Part II, The Death Convoy of Afghanistan
Witness reports and the probing of a mass grave point to war crimes. Does the United States have any responsibility for the atrocities of its allies? A NEWSWEEK investigation
By Babak Dehghanpisheh, John Barry and Roy Gutman
NEWSWEEK
msnbc.com
Some of the other drivers NEWSWEEK has traced say they, too, tried to help. One described how he also poked holes in his container and tried to bring water to the prisoners. But Dostum’s soldiers spotted him, and five of them gave him a beating with their rifle butts. Mohammed saw the beating and spent the rest of the night inside his locked cab.
Someone else saw a similar scene at Qala Zeini, and tried to send a warning. In December, Abdullah was in the settlement of Langar Khaneh, which is close to the fort of Qala Zeini. When the gates of Qala Zeini were closed for a day and a half, and traffic diverted through Langar Khaneh, Abdullah’s curiosity was aroused. He made his way over to the fort and peered inside. As he watched, four container trucks were driven into the fort. Not long after, prisoners arrived in pickups and Kamaz trucks, he says. Soldiers in the fort—Dostum’s men, Abdullah says—proceeded to tie up the prisoners with their own turbans.
Those who didn’t move fast enough or who tried to resist were beaten. Most prisoners, says Abdullah, were bound around their upper arms and blindfolded, but some were hogtied. Unruly prisoners were grabbed by hand and foot and swung into the containers on their bellies. When the containers were full, they were locked. Abdullah was in no doubt what he was witnessing. “The only purpose was to kill the prisoners,” he says.
Wondering whom he could alert to these preparations, Abdullah recalled an acquaintance who was working with the American forces based in Mazar. He was Said Vasiqullah Sadat, who was at the surrender negotiations and served as a translator for the Americans. Abdullah says that he told Vasiqullah what was happening, and he says Vasiqullah responded: “We will act.” The next day, Abdullah said, a group of Americans arrived at Qala Zeini in two dust-colored pickups. But the containers were gone, and—says Abdullah—the Americans turned around and drove back to Mazar.
Vasiqullah is cautious when asked about this version of events. He says that on the fourth day of the surrender at Yerganak—Nov. 28—he headed back to Mazar with several cars full of American soldiers. Some of these were billeting in Atta Mohammed’s headquarters in Mazar. Vasiqullah confirms that he “soon” heard about prisoners’ being transferred into containers at Qala Zeini. But he will not confirm that he heard this from the witness from Langar Khaneh. Nor will he confirm that he passed the news on to the Americans he was working with. “The Americans were distracted at this time,” he says. The uprising at the Qala Jangi prison in Mazar-e Sharif—in which CIA operative Mike Spann was killed and the American John Walker Lindh was discovered—had occurred on Nov. 25. “Many of them were taking care of arrangements for shipping Mike Spann’s body out of Mazar airport.” But, says Vasiqullah, the containers could not have remained a secret for long. “I think the Americans found out soon,” he says. “They were at Sheberghan prison from the beginning.”
—At 11 a.m. on Nov. 29, according to the driver Mohammed, a convoy of 13 container trucks set out from Qala Zeini. Each driver had soldiers in the cab beside him. A driver we’ll call Ghassan, who had picked up his load of human cargo at a concrete bridge 31 miles west of Mazar-e Sharif, was also on the move around this time. He recalls that some in his container were alive, and beating on the sides. “They just want water... Keep driving,” he was ordered.
By the time the trucks arrived at Sheberghan prison, many were ominously quiet. Mohammed was the driver of the second truck in line, but he got down from his cab and walked into the prison courtyard as the doors of the lead truck were opened. Of the 200 or so who had been loaded into the sealed container not quite 24 hours before, none had survived. “They opened the doors and the dead bodies spilled out like fish,” says Mohammed. “All their clothes were ripped and wet. ”
Mohammed says all 176 prisoners inside his truck survived because he had disobeyed orders and punched holes in the sides. (His account is supported by other witnesses.) He and others also say that no Americans were present when the trucks in his convoy were opened.
The following day, Nov. 30, a fresh convoy of seven trucks arrived at Sheberghan. The day after, Dec. 1, brought a third convoy—also seven trucks. NEWSWEEK has traced drivers from both later convoys. Their recollections are that most of those containers contained many dead bodies. But not all. The inmates of one truck in those convoys passed about 45,000 Pakistani rupees (about $750) to the driver through a crack in the floor as a bribe to cut air holes and spray in water through a hose. All 150 inmates survived. In at least one container, the prisoners themselves managed to rip holes in the wooden floor, and all of them survived.
Abdul, a 28-year-old pashtun, is one who lived. NEWSWEEK interviewed him in Sheberghan prison. He recalls that his container was packed to the breaking point. After nearly 24 hours without water, Abdul says, the prisoners were so desperate with thirst that they began licking the sweat off each other’s bodies. Some prisoners began to lose their reason and started biting those around them. Abdul’s was one of the containers in the third convoy to Sheberghan: by the time they reached the prison, he says, only 20 to 30 in his container were alive.
Other survivors now in Sheberghan tell almost identical stories. One 20-year-old was shoved into a fully packed container. After about eight hours, he thinks, the prisoners began kicking the sides of the container and shouting for air and water. None came. Some of the prisoners began using their turbans to soak and drink the sweat off each other’s bodies. After a few more hours many of the prisoners started going crazy and bit each other’s fingertips, arms and legs. Anything to get moisture. By the time they reached Sheberghan, the young man says, only about 40 in his container were still alive.
For some, the agony in the containers was intensified because they were tied up. This appears to have been a fate reserved for Pakistani—and perhaps other non-Afghan—prisoners. Mahmood, 20, says he surrendered at Konduz along with 1,500 other Pakistanis. All were bound hand and foot either with their own turbans or with strips ripped from their clothing, he says. Then they were packed in container trucks “like cattle,” he says. He reckons that about 100 people died in his container.
The drivers remain tormented by what they took part in. “Why weren’t there any United Nations people there to see the dead bodies?” asks one. “Why wasn’t anything being done?” Another driver shook uncontrollably as he spoke with NEWSWEEK.
The convoys of the dead and dying, along with many truckloads of living prisoners, seem to have arrived at Sheberghan for perhaps 10 days. Prying eyes were kept away. The Red Cross, learning of the arrivals of prisoners from Konduz, applied on —Nov. 29 to get into Sheberghan. Dostum’s commander at the prison promised that access would be granted within 24 hours. In fact, it was not until Dec. 10 that the Red Cross got into the prison. By then, most of the bodies had probably been buried. (Dostum’s spokesman denies that access was blocked by prison officials.)
There were witnesses near the burial site who noticed unusual activity. The hamlet of Lab-e Jar is about half a mile east of the grave site. On several nights in the first half of December, Dostum’s soldiers forbade the villagers to leave their homes. Most of the villagers are now too frightened to talk. “Bodies have been buried there for years,” says one. “You know what happened. I know what happened. But nothing is going to change if we talk about it.” Still, NEWSWEEK found some who were willing to say what they saw. One man, 49, claims that around the first week in December, Dostum’s soldiers blocked the dirt road running past Dasht-e Leili for several days. “No cars, no donkey carts, not even pedestrians were allowed to go down the road,” he says. He personally saw four or five container trucks at the burial site, he says. When U.N. investigators talked with the people of Lab-e Jar in May, two residents told of seeing bulldozers at work on the site around the middle of December.
A widening circle of organizations and individuals know, in broad terms, what happened after the fall of Konduz. The Red Cross has questioned survivors and compiled a report about the events; top officials at the Red Cross’s Geneva headquarters have met to discuss, inconclusively, what to do next. A pair of U.N. investigators were present when Haglund dug his trial trench across the Dasht-e Leili grave site. After questioning local witnesses, they, too, compiled a report. Two U.N. entities—the Assistance Mission to Afghanistan and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights—have also been mulling what to do. “You have to understand, you’re dealing with a potentially explosive issue here,” says a Red Cross official in Afghanistan, explaining why he was hesitant to discuss the matter. Until now, anyway, the American military has not conducted a full-fledged investigation, nor has it been asked to participate in one by other agencies. U.N. sources say that their inquiries have not implicated U.S. forces. Publicly, the Pentagon has kept its distance. At the end of January, Department of Defense officials were told (by the PHR) of the discovery of what appeared to be a recent mass grave. In late February, officials at the Pentagon and the State Department were given confidential copies of the first formal report compiled by Haglund and his colleagues at the PHR. Consistently, however, the Pentagon has responded that Central Command investigated and found that U.S. troops know nothing of any killings—that the Pentagon indeed has no reason to believe there were killings. In June, DOD spokesman Lt. Col. Dave Lapan said that Central Command had questioned individually the forces in Af-ghanistan “several months ago”: “Central Command looked into it and found no evidence of participation or knowledge or presence. Our guys weren’t there, didn’t watch and didn’t know about it—if indeed anything like that happened.” A DOD statement a week later was emphatic: “No US troops were present anywhere near that site in November. US troops were present in the December/January timeframe when the mass graves were discovered.”
But is that entirely true? The American unit most directly involved was the 595 A-team, part of the Fifth Special Forces Group based at Fort Campbell, Ky. The leader of the dozen-man 595 was Capt. Mark D. Nutsch. Throughout the Afghanistan operation, the Pentagon insisted that reporters identify Special Forces personnel by their first names only, claiming this was necessary to protect their families back home from possible terrorist reprisals. But the Army waived that concern in April, when—at the instigation of his Army superiors—the Kansas state Legislature passed a resolution of both houses honoring Captain Nutsch, a 33-year-old native of Kansas. Nutsch’s wife, Amy, and their baby daughter, Kaija, born while Nutsch was in Afghanistan, were present at the very public ceremony. Contacted recently by NEWSWEEK about the container deaths, Nutsch said he did not want to discuss them.
The Special Forces A-teams were the shock troops of the U.S. assault on the Taliban. They were the crucial link between the Northern Alliance militia on the ground and U.S. firepower in the air. Attached to each A-team in the Afghan campaign was at least one Air Force Special Operations soldier called a combat air controller. It was the high-precision airstrikes called in by those CACs that destroyed the Taliban forces. Each A-team was assigned to a specific local commander, and 595’s assignment was to work with General Dostum.
595’s role in the Afghan conflict made them legends to the wider public. Heloed into Afghanistan, like the rest of the teams, in a Special Forces Chinook, they met up with Dostum on Oct. 19 at his headquarters at Darra-e Suf in the mountain fastnesses south of Mazar-e Sharif. It was the 595 unit that famously carried out its missions on horseback; it was snippets from Nutsch’s dispatches that a euphoric Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took to reading at his press briefings. Invigorated —by American air power—and lubricated by the money distributed lavishly to wavering locals by the CIA paramilitaries—Dostum and his fellow Northern Alliance commanders swept north out of the mountains. The climax of the brief campaign began on Nov. 4, when the Northern Alliance launched a three-pronged assault on the major city in the north, Mazar-e Sharif, orchestrated and micromanaged by an assembly of Special Forces, including two A-teams.
595 members had been with Dostum at the surrender negotiations, and then again at the actual surrender at Yerganak. As a consequence they were not with their CIA colleagues, Mike Spann and Dave Tyson, when that pair went to Qala Jangi prison to question the fresh batch of Qaeda and Taliban hard-liners who had arrived there after the abortive breakout from Konduz. The 595 commander, Nutsch, felt bitter about Spann’s death. “This was a guy we considered part of our unit,” he told Robert Young Pelton, a reporter working for CNN and National Geographic Adventure. “If we had been there, Mike’s death would not have happened.”
Over the three days that the first convoys of dead were arriving at Sheberghan, Special Forces troops were in the area. There was also a separate, four-man U.S. intelligence team, in combat gear, at the prison doing first selections of Qaeda suspects for further questioning. According to Pelton, a swashbuckling freelancer who specializes in writing about dangerous places, Special Forces soldiers were mainly concerned about security at the prison. At the same time the containers of dead were arriving, many truckloads of living prisoners were also streaming in: On the evening of Dec. 1, for instance, a container arrived bearing the 86 survivors from Qala Jangi. One of them was John Walker Lindh. It was the 595 team’s medic, Bill, who first treated Lindh. Pelton believed at the time, and still does, that the dead from container trucks numbered “40-some odd” and were mostly people who died of wounds suffered in the siege of Konduz. “When I was with 595, we went over this time and again,” says Pelton. “What happened is that these people basically died because they were wounded.” A senior Defense Department official, speaking to NEWSWEEK on background, said the Pentagon asked the commander of the Fifth Special Forces Group to look into the reports of container deaths. That commander, Col. John Mulholland, reported back that the A-team knew that numbers, perhaps even large numbers, of Taliban prisoners had died on the journey to Sheberghan. But the Special Forces believed that these deaths had occurred from wounds or disease. news-week put this account to Colonel Mulholland through the public-affairs office of the Special Operations Command, but got no response by the time NEWSWEEK went to press.
For the Red Cross, the killings at Sheberghan represented an agonizing dilemma. The organization’s code of operating out of the public eye—a trade-off that allows them access to places no one else is allowed to go, and enables them to provide aid to people in the most difficult circumstances—inhibited its officials from going public with what they heard. “We approached the ICRC more than two months ago to look into this, and they showed no interest,” says Aziz ur Rahman Razekh of the Afghan Organization of Human Rights. “We got a frosty reception.”
In fact, the Red Cross was concerned from the start about the fate of prisoners turning up at Sheberghan. The Taliban’s surrender of the northern towns was an extended process; and the first dribble of prisoners from Konduz—captured on its outskirts—began to arrive at Sheberghan on Nov. 22-23. The ICRC office in Mazar-e Sharif learned of these arrivals; and on Nov. 29, a small team sought entry to Sheberghan prison. They were turned away. Asked about this now, an ICRC official says: “The authorities did not want us there.” (Dostum’s spokesman denies that prison officials refused them access.)
Not until Dec. 10 did the Red Cross manage to talk their way into Sheberghan to interview the new prisoners. They swiftly heard about the horrors of the containers. When NEWSWEEK first approached a Red Cross official to ask about the treatment of prisoners from Konduz, his immediate response was: “I can’t talk about containers.” Told of the stories that prisoners in Sheberghan had already given to news-week, he responded in some anguish: “If you’re hearing stories about containers now, what do you think we were hearing about then?”
Apparently caught between outrage and its own code of secrecy, the Red Cross may have sought to stir attention to Sheberghan indirectly. In mid-January John Heffernan and Jennifer Leaning of the PHR met by chance in Kabul with two Red Cross officials—one a senior official based in ICRC headquarters in Geneva. The Geneva official told them that the Red Cross had, they recall her saying, “grave concerns” about the treatment of prisoners by U.S. forces and their allies; and she urged them that this topic was “worth exploring.” That was why the PHR pair went up to Sheberghan. At the start of May, the PHR—frustrated by a lack of response in either Kabul or Washington to their private briefings on Haglund’s discoveries at Dasht-e Leili—issued a report describing his findings. The Red Cross chimed in, producing for reporters—this was at the Red Cross Kandahar office—a survivor from one of the containers: Sardar Mohammed, 23, from Kandahar. Mohammed reckoned, he said, that they had been packed 150 to a container. And he claimed that he and his fellow survivors had tallied up more 1,000 who had not survived the ordeal.
It may not be easy for Americans to summon much sympathy for Taliban or Qaeda prisoners. But the rules of war cannot be applied selectively. There is no real moral justification for the pain and destruction of combat if it is not to defend the rule of law. The line is tough to hold even in a conventional conflict. In a proxy war, it’s much more difficult. The dead at Dasht-e Leili are proof of that.
With Donatella Lorch in Washington, Karen Breslau in San Francisco and Stryker McGuire in London
© 2002 Newsweek, Inc. |
