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u.s. bombs afghan village
“We have many children who are injured… Their families are gone… Everyone says their parents are dead.” — with these chilling words a Kandahar hospital nurse described the horror of Washington's latest massacre of Afghan civilians.
The severely wounded included six-year-old Palika, who arrived at the Mir Wais Hospital in Kandahar still wearing her blood-drenched party dress. She is now an orphan.
Had the indiscriminate and cold-blooded slaughter of up to 150 people — who just minutes before had been enjoying themselves at a wedding reception — occurred in a Western country, or had it been perpetrated by any other government, the big business newspapers' banner headlines would have bellowed “Terrorist outrage!” or “Wedding massacre!”.
Instead, editors soberly emphasized that the terrible carnage was the result of an “error”, a “blunder”, an “intelligence failure” or — perhaps the most grotesque of the terms used to lessen the scale of the crime — a “friendly fire mishap”.
In the early hours of July 1, US warplanes — including a B-52 bomber and at least one AC-130 gunship, an aircraft that literally bristles with rapid-fire machine-guns and cannons — attacked at least four villages in the south-western province of Oruzgan, 400 kilometers from Kabul.
The village of Kakarak (also spelled Kakrakai in some news reports) bore the brunt of the surprise attack. For two hours, warplanes unleashed what the July 2 Washington Post described as a “withering field of fire”.
Afghan officials estimated the death toll at more than 40, with another 100 people wounded. However, survivors and district officials told the BBC on July 1 that between 100 and 150 people were killed, and more than 200 wounded. Some of the wounded were taken on a rugged nine-hour road trip to the nearest hospital in Kandahar.
Most of those killed — including 25 people from one family — were attending a wedding celebration in Kakarak. As villager Abdul Saboor told the BBC: “There are no Taliban or al Qaeda here. These people were all civilians, women and children.”
US officials scrambled to deny responsibility for the atrocity, issuing conflicting and contradictory accounts of what had taken place. The US Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, suggested that an “errant” 2000-pound bomb dropped from a B-52 bomber may have missed “an identified complex of caves”.
US Army Colonel Roger King at the Bagram air base near Kabul claimed that US warplanes were fired upon by “anti-aircraft artillery” and “heavy-caliber machine-guns” based in the four villages. This prompted US forces to retaliate with “close air support”.
Excuses
A third explanation offered by the US military was that the “anti-aircraft artillery” shells, supposedly fired at the warplanes, had fallen on the villagers.
Most mainstream media have speculated that the US pilots may have “mistakenly” interpreted the celebratory firing of guns into the air at the wedding reception as being hostile.
US officials have doggedly refused to accept that a wedding party had been attacked, despite confirmation by provincial and national Afghan officials.
In a particularly disgusting comment, a US officer told the July 2 Washington Post that the last time a wedding was reported to have been hit by US bombs, “even the `bride' had a beard and an AK-47. This group is masterful at disinformation.” (The officer was referring to a May 16 massacre of tribespeople by US forces, the first reports of which wrongly stated that a wedding had been attacked.)
However, US officials have admitted that no wreckage of “anti-aircraft artillery” has been located.
Even the pro-US regime of Hamid Karzai felt compelled to issue what the Associated Press on July 2 described as “an unprecedented statement” on the US attack. It was “unprecedented” because Karzai has never before made a peep that could be interpreted as criticism of Washington's conduct of the war, even following previous assaults that have caused significant civilian casualties.
The Afghan government announced on July 2 that Karzai had “called officials and commanders of the United States forces to his office and strongly advised them of the grave concern and sorrow” the attack had caused. Kabul said that Karzai had asked the US and its allies to “take all necessary measures to ensure that military activities to capture terrorist groups do not harm innocent Afghan civilians”.
Karzai's statement reflects the growing uneasiness of an increasing number of Afghans at the civilian death toll that continues to mount nine months after the defeat of the Taliban — particularly among the Pashtun people in the country's south and east who are bearing the brunt of US-inflicted massacres.
“The enemies of peace and stability could utilize this situation”, Karzai's foreign minister Abdullah warned the US. “Our people were victims of al Qaeda and it is not fair that they should be the victims of the American campaign. Civilians should not be killed.”
Mounting atrocities
The July 1 massacre was the latest in a long list of known US atrocities against Afghan civilians. They include:
· On October 11, the village of Khorum (also known as Karam), near the eastern city of Jalalabad, was destroyed by US warplanes. At least 100 people were killed. US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed Washington had “certain knowledge” that there was a Taliban military installation in the village and that anybody killed there “probably” had something to do with it. Reporters found no evidence of a military base.
· On December 6 and 7, US warplanes killed 16 people in Moshkhil village, in the south-eastern province of Paktia. There were three separate attacks in the space of 12 hours. A mosque and seven houses were destroyed.
· On December 21, as many as 65 people were killed when US warplanes attacked a convoy as it travelled between Khost and Gardez, the capital of Paktia province. US warplanes also attacked 10 houses and a mosque in the village of Asmani Kilai, from where the vehicles had departed, in a seven-hour bombardment. The Pentagon claimed that it was attacking Taliban or al Qaeda “leadership”, but the victims turned out to be members of the Paktia provincial council and other guests on their way to Kabul to attend the swearing in ceremony for the new government the next day.
· In the early hours of December 30, US warplanes slammed bombs into Qalaye Niaze village, Paktia province. Washington again claimed that Taliban and al Qaeda leaders were present and that the village was the site of an underground arms storage bunker. Rather than “terrorists”, Qalaye Niaze was filled with people who had gathered for a wedding. According to doctors at the nearest hospital, 107 people were slaughtered. The UN put the death toll at 52, including 25 children.
· On May 10, the London Times revealed that an April announcement by US and Australian military spokespeople that four “al Qaeda terrorists” had been killed was a lie. “A special forces source involved in the shooting described a small number of armed men, probably Afghans, stumbling across a six-man team of Australian SAS. Surprised, the men raised their weapons and were shot in the chest by the SAS”, Times journalist Anthony Loyd reported. He concluded: “If you carry a weapon in the wrong part of Afghanistan … you will inevitably die quickly.”
· On May 12, US special forces killed five people and captured 32 others in a four-hour night raid on a village 100km north of Kandahar. Washington announced that the victims — including a 13-year-old gunned down as he was hiding in a wheat field and a 15-year-old killed as he slept — were “suspected” of being al Qaeda or Taliban.
· On May 16, at least 10 tribesmen were killed as they exchanged shots with rival villagers squabbling over timber on a hill. Australian SAS troops, who had been observing the villagers' squabble for several days, claimed they had been shot at and requested an attack by US warplanes, which obliterated the tribesmen.
· On May 24, US-led forces raided a “suspected Taliban leadership compound” in Bandi Temur near Kandahar. Two people were killed and 59 people were abducted and taken away in helicopters. Hajji Berget, the 100-year-old village chief, died in custody from a blow to the head with a rifle butt, while a three-year-old girl who ran in terror during the attack fell down a well and drowned.
These dramatic incidents only account for a small number of the Afghan civilians that have died. Figures compiled by University of New Hampshire professor Marc Herold found that between October 7 and May 14 alone, 3780 civilians were directly killed by US forces. A detailed study of “indirect” civilian deaths — from starvation and illness — published in the May 20 British Guardian also found that “as many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost their lives as an indirect consequence of US intervention”.
Are these atrocities — concentrated in Afghanistan's south and east — simply a string of “errors”, “intelligence failures” or “friendly fire mishaps” as the US military, the Western press and Washington's puppet Kabul regime would have us believe?
An answer to this question was provided by an interview with a recently returned US soldier published in the May 25 Ithaca Journal. Private Matt Guckheimer, who served in eastern Afghanistan, told the newspaper: “We were told there were no friendly forces. If there was anybody there, they were the enemy. We were told specifically that if there were women and children to kill them.”
The Taliban drew much of its support from the people of the Pashtun tribal regions of Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan. When Washington launched its war to overthrow the Taliban following the September 11 terror attacks in the US, US officials at first believed that the Taliban would split and its top leadership around Mullah Mohammed Omar would be dumped.
However, as the war progressed, this split did not eventuate. Without a credible or trustworthy political or military force within the Pashtun population, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, Washington opted to form a political and military alliance with the Northern Alliance. The NA is led by warlords who claim to represent the smaller ethnic and religious minorities that predominate in the center, north and west of Afghanistan.
Part and parcel of this shift by Washington was to accept and facilitate the political marginalization of the southern and eastern tribal Pashtuns from the post-Taliban political set up, which was formalized at the June 10-19 loya jirga.
The continuing US and allied military operations in the south and east — including by Australian special forces — are no longer primarily aimed at defeating Taliban and al Qaeda “remnants”, but at terrorizing the disaffected and disenfranchised southern Pashtun population and discouraging the formation of a viable political and/or military force opposed to the US-installed Karzai regime.
On July 2, Amnesty International issued a statement related to the July 1 wedding massacre. It noted that “the rules of international humanitarian law require those who plan or decide upon an attack to do everything feasible to verify that the objectives targeted are not civilian. When it is unclear whether a target is used for military purposes, it shall be presumed to be a civilian object.”
Is it any wonder then that Washington is attempting so strenuously to have its armed forces exempted from the jurisdiction of the newly created International Criminal Court?
The ICC is charged with bringing to justice perpetrators of war crimes and human rights abuse in cases where national governments refuse to do so. No disciplinary action is known to have been taken against any pilots or commanders involved in the slaughter of Afghan civilians.
The July 1 massacre was just the latest in a long list of war crimes Washington has already committed in Afghanistan. Sadly, it will not be the last.
The article above was written by Norm Dixon.
