered in the fighting, but also due to disease, suffocation, suicide and a general weakness after weeks of intense fighting and bombardment”.

In a joint statement with three other Northern Alliance commanders, he added: “There was no intentional killing.”

What makes this massacre different from atrocities carried out by the Taliban regime is the presence of US special forces in the area, both at Shiberghan and at Erganak, 200 miles away, where the Taliban prisoners were first loaded into lorries. The question human rights groups want answered is: how much did the American soldiers know at the time?

The Pentagon said last week that the US troops had reported that they were unaware what had happened to the prisoners. But the evidence suggests that they were so close to Gen Dostum’s soldiers that they may have been informed.

The general has been on the US payroll for nearly a year. According to Newsweek magazine, an elite team from the Fifth Special Forces Group first met up with Gen Dostum last October, when its members were dropped by Chinook helicopter at his mountain base.

They coordinated the Northern Alliance’s dramatic assault on Mazar-i-Sharif, which fell on November 6, and then pursued the Taliban’s northern army to Kunduz, where it remained trapped for more than two weeks.

During this bloody period the US special forces unit, the 595 A-team, paid repeated visits to Shiberghan prison – plucking the American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh, for example, from his cell hours after his detention.

Mr Lindh and the other 85 Taliban survivors from the Qala-i-Jhangi were also transported to Shiberghan by container, despite the intervention of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

One source claims that a dust-covered special forces vehicle pulled up at Dasht-i-Leili and parked on the side of the road, 500 metres from where bulldozers were busy burying the Taliban dead. Gen Dostum’s soldiers instructed local villagers to stay away from the area.

MERE RUMOUR

Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, has called for an inquiry into the massacre, which appears to have taken place at night. Last week he sent a team to investigate. But given Mr Karzai’s tenuous grip on power, the team is unlikely to come to any definite conclusions.

The defence minister, Mohammad Fahim, has already dismissed the allegations of a massacre as a mere “rumour”. Other senior figures in Mr Karzai’s feuding administration have hinted that, given the Taliban’s horrific record, the prisoners had it coming.

The issue is a difficult one, Omar Samad, the government’s foreign ministry spokesman, said yesterday.

“We are very aware that the allegations need to be looked at thoroughly,” he said. “But you have to bear in mind the overall context of what happened in Afghanistan over the past two decades. We are dealing with incidents of massacres, human rights violations and foreign militants entering Afghanistan . . . which have built a sense of revenge that needs to be subdued.”

A confidential UN memo obtained by Newsweek concluded that there was enough evidence to justify a “fully-fledged criminal investigation”. But earlier this week Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special envoy, said the government was too fragile to investigate further. “Politics is the art of the possible,” he said.

The Pentagon has so far declined to answer several tricky questions, among them, were US soldiers present when the containers were first opened at Shiberghan prison?

US intelligence officers spent weeks interrogating Taliban and al-Qaida suspects at the jail, and in time removed 114 prisoners from their cramped, lice-ridden cells to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they remain without charge.

But the same soldiers appear to have no knowledge of the mass grave just down the road.

Sunday Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia), February 9, 2003

US soldiers accused of Afghan massacre

by Ted Rall

As the US claims the moral high ground in the propaganda battle with Iraq, allegations have emerged that their troops were involved in a massacre of prisoners in Afghanistan.

PRESSURE is building on the Pentagon to investigate the role of US troops in the deaths of thousands of prisoners during the invasion of Afghanistan.

Witnesses have claimed that US Special Forces supervised the systematic murder of more than 3000 captured Taliban soldiers in November 2001.

That charge is the centrepiece of the documentary, Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death, which was shown on SBS last month and is expected to be shown in the US within the next few weeks.

British director Jamie Doran, a former BBC producer, has accused the Pentagon of engineering a cover-up.

“They’re hiding behind a wall of secrecy, hoping this story will go away, but it won’t,” Doran said.

Massacre has been shown on German television and to several European parliaments. The UN has promised an investigation.

Because of a media blackout, few Americans are aware that, on the eve of a new war, their nation’s reputation as a defender of human rights is once again under threat.

The allegations stem from the uprising at Qala-i-Jhangi fortress, a dramatic event that marked the last major confrontation between US-backed forces of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban Government.

Several hundred prisoners, including American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh, revolted against their guards and seized a weapons cache.

Responding to Special Forces soldiers working with the Northern Alliance, US jets used bombs to kill most of the rebels, but not before CIA interrogator Johnny Mike Spann was killed and an unknown number of Northern Alliance soldiers shot dead.

Eighty-six Talibs, including Lindh, survived the Qala-i-Jhangi revolt. Meanwhile, 8000-plus soldiers surrendered at Kunduz, the last Taliban redoubt in northern Afghanistan.

Commanders loyal to General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek warlord who later became Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s deputy defence minister, had painstakingly negotiated the surrender of the Taliban at Kunduz and Qala-i-Jhangi.

As I observed while covering the Kunduz front, Northern Alliance commanders promised to quickly release ethnic Afghans among the Taliban once they laid down their arms. Many immediately joined the Northern Alliance.

The status of foreign nationals, the so-called Arab Taliban, was somewhat nebulous because they did not have home towns in Afghanistan to which they might return after being released.

In the end, Dostum guaranteed the lives of the 8000-plus PoWs, and Doran says British and US military officers witnessed the surrender deal.

After five years holed up in the mountainous northeast region bordering China and Kashmir watching the Taliban capture 95 per cent of Afghanistan, Dostum and other Northern Alliance warlords found themselves, after September 11, 2001, with a new best friend — the US taxpayer.

It was reported in Newsweek magazine that US Special Forces commandos from the US Fifth Group joined Dostum in October 2001, offering hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, advanced weaponry and the use of air support to strike the targets he indicated.

Special Forces soldiers turned Dostum and his top commanders into America’s proxy army. The Afghans, meanwhile, were not inclined to disobey the source of such extravagant donations.

Although the Americans have been portrayed as tagging along with the Northern Alliance, Doran says it was clear Afghan forces followed US orders. He claims US troops were in de facto command of joint US-Afghan operations, including Dostum’s actions in the north.

About 5000 of the 8000 prisoners made the trip to Sheberghan prison in the backs of open Soviet-era pick-up trucks. But Dostum’s soldiers, furious about the Qala-i-Jhangi uprising and a Taliban ambush during the siege of Kunduz, were out for vengeance.

They stopped and commandeered private container trucks to transport the other 3000 prisoners.

“It was awful,” Irfan Azgar Ali, a survivor of the trip, told London’s Guardian newspaper.

“They crammed us into sealed shipping containers. We had no water for 20 hours. We banged on the side of the container. There was no air and it was very hot.

“There were 300 of us in my container. By the time we arrived in Sheberghan, only 10 of us were alive.”

One Afghan truck driver, forced to drive one such container, says the prisoners began to beg for air.

“Northern Alliance commanders told us to stop the trucks, and we came down,” he said.

“After that, they shot into the containers, to make air holes. Blood came pouring out. They were screaming inside.”

Another driver in the convoy estimates that an average of 150 to 160 people died in each container.

WHEN the containers were unlocked at Sheberghan, the bodies of the dead tumbled out.

A 12-man US Fifth Special Forces Group unit, Operational Detachment Alpha 595, guarded the prison’s front gates and, according to witnesses, controlled the facility in the hopes of picking key prisoners for interrogation and possible transportation to Guantanamo Bay. That is how Lindh was singled out.

In Massacre, a Northern Alliance soldier tells Doran everything was under the control of the American commanders. American troops searched the bodies from the containers for al-Qaida identification cards. But, says another driver, some of the prisoners were still alive. They were shot while 30 to 40 American soldiers watched.

Members of ODA 595, interviewed for US television program Frontline on August 2 last year, confirmed their presence at Sheberghan, but denied taking part in war crimes.

“The prisoners were being treated the exact same way as Dostum’s forces were,” Master Sergeant Paul said.

“I didn’t see any atrocities, but I easily could have. Some prisoners may have died because they were sick or ill, and Dostum’s forces just couldn’t give them any care because they didn’t have it.”

But even General Dostum admits there were 200 such deaths. And one of the the Northern Alliance soldiers who spoke to Doran claims US troops masterminded the cover-up. “The Americans told the Sheberghan people to get rid of them (the bodies) before satellite pictures could be taken,” he said.

Ten minutes down the road from Sheberghan is the windswept scrub of Dasht-i-Leili. According to the Boston-based group Physicians for Human Rights, the 3000 murdered Taliban PoWs were brought there for mass burial.

One witness told the Guardian that a Special Forces vehicle was parked at the scene as bulldozers buried the dead.

Doran’s camera sweeps over clothing, bits of skull, matted hair, jaws, femurs and ribs jutting out of the sand, despite a sloppy attempt to remove evidence after the fact.

BULLET casings littering the site offer grim testimony that some Talibs were still alive and were executed before being dumped in the desert.

Since 1999, both sides in the Afghan civil war had killed their prisoners in similar gruesome fashion, particularly in and around the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. And no one is defending the Taliban as a regime.

“I have three daughters and the Taliban disgusted me,” says Doran. “But if we’re claiming to be a civilised society, then when men surrender, they have to be given basic protection.

“These men were murdered in a grotesque fashion, summarily executed and kicked into large holes in the ground with American soldiers standing by.”

In recent months, Doran says, two witnesses who appear in his film have been brought to Sheberghan prison and executed by men loyal to Dostum.

The Pentagon refuses to investigate these charges.

Ted Rall is the author of Gas War: The Truth Behind the American Occupation of Afghanistan.