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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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April 15th,
2007 - Marines’ Actions in Afghanistan Called Excessive |
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Marines’
Actions in Afghanistan Called Excessive By Carlotta Gall New York Times April 15, 2007 Kabul, Afghanistan, April 14
- American marines reacted to a bomb ambush with excessive force in eastern
Afghanistan last month, hitting groups of bystanders and vehicles with
machine-gun fire in a series of attacks that covered 10 miles of highway and
left 12 civilians dead, including an infant and three elderly men, according
to a report published by an Afghan human rights commission on Saturday. Families of the victims
described in interviews this week the painful toll of the attacks, which took
place on March 4 in Nangarhar Province. One victim, a 16-year-old newly
married girl, was cut down while she was carrying a bundle of grass to her
family’s farmhouse, according to her family and the report. A 75-year-old man
walking to his shop was hit by so many bullets that his son said he did not
recognize the body when he came to the scene. In its report, the Afghan
Independent Human Rights Commission condemned the suicide bomb attack that
started the episode, striking a Marine Special Operations unit convoy and
slightly wounding one American. And the report said there might also have
been small arms fire directed at the convoy immediately after the blast. But
it said the response was disproportionate, especially given the obviously
nonmilitary nature of the marines’ targets long after the ambush. “In failing to distinguish
between civilians and legitimate military targets, the U.S. Marine Corps
Special Forces employed indiscriminate force,” the report said. “Their
actions thus constitute a serious violation of international humanitarian
standards.” In the weeks immediately
after the episode, the United States military began an investigation, and it
is now exploring possible criminal charges, senior military officials said.
The marines involved in the episode are being kept in Afghanistan, but the
rest of their 120-man company has been pulled out of the country. [The Washington Post reported
late Saturday that a preliminary United States investigation had found that
the people who were killed and injured were civilians, and that there was no
evidence that the marines involved had come under small arms fire after the
bombing. [The preliminary findings
were reported by Army Maj. Gen. Francis H. Kearney III, the commander of
Special Operations troops in the Middle East and Central Asia, who ordered a
formal investigation in March, The Post reported.] An American spokesman in Afghanistan,
Lt. Col. David A. Accetta, said Saturday that the military was in the final
stages of approving condolence payments for families of the wounded and dead
in the shootings. The events have had the
highest profile of a number of potential human rights violations by both
sides, many by the Taliban and its allies, in the fighting in Afghanistan
that were documented by the Afghan commission, which was established after
the Taliban’s ouster and is partly financed by Congress. The commission’s
report comes amid resurgent Taliban violence and coalition reprisals that are
costing an increasing number of civilian lives and that have brought harsh
criticism of international forces in the country. The deputy director of the
human rights commission, Nader Nadery, warned that attacks like the highway
shooting had greatly contributed to outrage in Afghanistan, contradicting
efforts by coalition forces to win people’s support away from the Taliban.
“This is not an isolated case” he said. “People are realizing more that they
are a victim of the conflict from both sides, from the Taliban and from the
international operations.” He added, “What we
identified throughout all our investigation is a high level of frustration
among the public and among the civilians.” A spokesman for the United
States Central Command said the Afghan commission’s report had been forwarded
to Adm. William J. Fallon, the senior American officer in the region, for
review. In Washington, the chairman
of the House subcommittee that oversees American Special Operations forces
said Saturday that he was concerned by the information gathered so far, but
that he had received assurances that a thorough military investigation was
under way. “It is a very serious
matter, and the evidence is troubling,” said the chairman, Representative
Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington. In a telephone interview
from his home in Tacoma, Wash., Mr. Smith added: “There should be a full and
complete investigation, and the military is doing that. That is the purpose
of the report done by the Special Operations component of the Central
Command.” Anger and frustration over
the shooting was evident in Spinpul, where the attack happened, and in the
whole province of Nangarhar. Still mourning, the families of the victims said
this week that they had demanded from President Hamid Karzai and the American
generals they had met that those responsible be punished. Some of them said
the soldiers should be tried under Islamic law and face the death penalty if
found guilty of the killings. “They committed a great
cruelty; they should be punished,” said Gharghashta, 65, whose
daughter-in-law was killed at the door of their farmhouse compound, several
hundred yards from the road and the scene of the blast. The American troops
were firing from the road and raked the river bed where workers were digging
a ditch and the surrounding fields with gunfire, he and other witnesses said. “She was cutting grass in
the field and she was carrying the bundle of grass on her head back into the
house for the animals,” said his eldest son, Abdel Muhammad, 25. “There was a big blast and
then I heard firing. I started walking toward my house,” he said. “When I
reached the house, my sister called and said my sister-in-law had been
killed,” he said. The young woman, Yadwaro, 16, was shot in the back and fell
dead across the threshold, he said. Her husband, Tera Gul, 18, sat listening
silently to his brother and then got up and walked away. The suicide bomb attack
happened 500 yards along the road from the bridge that gives the village its
name, White Bridge, on the main highway 25 miles east of Jalalabad. A man
driving a minibus in the opposite direction to the Marine unit exploded his
vehicle as he passed the convoy of five or six Humvees, according to the commission’s
report, which was drawn from interviews with witnesses, police officers,
community leaders and hospital officials. One marine was lightly wounded by
shrapnel from the blast, it said. The convoy may then have
come under small arms fire from one vehicle on the same side of the road as
the bomber, Mr. Nadery said. In the days after the episode, the United States
military said the convoy had come under a “complex ambush from several
directions,” but the human rights panel questioned this. “If such an attack did
indeed occur, as it is claimed by the U.S. military, it was almost certainly
very limited in scope and restricted to the immediate site” of the suicide
bombing, it said in its report. The report’s description
continued: Two Humvees then moved forward 500 yards to the bridge and opened
fire with roof-mounted machine-guns on a car that had stopped on a side road,
some yards from the highway. The gunners then swung their weapons around and
began firing on the nearby river bed and fields. They killed six people
instantly and wounded at least another. The car’s driver, a veteran
mujahedeen fighter who goes by the name of Lewanai, 45, was wounded but
survived the shooting by diving out of his door and scrambling behind a mound
of earth. But the big guns shredded his car and the three people inside: his
father, Hajji Zarpadshah, 80; his uncle, Hajji Shin Makhe, 75; and his
nephew, Farid Gul, 16. “It was an illegal action,”
he said. “I know the army rules, and when I heard the blast I stopped my car,
I was thinking in case they shoot me,” he said in an interview at his home
nearby. “They opened fire and were shooting for 10 minutes.” The car, now parked at a
nearby gas station, is torn by gashes from the bullets over its hood, side
and roof and the seats are shredded from the gunfire, the ceiling is
smattered with debris and bits of blood and bone. Mr. Nadery said that the
vehicle had been hit by 250 bullets. “Their insides were all
coming out,” said Noor Islam, 22, who saw the dead men in the car after the
attack. “We were very upset. Two of them were old men with white beards, and
one was young,” he said. “They had no weapons.” Near the car was Shin Gul,
70, who was waiting for a ride to the nearby bazaar of Markoh where the
family had a shop selling flour. He was cut down on the spot and his body so
torn apart that his son, Muhammad Ayub, 35, said he could not recognize him
at first. “I saw a notebook in his pocket and then I knew it was him,” he
said. Nearby a 30-year-old
shepherd named Farid was shot. He died two weeks later in the hospital. Mr. Ayub said he was with a
group of workers digging a ditch in the river bed when they came under fire
from the Humvees at the bridge. They all survived by taking cover in the
ditch, but the bullets went over their heads. Those were the shots that
killed the newlywed girl, Yadwaro, about 100 yards beyond. As the Humvees pulled away
across the bridge they opened fire on a gas station and other vehicles,
killing four people in a minibus, including a 1-year-old, the report said. In that attack and later
ones along the 10-mile stretch of road from Spinpul, six people were killed
and 25 were wounded. The report covered other
civilian killings in recent weeks, including extensive human-rights
violations by Taliban fighters and their allies that involved beheadings and
the mutilation of victims. In other cases involving
coalition troops in Afghanistan, the report detailed an airstrike in Kapisa
Province in March that killed a family of nine people, including two pregnant
women and four children younger than 5. The report also criticized
continuing house raids by American forces, including one on the house of one
of the human rights commission’s staff members, who the report said was
hooded and handcuffed to a detonator and told not to move in case it exploded. Copyright 2007 The New York
Times Company External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/world/asia/15afghan.html |