[Bloquez l'empire!] Report Criticizes Marines' Actions in Afghanistan (Graphic detail)

[mary foster]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/world/asia/14cnd-afghan.html?ex=1334289600
&en=c66c93c61c77237d&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Report Criticizes Marines' Actions in Afghanistan



By CARLOTTA GALL

Published: 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 rampage that covered 10
miles of highway and left 12 civilians dead, including an infant and three
elderly men, according to a report published today by an Afghan human rights
commission.



Families of the victims said this week that they had demanded justice from
the American military and the Afghan government, and they described the
aftermath of the marines' shooting, in Nangarhar Province. One 16-year-old
newly married girl was cut down while she was carrying a bundle of grass to
her family's farmhouse. A 75-year-old man walking to his shop was hit by so
many bullets that his son 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 initially struck a convoy of a Marine Special
Operations unit on March 4, wounding one American, and said that there may
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 non-military 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."



The bombing and subsequent shooting was the most high profile of a number of
human rights violations by both sides in the fighting in Afghanistan that
were documented by the human rights commission. The report comes amid
resurgent Taliban violence and coalition reprisals that are costing an
increasing number of civilian lives and have brought harsh criticism of the
government and international forces.



A spokesman for the military's Central Command said the report had been
forwarded to Adm. William J. Fallon, the senior American officer in the
region, for review.



The military, which is conducting its own criminal investigation, has said
that the marines involved were being kept in Afghanistan and that the rest
of their 120-man company has been pulled out of the country. One senior
official who has served in Afghanistan said in a recent interview that such
a recall was unprecedented and was a sign of the seriousness of the
incident.



The deputy director of the human rights commission, Nader Nadery, warned
that incidents like the highway shooting have greatly fueled outrage in
Afghanistan, contradicting efforts by coalition forces to win people's
support away from the Taliban.



"There is a high level of frustration among the public and civilians that
they are victims of both sides of the conflict," he added.



In Spinpul, where the incident happened, and in the whole province of
Nangarhar, that frustration is evident. 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 Ghor
Ghashta, 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 some 500 yards along the road from the
bridge that gives the village its name, White Bridge, on the main highway
about 25 miles east of the town 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 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
incident, the United States military said that the convoy had come under a
"complex ambush from several directions," but the human rights commission
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.



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 report said.



The driver of the car, 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
power of 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 sacks of 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 when he first came on the scene. "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 and 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 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 one minibus, including a
1-year-old child, the report said.



In more incidents over the 10-mile stretch of road from Spinpul, the marines
killed six more people and wounded 25.



The report covered other civilian killings in recent weeks, including
extensive human-rights violations by Taliban fighters and their allies, like
beheadings and the mutilation of victims.



In other cases involving coalition troops in Afghan, 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 five.



The report also criticized ongoing house raids by American forces, including
one on the house of one of the human rights commission's staff members, who
said he was hooded and handcuffed to a detonator and told not to move in
case it exploded.