U.S.
HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS
IN
THE WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN
THESE
ARE THE ONES WE HEAR ABOUT ON U.S. MEDIA
(There may be many, many
more)
U.S. War Crimes
Against Afghanistan
U.S.
bombs have killed at least 3,767 civilians in Afghanistan!
(estimate is
up to 4,000 - January 29th, 2002)
Prisoner
Torture and Massacres in Afghanistan
"We
are not innocent of making war against civilian populations.
The modern doctrine of such warfare was set forth and enacted
by General William Tecumseh Sherman, who held that a civilian
population could be declared guilty and rightly subjected to
military punishment. We have never repudiated that doctrine." Wendell
Berry
War,
by its very nature, victimizes innocent civilians. It kills, maims,
murders, cripples, orphans, widows, and destroys innocent people
and their property. This has always been the case and is a well known
fact. Despite their assurances that they are trying real hard to
avoid civilian casualties, which they refer to as "collateral
damage" as "murder" doesn't sound very good, the military
know that they will kill innocent people, perhaps hundreds of thousands
of them before they finish yet another needless war. For example,
World War II ended with the nuclear bombing of two cities crowded
with innocent civilians.
To
this day, U.S. military personnel justify the mass murders and insinuate
that they are willing to do it again. The Vietnam war involved the
deaths of 2 million Vietnamese, mostly civilians (3% of the casualties
were American). Some American Vietnam vets, to this day, lament that
they could not have killed more people there.
The
Korean war killed 3 million Asians, mostly civilians. Hundreds of
thousands of innocent civilians have been tortured, brutalized and
killed in Central America under the U.S. backed and trained guerilla
armies and death squads during the Reagan/Bush administrations. 100,000
were killed in El Salvador alone between 1980 and 1992 as the U.S.
funneled a million dollars a day to finance El Salvador's war of
terror against its own people. The U.S. bombed a civilian neighborhood
during its illegal invasion of Panama. The UN estimates that a million
people, mostly civilians, have died as a direct result of U.S. imposed
sanctions against Iraq between 1991 and 1997 alone, following the
Gulf War, which itself is estimated to have killed between 100,000
and 200,000 Iraqis, many of them civilians. The use of war to pursue
justice for a crime against civilians, such as the Trade Tower bombings,
is an immoral and senseless crime in itself.
Perhaps
the military mentality is best summed up by a quote from a military
person, recently sent to us by email: "As a former paratrooper
and combat veteran, I can assure you that the United States has not,
since WW2, targeted civilians. If there are unfortunate civilian
deaths, those are the fortunes of war. I am confident that we will
prevail. If our enemy cowardly hides behind civilians, kill them
all, God will know His own."
In
Bush's war against Afghanistan, the US began a series of murderous
human rights violations almost immediately. We will keep a record
of them on this page. Please email us with any additional ones which
we have not been made aware of! Undoubtedly, this is only the tip
of a tragic iceberg!
Dates
are when the reports were broadcast over American media:
October
7th: Bombings start
Mid
October: U.S. Bombs residential neighborhood in Kabul
Mid
October: U.S. bombs Red Cross Buildings (in Kabul?)
October
21: U.S. bombs and kills ten year old son of Taliban
leader
Bomb
is also dropped through roof of boy's school, doesn't explode.
October
22: U.S. allegedly bombs hospital, killing 100
October
22: Taliban announce that over 1,000 civilians have
now been killed by the US.
October
23 (Washington Post): US accidentally drops 1,000
pound bomb on senior citizens home in Herat. Estimated killed:
100.
U.S.
also drops two 500 pound bombs on residential area over northwest
Kabul.
October
25 (NPR): U.S. accidentally bombs civilian bus
October
27 (NJ Star Ledger): U.S. accidentally bombs UN building
in Kabul killing United Nations bomb sniffing dogs used to remove
land mines.
Saturday
October 27, 2001, The Guardian:
Civilians
wounded in allied bombing raids are fleeing into Pakistan for treatment
because the medical system in southern Afghanistan has effectively
collapsed, refugees said yesterday. Hospitals in the city of Kandahar,
the Taliban's spiritual home, are operating at a fraction of capacity
despite spiraling numbers of injured because there are no longer
enough trained doctors, nurses or drugs.
Parents
with mutilated children have been turned away and told to hire smugglers
to take them across the border to Quetta, a Pakistani frontier city
at least six hours away by car. Refugees interviewed in Quetta's
civil hospital yesterday said they were the lucky ones. Those too
wounded or poor to make the journey have been left to die in their
homes in Kandahar. "It is unbelievable, there were no surgeons
available when we visited hospitals last week. They were too afraid
to work and those doctors who were there did not seem trained. They
did not have enough equipment," said Abdul Halim, 30, a wheat
farmer.
Some
doctors had opened private clinics in their own homes and charged
extortionate fees for operations, he claimed. "Those who cannot
pay just go home to die." Groaning beside Mr Halim on a bed
was his friend Ziaul Haq, 18, whose right foot was crushed in a bombing
raid last week while scrounging for work in Kabul's Pagwanagsaj bazaar.
The flesh and muscles were shredded, leaving just bone, but his family
had enough money for his trip to Quetta via Kandahar. Mr Haq would
not speak.
In
another bed at ward B Abdul Wasaj, 10, lay absolutely still, trying
not to shift his skinny frame lest it inflame the broken hip that
encased his left leg in plaster. He had been playing football in
front of his Kandahar home at 10am nine days ago when a bomb blast
threw him several feet in the air, he said. "I heard a boom
and then I went unconscious." The blast created a thick dust
cloud that shrouded dozens of wounded, said his father, Ghulam Gilani,
40. "It took a while to find him because he wasn't crying out
like the others were and he was buried in sand. I thought he must
be dead." Mr Gilani carried his son to a hospital which could
do nothing and so he took his son to Quetta, without anaesthetic. "He
cried all the way."
Two
miles away another hospital, the Al-khidmat Al-Hajeri, was treating
survivors from the Ullah family, which buried 11 relatives in the
town of Tarin Kot after an air strike last weekend. Dery Gul's two
daughters suffered deep cuts but her own face was swaddled in bandages,
her eyes burned. The Pentagon has admitted several bombs have gone
astray since the air campaign started but the patients were convinced
they had been deliberately targeted.
October
28 (NPR): U.S. accidentally bombs Ghanikhil, civilian town
of the Northern Alliance, killing 13 civilians including a father
and his 7 children.
October
28 (NJ Star Ledger): The UN High Commission for Refugees
announces that "at the end of the day this could possibly
be the worst refugee crisis we have seen in the world. Far worse
than Somalia and Kosovo." The World Food Program says
the logistics of delivering 52,000 tons of food per month required
to feed the 6 million people at risk of starving in Afghanistan
are formidable. "No, we are not very optimistic, but we
are racing against the clock to prevent millions of people from
starving. . . There is no question that when winter comes around
we have to drop food, and that has its own difficulties with the
airstrikes going on. It's not a pretty picture."
At
the end of October, as a result of a lot of reports of civilian
casualties by the American media, the Bush administration clamped
down and suggested that such reporting should be stopped. It was
then reported that CNN agreed that the reports of civilian casualties
amounted to imbalanced reporting. Immediately after, the US public
was warned of a "new terrorist threat." This threat was
not only impending, but was to occur on the west coast. All major
media groups diverted their attention from the civilian deaths
in Afghanistan to the west coast, where, on November 2, 2001, all
TV news stations had their cameras trained on the Golden Gate Bridge
in expectation of a "terrorist attack," a ridiculous
scenario when you think about it. Bombing in Afghanistan during
this diversion was increased both in frequency and intensity, but
reports of civilian casualties dropped to virtually nothing. This
is mentioned here to illustrate the complicity of the mass media
during wartime and the collusion between the major media groups
and the political party in power. The impending terrorist threat
was simply a diversion to break the public's attention from civilian
casualties. It was hugely successful. A week later, after the ruse
had been employed and succeeded, the FBI reported that there had
been no credible evidence of a new terrorist threat. Although the "terrorist
threat" made front page headlines, the FBI revelation didn't.
Propaganda works, and it has been developed to a fine art. This
is a perfect example.
October
30, 2001:

November
7, 2001:

Early
November: Bush administration warns media to watch what
they report. CNN chief suggests reports of civilian casualties
amount to biased and imbalanced war coverage. Coverage of civilian
war deaths and injuries subsequently plummets to almost nothing
(see below). Most of the detailed information about civilian deaths
now comes from the foreign press.
November
7th: USA Today reports that US cluster bombs killed one
person and wounded others when they touched and set off an unexploded
bomblet released from a cluster bomb in the Afghan village of Ishaq
Suleman Zai. Two other Afghan children were injured when they touched
an unexploded bomblet in the village of Qalashakr. USA Today reports
that the Pentagon is also now using its biggest non-nuclear bomb,
the 15,000 pound "Daisy Cutter" bomb, which contains
12,600 pounds of explosives, is roughly the size of a small car,
incinerates anything within 1800 feet (roughly 1/3 mile) creating
a shockwave that can be felt for miles.
November
13th: (Los Angeles Times): Shrapnel from U.S. bombing hit
a convoy of 22 World Food Program trucks near Shaspuhl. The trucks
were carrying 330 tons of food, enough to feed between 40,000 and
50,000 people for a month. Only 20% of the food is still usable.
Ten
UNICEF trucks in a convoy carrying water pumps and tents for displaced
civilians in Mazar-e-Sharif were stolen by the Northern Alliance.
November
29th, Commentary by Robert Fisk, The Independent,
following prisoner executions in Afghanistan:
Over
the past 50 years, we sat on our moral pedestal and lectured the
Chinese and the Soviets, the Arabs and the Africans, about human
rights. We pronounced on the human-rights crimes of Bosnians and
Croatians and Serbs. We put many of them in the dock, just as we
did the Nazis at Nuremberg. Thousands of dossiers were produced,
describing in nauseous detail
the secret courts and death squads and torture and extra judicial executions
carried out by rogue states and pathological dictators. Quite right
too.
Yet
suddenly, after 11 September, we went mad. We bombed Afghan villages
into rubble, along with their inhabitants blaming the insane
Taliban and Osama bin Laden for our slaughter and now we have
allowed our gruesome militia allies to execute their prisoners. President
George Bush has signed into law a set of secret military courts to
try and then liquidate anyone believed to be a "terrorist murderer" in
the eyes of America's awesomely inefficient intelligence services.
And make no mistake about it, we are talking here about legally sanctioned
American government death squads. They have been created, of course,
so that Osama bin Laden and his men should they be caught rather
than killed, will have no public defence; just a pseudo trial and
a firing squad.
It's
quite clear what has happened. When people with yellow or black or
brownish skin, with Communist or Islamic or Nationalist credentials,
murder their prisoners or carpet bomb villages to kill their enemies
or set up death squad courts, they must be condemned by the United
States, the European Union, the United Nations and the "civilised" world.
We are the masters of human rights, the Liberals, the great and good
who can preach to the impoverished masses. But when our people are
murdered
when our glittering buildings are destroyed then we tear up
every piece of human rights legislation, send off the B-52s in the
direction of the impoverished masses and set out to murder our enemies.
Winston
Churchill took the Bush view of his enemies. In 1945, he preferred
the straightforward execution of the Nazi leadership. Yet despite
the fact that Hitler's monsters were responsible for at least 50
million deaths 10,000 times greater than the victims of 11
September the Nazi murderers were given a trial at Nuremberg
because US President Truman made a remarkable decision.
"Undiscriminating executions or punishments," he said, "without
definite findings of guilt fairly arrived at, would not fit easily
on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride."
No
one should be surprised that Mr Bush a small-time Texas Governor-Executioner
should fail to understand the morality of a statesman in the
Whitehouse. What is so shocking is that the Blairs, Schröders,
Chiracs and all the television boys should have remained so gutlessly
silent in the face of the Afghan executions and East European-style
legislation sanctified since 11 September.
Click
here for more commentary on the prisoner massacres
02 December 2001 The Independent
U.S.
Bomb Error Kills 70
By Richard Lloyd Parry in Jalalabad and Justin Huggler in Mazar-i-Sharif
American
air raids have killed at least 70 civilians, and possibly hundreds,
in a single night in the biggest bombing mistake of the war, according
to pro-Western commanders in eastern Afghanistan. The US military
said the bombing "just did not happen".
The
civilians apparently died as the result of mis-targeting by B-52
bombers aiming at al-Qa'ida bases in the White Mountains near Jalalabad,
where Osama bin Laden is reported to be hiding. At least 50 people
died late on Friday night in the villages of Baluth and Akal Khal
in the Mairajuddin district, 30 miles from the regional capital,
while another raid early yesterday morning destroyed the village
of Kama Ado.
One
commander claimed only 20 people were killed in Kama Ado, but Lal
Gul, a local farmer, said few villagers were left alive from a population
of more than 200. Major Brad Lowell, a Marine Corps spokesman, said
although American bombs did hit a target in the area, it was not
civilian. He said the witnesses' account "doesn't jibe with
our imagery", adding: "It just did not happen."
December
4, 2001 Pittsburgh Post Gazette, page A6:
"In
a signed declaration addressed to the world, the elders of the [Tora
Bora] region said:
"...Our demand to the United States government and its coalition:
stop the bombing in the name of humanity."
A
US missile killed eight guards sent by the Eastern Shura to watch
over the local municipal office in Landa Khel. The villagers of Kama
Ado, about 35 miles south of Jalalabad, said they had identified
and buried 155 of their dead. Eastern Shura officials said at least
58 people had died in three other nearby villages. The officials
and villagers said the death toll would climb and that the dead were
Afghan civilians, not al Qaida fighters. The Pentagon has denied
that any villages were struck."
The
media continues to report that "it has been impossible to verify
these accounts"
of civilian deaths. However, the next day, on December 5th, also in
the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, FRONT PAGE (not page A6 where the civilian
death reports were buried, the headline read:
"Afghans
say 10 al-Qaida chiefs killed... At least ten senior lieutenants
in Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida organization were killed by US airstrikes
on Monday near the mountainous complex of caves and tunnels where
officials believe bin laden is hiding..."
Funny
how over 200 civilians can be killed and the deaths reported by both
villagers and officials who had to bury them, and the Pentagon not
have any evidence of these deaths at all, yet 10 al-Qaida members
who died in the bombing can be easily identified by the Pentagon
and these reports put on the front page. You have to turn to page
A-15, though, to get the rest of the story on the 10 al-Qaida chiefs
killed: "There were conflicting reports about the identity of
[the al-Qaida chiefs] killed in the aerial attacks. One top military
commander here said that bin Laden's closest advisor, Ayman al-Zawahiri,
was among those injured or dead. Other reports said that while al-Zawahiri
was unharmed, his wife and three daughters were killed."
On
December 3rd, it was reported that 25 Israelis were killed
by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem. Bush called the bombings "horrific
acts of murder."
Yet, when innocent Afghan civilians are killed, injured, maimed, or
their villages destroyed by the US bombs, the Bush administration denies
the reports and brushes them aside as inconsequential.
December
4th, 2001, Robert Fisk:
"... I
visited a grotty, fly-blown hospital in Quetta, the Pakistani border
city where Afghan victims of American bombing raids are brought for
treatment. Surrounded by an army of flies in bed No 12, Mahmat most
Afghans have no family names
told me his story. There were no CNN cameras, no BBC reporters in this
hospital to film the patient. Nor will there be. Mahmat had been asleep
in his home in the village of Kazikarez six days ago when a bomb from
an American B-52 fell on his village. He was asleep in one room, his
wife with the children. His son Nourali died, as did Jaber aged
10 Janaan, eight, Salamo, six, Twayir, four, and Palwasha the
only girl two.
"The plane
flies so high that we cannot hear them and the mud roof fell on them," Mahmat
said. His wife Rukia whom he permitted me to see lay
in the next room (bed No 13). She did not know that her children
were dead. She was 25 and looked 45. A cloth dignified her forehead.
Her children like so many Afghan innocents in this frightful
War for civilisation were victims whom Mr Bush and Mr Blair
will never acknowledge. And watching Mahmat plead for money the
American bomb had blasted away his clothes and he was naked beneath
the hospital blanket I could see something terrible: he and
the angry cousin beside him and the uncle and the wife's brother
in the hospital attacking America for the murders that they had inflicted
on their family...
One day, I
suspect, Mahmat's relatives may be angry enough to take their revenge
on the United States, in which case they will be terrorists, men
of violence. We may even ask if their leaders could control them.
They are not bin Ladens, Mahmat's family said that
"We are neither Taliban nor Arab" but, frankly, could
we blame them if they decided to strike at the United States for the
bloody and terrible crime done to their family. Can the United States
stop bombing villages? Can Washington persuade its special forces to
protect prisoners? Can the Americans control their own people?"
Read
the full Robert Fisk article
December
11, 2001 (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) "The bombs
[in the Tora Bora region - see December 4th, where the Elders
pleaded for the bombing to stop "in the name of humanity"]
are knocking huge boulders off the side of the mountain, and
several of them have rolled down on young children,"
said an Afghan villager who recently trvaeled to one of the mountain
pockets where {al-Qaida] families were hiding. [The US military knows
that the al-Qaida are with their families and are bombing them relentlessly
anyway.]
(Pittsburgh
Post Gazette): ..."several thousand displaced people in this
refugee camp near Kunduz need winter clothing and medical attention
to prevent many more deaths in the months ahead. More than 175 of
these refugees, most of them children, have died of disease since
the bombardment began, relief officials said. Their graves clutter
the camp's edges. 'The situation is very bad,' said Abdul-Manan,
senior field assistant for [the International Organization for Migration].
In another time, Bagh-e-Shirkat might have been beautiful. It was
once a self-sufficient village on a plateau above the meandering
waters of the Chanar Darya, with expansive vistas of rice patties
and forested banks below. Now it is a place of misery and disease,
a cold and mud-slicked maze of crimbled homes, where piles of human
waste are everywhere. Many families live in holes dug in the ground
and covered with logs, earth and plastic sheets. The temperature
has hovered near freezing for a week, and light but steady rain has
cloaked everything in an unrelenting chill. Relief officials and
residents here said the combination of poor diet, foul weather and
unsanitary conditions has accelerated the spread of sickness just
as winter has arrived.
"...many
[relief] agencies that normally operate in this region... were thoroughly
looted in the last days of fighting in the nearby city of Kunduz.
Relief officials said that marauding soldiers, some from Taliban
units and others from the Northern Alliance, stole their trucks and
stripped offices of everything from tools to medical equipment....
So far American help has not been visible, except for an aerial food
drop near the airport last week. It rained meals on Northern Alliance
soldiers, but not civilians, and had no effect on the camps of hungry
people a few miles away."
Thursday December 20, 2001
Estimates
suggest US bombs have killed at least 3,767 civilians
The
innocent dead in a coward's war
Seumas Milne; The Guardian
The price in
blood that has already been paid for America's war against terror
is only now starting to become clear. Not by Britain or the US, nor
even so far by the al-Qaida and Taliban leaders held responsible
for the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. It has instead
been paid by ordinary Afghans, who had nothing whatever to do with
the atrocities, didn't elect the Taliban theocrats who ruled over
them and had no say in the decision to give house room to Bin Laden
and his friends.
The Pentagon
has been characteristically coy about how many people it believes
have died under the missiles it has showered on Afghanistan. Acutely
sensitive to the impact on international support for the war, spokespeople
have usually batted away reports of civilian casualties with a casual "these
cannot be independently confirmed", or sometimes simply denied
the deaths occurred at all. The US media have been particularly helpful.
Seven weeks into the bombing campaign, the Los Angeles Times only
felt able to hazard the guess that "at least dozens of civilians"
had been killed.
Now, for the
first time, a systematic independent study has been carried out into
civilian casualties in Afghanistan by Marc Herold, a US economics
professor at the University of New Hampshire. Based on corroborated
reports from aid agencies, the UN, eyewitnesses, TV stations, newspapers
and news agencies around the world, Herold estimates that at least
3,767 civilians were killed by US bombs between October 7 and December
10. That is an average of 62 innocent deaths a day - and an even
higher figure than the 3,234 now thought to have been killed in New
York and Washington on September 11....
Read
the entire article...
Sunday, December 23, 2001 in
the Minneapolis Star-Tribune
To
Make Amends for Errant Bombs
by David Corn
....But the United States also ought to establish a fund that specifically
makes payments to Afghan civilians whose families, bodies, homes
or businesses have been shattered by errant U.S. bombs. If there
are inevitable civilian losses due to the U.S. military action,
shouldn't America bear those costs as the price of protecting itself
from terrorism?
The Afghan
civilians struck by U.S. bombs are innocent victims not unlike those
Americans killed or injured on Sept. 11. Consider the case of Noor
Muhammad, a 12-year-old boy who lived in a village near Tora Bora.
He recalls hearing an airplane and running from his room; he does
not know what happened next. But when he awoke in a Jalalabad hospital
he had lost his right arm, his left hand and his sight. In another
instance, according to villagers outside Kandahar, U.S. warplanes
pursuing Arab fighters sprayed a wide area with shrapnel, killing
and injuring dozens of civilians, including several small children.
One, a 6-year-old girl, was paralyzed below the waist. Americans
have generously created funds for the American survivors of the Sept.
11 attacks. Noor and others like him deserve similar generosity....
Read
the entire article
24
December 2001
Americans 'duped' into attack
on convoy
By Kim Sengupta in Kabul
A tale of tribal
treachery, Arab mercenaries and how the Americans may have been used
to settle an Afghan blood feud emerged yesterday behind the bombing
of a convoy that left up to 60 people dead and 40 injured...
Read
the entire article
December 27th, 2001: National
Public Radio:
Dozens of Afghan
civilians were killed in airstrikes today when a village was intentionally
bombed by the US. The villagers said there were no Al Qaida there
and couldn't understand why they were targeted. Rumsfield said they
suspected that Al Qaida were there. He said Osama bin Laden is responsible
for the civilian deaths.
What
If We Could See the Afghan Dead as We've Seen the September 11
Victims?
by Howard
Zinn (here excerpted - to read the entire article, click
here)
From a hospital in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, reported in the Boston Globe
by John Donnelly on December 5, 2001:
"In one
bed lay Noor Mohammad, 10, who was a bundle of bandages. He lost
his eyes and hands to the bomb that hit his house after Sunday dinner.
Hospital director Guloja Shimwari shook his head at the boy's wounds.
'The United States must be thinking he is Osama,' Shimwari said.
'If he is not Osama, then why would they do this?'"
The report
continued:
"The hospital's
morgue received 17 bodies last weekend, and officials here estimate
at least 89 civilians were killed in several villages. In the hospital
yesterday, a bomb's damage could be chronicled in the life of one
family. A bomb had killed the father, Faisal Karim. In one bed was
his wife, Mustafa Jama, who had severe head injuries.... Around her,
six of her children were in bandages.... One of them, Zahidullah,
8, lay in a coma."
In the New
York Times , Barry Bearak, reporting December 15 from the
village of Madoo, Afghanistan, tells of the destruction of fifteen
houses and their occupants. "'In the night, as we slept, they
dropped the bombs on us,' said Paira Gul, a young man whose eyes
were aflame with bitterness. His sisters and their families had perished,
he said.... The houses were small, the bombing precise. No structure
escaped the thundering havoc. Fifteen houses, 15 ruins.... 'Most
of the dead are children,' Tor Tul said."
Another Times
reporter, C.J. Chivers, writing from the village of Charykari on December
12, reported "a terrifying and rolling barrage that the
villagers believe was the payload of an American B-52.... The villagers
say 30 people died.... One man, Muhibullah, 40, led the way through
his yard and showed three unexploded cluster bombs he is afraid to
touch. A fourth was not a dud. It landed near his porch. 'My son
was sitting there...the metal went inside him.' The boy, Zumarai,
5, is in a hospital in Kunduz, with wounds to leg and abdomen. His
sister, Sharpari, 10, was killed. 'The United States killed my daughter
and injured my son,' Mr. Muhibullah said. 'Six of my cows were destroyed
and all of my wheat and rice was burned. I am very angry. I miss
my daughter.'"
From the Washington
Post , October 24, from Peshawar, Pakistan, by Pamela Constable: "Sardar,
a taxi driver and father of 12, said his family had spent night after
night listening to the bombing in their community south of Kabul.
One night during the first week, he said, a bomb aimed at a nearby
radio station struck a house, killing all five members of the family
living there. 'There was no sign of a home left,' he said. 'We just
collected the pieces of bodies and buried them.'"
Reporter Catherine
Philp of the Times of London, reporting October 25 from Quetta,
Pakistan: "It was not long after 7 pm on Sunday when the bombs
began to fall over the outskirts of Torai village.... Rushing outside,
Mauroof saw a massive fireball. Morning brought an end to the bombing
and...a neighbor arrived to tell him that some 20 villagers had been
killed in the blasts, among them ten of his relatives. 'I saw the
body of one of my brothers-in-law being pulled from the debris,'
Mauroof said. 'The lower part of his body had been blown away. Some
of the other bodies were unrecognizable. There were heads missing
and arms blown off....' The roll call of the dead read like an invitation
list to a family wedding: his mother-in-law, two sisters-in-law,
three brothers-in-law, and four of his sister's five young children,
two girls and two boys, all under the age of eight."
Human Rights
Watch report, October 26: "Twenty-five-year-old Samiullah...rushed
home to rescue his family.... he found the bodies of his twenty-year-old
wife and three of his children: Mohibullah, aged six; Harifullah,
aged three; and Bibi Aysha, aged one.... Also killed were his two
brothers, Nasiullah, aged eight, and Ghaziullah, aged six, as well
as two of his sisters, aged fourteen and eleven."
From Reuters, October
28, Sayed Salahuddin reporting from Kabul: "A U.S. bomb
flattened a flimsy mud-brick home in Kabul Sunday, blowing apart
seven children as they ate breakfast with their father.... Sobs
racked the body of a middle-aged man as he cradled the head of
his baby, its dust-covered body dressed only in a blue diaper,
lying beside the bodies of three other children, their colorful
clothes layered with debris from their shattered homes."
Washington
Post Foreign Service, November 2, from Quetta, Pakistan, by Rajiv
Chandrasekaran: "The thunder of the first explosions jolted
Nasir Ahmed awake.... he grabbed his 14-year-old niece and scurried
into a communal courtyard. From there, he said, they watched as civilians
who survived the bombing run, including his niece and a woman holding
her 5-year-old son, were gunned down by a slow-moving, propeller-driven
aircraft circling overheard. When the gunship departed an hour later,
at least 25 people in the village--all civilians--were dead, according
to accounts of the incident provided today by Ahmed, two other witnesses,
and several relatives of people in the village.
"The Pentagon
confirmed that the village was hit...but officials said they believe
the aircraft struck a legitimate military target.... Asked about
civilian casualties, the official said, 'We don't know. We're not
on the ground.'
"Shaida,
14.... 'Americans are not good.... They killed my mother. They killed
my father. I don't understand why.'"
A Newsday report
on November 24 from Kabul, by James Rupert: "In the sprawling,
mud-brick slum of Qala-ye-Khatir, most men were kneeling in the mosques
at morning prayer on November 6 when a quarter-ton of steel and high
explosives hurtled from the sky into the home of Gul Ahmed, a carpet
weaver. The American bomb detonated, killing Ahmed, his five daughters,
one of his wives, and a son. Next door, it demolished the home of
Sahib Dad and killed two of his children....
"Ross
Chamberlain, the coordinator for U.N. mine-clearing operations in
much of Afghanistan.... 'There's really no such thing as a precision
bombing.... We are finding more cases of errant targeting than accurate
targeting, more misses than hits.'"
The New York
Times , November 22, from Ghaleh Shafer, Afghanistan: "10-year-old
Mohebolah Seraj went out to collect wood for his family, and thought
he had happened upon a food packet. He picked it up and lost three
fingers in an explosion. Doctors say he will probably lose his whole
hand.... his mother, Sardar Seraj...said that she cried and told
the doctors not to cut off her son's whole hand...
"The hospital
where her son is being cared for is a grim place, lacking power and
basic sanitation. In one room lay Muhammad Ayoub, a 20-year-old who
was in the house when the cluster bomb initially landed. He lost
a leg and his eyesight, and his face was severely disfigured. He
moaned in agony.... Hospital officials said that a 16-year-old had
been decapitated."
A New York
Times report on December 3 from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, by
Tim Weiner: "The commanders, who are pro-American...say that
four nearby villages were struck this weekend, leaving 80 or more
people dead and others wounded.... The villages are near Tora Bora,
the mountain camp where Mr. bin Laden is presumed to be hiding. A
Pentagon spokesman said Saturday that the bombing of civilians near
Tora Bora 'never happened.'
"Eight
men guarding the building [a district office building]...were killed,
[mujahedeen commander] Hajji Zaman said. He gave the names of the
dead as Zia ul-Hassan, 16; Wilayat Khan, 17; Abdul Wadi, 20; Jany,
22; Abdul Wahid, 30; Hajji Wazir, 35; Hajji Nasser, also 35; and
Awlia Gul, 37.... Ali Shah, 26, of Landa Khel, said, 'There is no
one in this village who is part of Al Qaeda.'
"Witnesses
said that at least 50 and as many as 200 villagers had been killed.
"'We are
poor people,' [Muhammad] Tahir said. 'Our trees are our only shelter
from the cold and wind. The trees have been bombed. Our waterfall,
our only source of water--they bombed it. Where is the humanity?'"
The Independent
, December 4:
"The village where nothing happened.... The cemetery on the hill
contains 40 freshly dug graves, unmarked and identical. And the village
of Kama Ado has ceased to exist.... And all this is very strange because,
on Saturday morning--when American B-52s unloaded dozens of bombs that
killed 115 men, women and children--nothing happened.... We know this
because the U.S. Department of Defence told us so.... 'It just didn't
happen.'"
The New York
Times , December 12, David Rohde, writing from Ghazni, Afghanistan: "Each
ward of the Ghazni Hospital features a new calamity. In the first,
two 14-year-old boys had lost parts of their hands when they picked
up land mines. 'I was playing with a toy and it exploded' said one
of them, Muhammad Allah.... a woman named Rose lay on a bed in the
corner of the room, grunting with each breath. Her waiflike children
slept nearby, whimpering periodically. Early on Sunday morning, shrapnel
from an American bomb tore through the woman's abdomen, broke her
4-year-old son's leg and ripped into her 6-year-old daughter's head,
doctors here said. A second 6-year-old girl in the room was paralyzed
from the waist down. X-rays showed how a tiny shard of metal had
neatly severed her spinal cord."
Reported in
the Chicago Tribune , December 28, by Paul Salopek, from Madoo,
Afghanistan: "'American soldiers came after the bombing and
asked if any Al Qaeda had lived here,' said villager Paira Gul. 'Is
that an Al Qaeda?' Gul asked, pointing to a child's severed foot
he had excavated minutes earlier from a smashed house. 'Tell me'
he said, his voice choking with fury, 'is that what an Al Qaeda looks
like?'"
Reuters, December
31, from Qalaye Niazi, Afghanistan: "Janat Gul said 24
members of his family were killed in the pre-dawn U.S. bombing
raid on Qalaye Niazi, and described himself as the sole survivor....
In the U.S. Major Pete Mitchell--a spokesman for U.S. Central Command--said:
'We are aware of the incident and we are currently investigating.'"
Yes, these
reports appeared, but scattered through the months of bombing and
on the inside pages, or buried in larger stories and accompanied
by solemn government denials. With no access to alternative information,
it is not surprising that a majority of Americans have approved of
what they have been led to think is a "war on terrorism."
Recall that
Americans at first supported the war in Vietnam. But once the statistics
of the dead became visible human beings--once they saw not only the
body bags of young GIs piling up by the tens of thousands but also
the images of the napalmed children, the burning huts, the massacred
families at My Lai--shock and indignation fueled a national movement
to end the war.
I do believe
that if people could see the consequences of the bombing campaign
as vividly as we were all confronted with the horrifying photos in
the wake of September 11, if they saw on television night after night
the blinded and maimed children, the weeping parents of Afghanistan,
they might ask: Is this the way to combat terrorism?
January 21, 2002 (National
Public Radio)
Villages were
again intentionally bombed in a six day bombing campaign during the
week of January 14th, 2002.
April 2002: Four Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan
by American bombs.
July 2002: 48 killed when American bomb hits wedding party.
July 9, 2002
"Why
are they shooting our women and children?"
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
"Why are
they shooting our women and children?" asked Abdul Kaliq, a
25-year-old farmer from Kakarak, in Afghanistan.
"The Americans
should make peace in Afghanistan and rebuild Afghanistan," he
said, wincing as he moved in the hospital bed. Shrapnel lacerated
his back and both arms during the raid.
Abdul Kaliq
was one of more than 120 survivors as U.S. planes mistakenly attacked
an Afghan wedding party on July 1st. More than 40 civilians were
killed. Most of them were women and children.
BuzzFlash may
have the answer to Abdul Kaliq's question, "Why are they shooting
our women and children?"
Here is an
interview with an Ithaca, New York, U.S. Army soldier that we linked
to in May that may explain it all:
"In an
April interview with The Ithaca Journal at his family's Cayuga Heights
home, Guckenheimer, 22, shared his experiences during Operation Anaconda.
He was sent on March 6 in a company of more than 100 soldiers to
participate in the largest U.S.-led ground engagement in Eastern
Afghanistan.
"We were
told there were no friendly forces," said Guckenheimer, an assistant
gunner with the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum. "If there
was anybody there, they were the enemy. We were told specifically
that if there were women and children to kill them."
The interview
was conducted by
"The Ithaca Journal." (On June 4th, "The Ithaca Journal"
ran a "clarification" from Guckenheimer at http://www.theithacajournal.com/news/stories/20020604/opinion/440857.html We
are also posting it below this BuzzFlash Editorial.)
"The celebrations
were in full swing," writes The Times of London,"with hundreds
of guests preparing for a wedding singing and dancing in the beam
of a tractor's headlights. Out of the darkness a warplane descended,
sending rockets exploding through the crowd.
Survivors of
the party in Kakarak, southern Afghanistan, yesterday described the
events after they came under fire in the early hours of Monday from
American gunships. They told of a sustained attack from the air,
with wedding guests being chased and shot dead as they tried to escape."
It wasn't the
first time a wedding was bombed by U.S. military planes either. One
article documents at least three wedding bombings by American forces
(http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006D95F.htm).
"With
the festivities, some people said they didn't even hear the AC-130
gunship as it approached the compound. Sadiqa, 15, was in the women's
section listening to music when the firing started.
The first fire
hit among the women, she said. Terrified, she and others ran out
of the courtyard and into surrounding fields. Sadiqa said she searched
for a dry stream bed where she could hide. She was shot as she ran,
the shrapnel shearing into both legs.
Days later,
she still wore the salmon-colored dress she had put on for the party.
Her injuries will heal, doctors say; far harder is the loss of her
entire family, 15 people who died in the raid.
On a neighboring
bed, Sabor Gul, 11, stared out in distress. She looked terrified
as two reporters asked what had happened. A nurse explained that
the girl was scared because the visitors were Americans.
"The American
people bombed us," Sabor said softly. "The airplane was
very big. When the bombing started, every woman was scared; other
women were killed in the river."
"Around
her in the orchard, there was unspeakable gore. A woman's torso had
landed in one of the small almond trees. Human flesh was still hanging
on the tree five days after the attack, and more putrefying remains
were tangled in the branches of a pomegranate tree, its bright scarlet
flowers still blooming.
"They
were collecting body parts in a bucket," said the governor of
Oruzgan Province, Jan Muhammad, who arrived the day after the attack." (see http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/08/international/asia/08VILL.html)
Afghans
Report 17 Civilians Killed in Allied Air Raids
By CARLOTTA GALL
KABUL, Afghanistan, Feb.12,
2003 Afghan officials said today that 17 civilians, including
women and children, had been killed in an American-led bombing
of a mountainous region of southern Afghanistan, where United States
Special Forces have been fighting rebels since Monday.
The fighting
began when the Special Forces were attacked in an ambush and called
in coalition planes to bomb the area.
Col. Roger
King, the United States military spokesman, said that the Special
Forces battled about 25 rebels who had been spotted taking up offensive
positions around midday Tuesday, and that the Americans had captured
12 men near the village of Lejay.
He reported
no American or coalition casualties and said he had no information
about civilian casualties. But the civilian toll appears to have
been heavy.
An aide to
the governor of Helmand Province, where the fighting was going on,
said villagers had reported to the authorities that 17 civilians,
including women and children, had been killed.
"The people
came crying, saying their relatives had died or were missing," the
aide, Haji Muhammad Wali, said by telephone from Helmand's capital,
Lashkar Gah, Reuters reported.
The fighting
has been concentrated in Baghran, a mountainous region in the north
of the province. Baghran has been a source of concern for the United
States military tracking movements of suspected rebels.
American
Bomb Kills 11 Afghan Civilians
Wed., April 9, 2003 08:30 AM ET
By Parwez Besmel
BAGRAM, Afghanistan
(Reuters) - The U.S. military said 11 Afghan civilians, seven of
them women, were killed early on Wednesday when an American bomb
missed its target and landed on a house in eastern Afghanistan.
"Eleven
Afghan civilians were killed and one was wounded early this morning
when a bomb dropped by coalition aircraft landed in a house on the
outskirts of Shkin near the Pakistan border,"
said Douglas Lefforge, a spokesman at the U.S. military's headquarters
at Bagram air base north of Kabul.
Marie
Cocco
U.S. Owes Postwar Aid to Mothers,
Children
May 6, 2003
Americans should
not believe our
"good wars" in Afghanistan and Iraq are kinder and gentler
than most.
Afghanistan,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggested during a visit to Kabul
last week, is such a paragon of progress that it might become a model
for reconstruction in Iraq. Save the Children offers another perspective.
It ranks Afghanistan among the five worst conflict zones in which
to be a woman or child. The others are Angola, Burundi, the Congo
and Sierra Leone.
"More
than a year after the fall of the Taliban, there is still overwhelming
poverty, lack of basic services as well as insecurity, lawlessness
and continued violence throughout much of the country," the
report says.
On a scale
measuring the well-being of children, Afghanistan came in dead last,
behind 162 other countries. Eighty-seven percent of the Afghan population
remains without safe water, a quarter of children are malnourished,
and 71 percent still aren't enrolled in school. This is despite the
American president's proclamation in March 2002 that schools were
re-opening with spanking new textbooks sent by a generous United
States.
As for their
mothers - the Afghan women used so widely as public-relations props
for American politicians at the war's outset - Save the Children
found that almost all of them deliver babies without assistance from
trained health personnel. One in seven Afghan women dies during childbirth.
This is not
what we promised.
President George
W. Bush, in launching the war to wipe out al-Qaida terrorist bases,
used the oppression of Afghan women as a casus belli. The women sipped
tea at the White House and sat in a place of honor for the State
of the Union address. First lady Laura Bush delivered her own speeches
espousing their cause. The president said he would learn from the
past and not abandon Afghans to warlords and druglords once military
goals were met.
"We will
not leave until the mission is complete," Bush declared.
This mission
is not accomplished. Mostly, aid groups and U.S. diplomatic officials
say, it's because much of Afghanistan outside the capital has been
abandoned to warlords and druglords.
"The United
States has not been prepared to underwrite or ensure security outside
Kabul," Save the Children President Charles F. MacCormack said
in an interview. "It has been quite insecure in other parts
of Afghanistan all along and it's going from bad to worse."
Meanwhile in
Iraq, lack of safe water is fostering disease among children, and
nearly a month of U.S. occupation has failed to get hospitals functioning
properly. MacCormack said security in Iraq improves daily, but banditry
remains a threat.
"Trucks
are still robbed, people are still shot," he said. "What
sense is it for us to re-stock a clinic if somebody's going to come
at night and take the stuff?"
December 7, 2003
United States Warplanes
Kill Nine Children and One Man
KABUL, Afghanistan, Sunday, Dec. 7 United
States warplanes attacking a suspected member of the Taliban killed
nine children in the southeastern province of Ghazni on Saturday, Afghan
and American military officials confirmed Sunday morning. One man was
also killed in the attack, they said. The aircraft involved was an
A-10 attack jet, a type that flies low and fires guns and rockets in
support of infantry.
A spokesman for President Hamid Karzai
in Kabul said that when first reports arrived from the region, the
American military had denied that the attack occurred. Mr. Karzai has
frequently asked the United States military to take greater care with
bombing raids on civilian areas and with they intelligence it receives,
which has often proved erroneous. There have been hundreds of civilian
casualties from bombing raids during the past two years. At least 48
people were killed in July 2002 when American planes fired on a village
where a wedding party was in progress.
In another incident, eleven people from
one family were killed when a bomb landed on their house near the Pakistani
border in Paktika Province. The United States military quickly acknowledged
the mistake, saying the attack was aimed at a group of militants whe
were trying to escape across the border.
On Oct. 30. American planes bombed a village
in the northern province of Nuristan, killing six members of one family,
most of them women and children, and two religious students in the
village mosque. The military has not yet confirmed that its planes
were in the area that night.
In their statement, the United States
military said it the targeted man had been involved in the killings
of two contractors working on Afghanistan's main highway connecting
the capital with the cities of Kandahar and Herat. There have been
no reported killings of contractors. Several Afghan security policemen
were killed in an attack on the road in September.
American and allied forces in Afghanistan "follow
stringent rules of engagement to specifically avoid this type of incident
while continuing to target terrorists," the statement said.
The aircraft opened fire on the suspect
in what whas described as "an isolated rural site" south
of the town of Ghazni, the statement said.
The attack came about 10:30 on Saturday
morning. Ghazni is about 80 miles southeast of Kabul on the road to
Kandahar, the former stronghold of the Taliban movement that governed
Afghanistan before the United States and Afghan opposition forces overthrew
it two years ago.
From the BBC,
December 7, 2003:
Local villagers in Afghanistan have contradicted
US reports that the target of an air strike that killed nine children
also died in the raid.
The attack was carried out on Saturday
in the village of Hutala, in a remote area of southern Ghazni province.
US officials said they were acting on
extensive intelligence and had killed a former Taleban militant, Mullah
Wazir.
But local Afghans told the BBC's Crispin
Thurold the intended target had left the village 10 days earlier.
The United Nations has condemned the incident
as "profoundly distressing
" and called for a swift inquiry.
Patches of dried blood and a pitiful pile
of children's hats and shoes are the only evidence that remains of
a bombing raid that went dreadfully wrong, our correspondent says.
Seven boys, two girls and a 25-year-old
man were killed when two A-10 American planes fired rockets and bullets
into a group of villagers sitting under the shade of a tree at about
1030 local time (0600 GMT) on Saturday.
Only one house was hit in the attack -
but accounts differ on whether it belonged to the militant targeted.
US ground forces found the bodies of the children near that of the
intended target after the strike, US military spokesman Major Christopher
West said.
Six Afghan Children Killed in U.S. Attack
By STEPHEN GRAHAM, Associated Press Writer , December
10, 2003
KABUL, Afghanistan - Six children were
crushed to death by a collapsing wall during an assault by U.S. forces
on a weapons compound in eastern Afghanistan, an American military
spokesman said Wednesday — the second time in a week that children
have been killed in U.S. action against Taliban and al-Qaida suspects.
Both incidents occurred in Pashtun-dominated
areas, risking further alienation among the country's largest ethnic
group from which the Islamic militant Taliban emerged. The areas already
have been a focus of insurgent attacks on coalition and government
targets, and international aid workers.
Two adults were killed along with the
six children during an attack Friday night against a complex in Paktia
province where a renegade Afghan commander, Mullah Jalani, kept a huge
cache of weapons, said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty.
"The next day we discovered the
bodies of two adults and six children," he said. "We had
no indication there were noncombatants" in the compound.
Jalani is believed to be an associate
of renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former prime minister who
has joined the resurgent Taliban. The military believes Jalani was
involved in recent attacks against coalition forces, but has not provided
any details.
Jalani was not at the site, but nine
other people were arrested, Hilferty said. He did not identify the
adults that were killed or say whether they were combatants or civilians.
Hilferty said U.S. warplanes and troops
attacked the compound, setting off secondary explosions. He expressed
regret over the death of civilians in Afghanistan, but said it was
impossible to completely avoid such incidents.
"We try very hard not to kill anyone.
We would prefer to capture the terrorists rather than kill them," Hilferty
said.
"But in this incident, if noncombatants
surround themselves with thousands of weapons and hundreds of rounds
of ammunition and howitzers and mortars in a compound known to be used
by a terrorist, we are not completely responsible for the consequences."
Afghans Condemn U.S. Airstrike Deaths
By AMIR SHAH, Associated Press, 7/5/2005
KABUL, Afghanistan -
Afghanistan on Tuesday condemned the killing of up to 17 civilians
in a U.S. airstrike, and a senior American defense official confirmed
the deaths of two Navy SEALs who were missing in action in the country's
northeast.
"The president is extremely saddened and disturbed," said
Jawed Ludin, President Hamid Karzai's chief of staff. "There is
no way ... the killing of civilians can be justified. ... It's the
terrorists we are fighting. It's not our people who should suffer."
An initial strike destroyed a house, and as villagers
gathered to look at the damage, a U.S. warplane dropped a second bomb
on the same target, killing 17 of them, including three women and children.
U.S. forces "regret the loss of innocent lives and
follow stringent rules of engagement specifically to ensure that noncombatants
are safeguarded. However, when enemy forces move their families into
the locations where they conduct terrorist operations, they put these
innocent civilians at risk."
The civilians are the latest victims in an unprecedented
spate of violence that has left about 700 people dead and threatened
to sabotage three years of progress toward peace. Afghan officials
insist the violence will not disrupt landmark legislative elections
slated for September.
To
be continued (regrettably)...
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