The Death Convoy of Afghanistan
Part I
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
Aug. 26 issue — Trudging over the moonscape of Dasht-e Leili, a desolate expanse of low rolling hills in northern Afghanistan, Bill Haglund spotted clues half-buried in the gray-beige sand. Strings of prayer beads. A woolen skullcap. A few shoes. Those remnants, along with track marks and blade scrapes left by a bulldozer, suggested that Haglund had found what he was looking for. Then he came across a human tibia, three sets of pelvic bones and some ribs.
MASS GRAVES are not always easy to spot, though trained investigators know the signs. “You look for disturbance of the earth, differences in the vegetation, areas that have been machined over,” says Haglund, a forensic anthropologist and pioneer in the field of “human-rights archeology.” At Dasht-e Leili, a 15-minute drive from the Northern Alliance prison at Sheber-ghan, scavenging animals had brought the evidence to the surface. Some of the gnawed bones were old and bleached, but some were from bodies so recently buried the bones still carried tissue. The area of bulldozer activity—roughly an acre—suggested burials on a large scale. A stray surgical glove also caught Haglund’s eye. Such gloves are often used by people handling corpses, and could be evidence, Haglund thought, of “a modicum of planning.”
Haglund was in Dasht-e Leili on more than a hunch. In January, two investigators from the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights had argued their way into the nearby Sheberghan prison. What they saw shocked them. More than 3,000 Taliban prisoners—who had surrendered to the victorious Northern Alliance forces at the fall of Konduz in late November—were crammed, sick and starving, into a facility with room for only 800. The Northern Alliance commander of the prison acknowledged the charnel-house conditions, but pleaded that he had no money. He begged the PHR to send food and supplies, and to ask the United Nations to dig a well so the prisoners could drink unpolluted water.
But stories of a deeper horror came from the prisoners themselves. However awful their conditions, they were the lucky ones. They were alive. Many hundreds of their comrades, they said, had been killed on the journey to Sheberghan from Konduz by being stuffed into sealed cargo containers and left to asphyxiate. Local aid workers and Afghan officials quietly confirmed that they had heard the same stories. They confirmed, too, persistent reports about the disposal of many of the dead in mass graves at Dasht-e Leili.
That’s when Haglund, a veteran of similar investigations in Rwanda, Sri Lanka, the Balkans and other scenes of atrocity, was called in. Standing at what he reckoned from the ‘dozer tracks was an edge of the grave site, he pushed a long, hollow probe deep into the compacted sand. Then he sniffed. The acrid smell reeking up the shaft was unmistakable. Haglund and local laborers later dug down; at five feet, they came upon a layer of decomposing corpses, lying pressed together in a row. They dug a trial trench about six yards long, and in that —short length found 15 corpses. “They were relatively fresh bodies: the flesh was still on the bones,” Haglund recalls. “They were scantily clad, which was consistent with reports that [before they died] they had been in a very hot place.” Some had their hands tied. Haglund brought up three of the corpses, and a colleague conducted autopsies in a tent. The victims were all young men, and their bodies showed “no overt trauma”—no gunshot wounds, no blows from blunt instruments. This, too, Hag-lund says, is “consistent” with the survivors’ stories of death by asphyxiation.
How many are buried at Dasht-e Leili? Haglund won’t speculate. “The only thing we know is that it’s a very large site,” says a U.N. official privy to the investigation, and there was “a high density of bodies in the trial trench.” Other sources who have investigated the killings aren’t surprised. “I can say with confidence that more than a thousand people died in the containers,” says Aziz ur Rahman Razekh, director of the Afghan Organization of Human Rights. NEWSWEEK’s extensive inquiries of prisoners, truckdrivers, Afghan militiamen and local villagers—including interviews with survivors who licked and chewed each other’s skin to stay alive—suggest also that many hundreds of people died.
The dead of Dasht-e Leili—and the horrific manner of their killing—are one of the dirty little secrets of the Afghan war. The episode is more than just another atrocity in a land that has seen many. The killings illustrate the problems America will face if it opts to fight wars by proxy, as the United States did in Afghanistan, using small numbers of U.S. Special Forces calling in air power to support local fighters on the ground. It also raises questions about the responsibility Americans have for the conduct of allies who may have no —interest in applying protections of the Geneva Conventions. The benefit in fighting a proxy-style war in Afghanistan was victory on the cheap—cheap, at any rate, in American blood. The cost, NEWSWEEK’s investigation has established, is that American forces were working intimately with “allies” who committed what could well qualify as war crimes.
Nothing that NEWSWEEK learned suggests that American forces had advance knowledge of the killings, witnessed the prisoners being stuffed into the unventilated trucks or were in a position to prevent that. They were in the area of the prison at the time the containers were delivered, although probably not when they were opened. The small group of Special Forces soldiers were more focused at the time on prison security, and preventing an uprising such as the bloody outbreak that had happened days earlier in the prison fort at Qala Jangi. The soldiers surely heard stories of deaths in the containers, but may have thought them exaggerated. They also may have believed that the dead were war casualties, or wounded prisoners who, among thousands of their comrades, simply didn’t survive the rugged journey from the surrender point to the prison. But it’s also true that Pentagon spokesmen have obfuscated when faced with questions on the subject. Officials across the administration did not respond to repeated requests by NEWSWEEK for a detailed accounting of U.S. activities in the Konduz, Mazar-e Sharif and Sheberghan areas at the time in question, and Defense Department spokespersons have made statements that are false.
Questions can be raised, as well, about international agencies. How seriously has the United Nations pursued investigations of what happened at Sheberghan? The reports of atrocity come at a time when the international community is desperately trying to bring stability to Afghanistan. Well-meaning officials may be wondering if a full-scale investigation might set off a new round of Afghan slaughter. Would it be worth it? A confidential U.N. memorandum, parts of which were made available to NEWSWEEK, says that the findings of investigations into the Dasht-e Leili graves “are sufficient to justify a fully-fledged criminal investigation.” It says that based on “information collected,” the site “contains bodies of Taliban POW’s who died of suffocation during transfer from Konduz to Sheberghan.” A witness quoted in the report puts the death toll at 960. Yet the re—port also raises urgent questions. “Considering the political sensitivity of this case and related protection concerns, it is strongly recommended that all activities relevant to this case be brought to a halt until a decision is made concerning the final goal of the exercise: criminal trial, truth commission, other, etc.”
The militia leader whose forces allegedly carried out the killings is Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, one of Afghanistan’s most ruthless and effective warlords. Dostum’s spokesperson, Faizullah Zaki, told NEWSWEEK that many people did die of suffocation. But he put the total number at “between 100 and 120 people, a few from each container,” and said that some of them “were seriously injured and died en route.” He suggested that the uprising at Qala Jangi prison, just three days earlier, might have affected their treatment. “If the incident at Qala Jangi hadn’t happened, it’s possible that the prisoners would have been transferred more peacefully. There would have been less irregularities,” he said, adding: “They suffocated. Died, not killed. Nobody killed anybody.” Zaki also said that General Dostum was not in the place where the prisoners were loaded into containers. “The technical details of the transfer were left to lower-level commanders,” he said, adding that “there was a handful of American soldiers that didn’t leave [Dostum’s] side” during the period in question.
The close involvement of American soldiers with General Dostum can only make an investigation all the more sensitive. “The issue nobody wants to discuss is the involvement of U.S. forces,” says Jennifer Leaning, professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the pair of Physicians for Human Rights investigators who pushed their way into Sheberghan. “U.S. forces were in the area at the time. What did the U.S. know, and when and —where—and what did they do about it?”
The Taliban and Qaeda forces at Konduz surrendered in a negotiated deal that took two to three days to hammer out. According to Shams-ul-Haq (Shamuk) Naseri, a mid-level Northern Alliance commander who was present, the talks were held in the presence of three American intelligence officers and a dozen or more Special Forces soldiers. Northern Alliance commanders, including General Dostum, agreed to relatively generous conditions: The Afghan fighters would be allowed to go home to their villages. Most of the Pakistanis could also return home after the Americans picked out suspected Qaeda operatives. Arabs and other foreign fighters would be turned over to the United Nations or some other international organization. According to another Afghan present at the talks, Said Vasiqullah Sadat, the Taliban representatives insisted that their men surrender to General Dostum, because they figured he was the least likely to seek revenge for past killings. The surrender would formally start on Sunday, Nov. 25—to give time for the Taliban leaders to sell the deal to their forces in Konduz.
The day after negotiations ended, roughly 400 hard-core fighters made a break for it anyway, fleeing west. But the vast majority of fighters trapped in Konduz surrendered “like sheep,” according to Naseri. “One went and the rest followed.” The agreed site for the actual surrender was Yerganak, a desert spot about five miles west of Konduz. Most of the top Taliban and foreign commanders drove out, and their vehicles were promptly confiscated by the Northern Alliance. The rest walked. Four checkpoints had been set up at Yerganak to disarm the fighters and load them onto whatever vehicles were available: pickups, big-wheeled, open-topped Russian Kamaz trucks, even some container trucks. But the numbers streaming out of Konduz overwhelmed the facilities, and most of those surrendering waited three or four days in the desert.
Dostum and another Northern Alliance commander, Atta Mohammed, were at Yerganak to monitor the surrender. So were dozens of American Special Forces troops, according to U.S. and Afghan participants. Some of the Special Forces teams were zipping around the area on four-wheeler motorcycles; Dostum was filmed at the time enjoying a ride on the back of one. The Americans provided much of the food and water given to the waiting masses. But they were there primarily to provide credible muscle, a message that was reinforced by the frequent appearance of U.S. bombers streaking overhead.
At about this time, soldiers from Dostum’s militia arrived at a container depot on the outskirts of Mazar-e Sharif, about 100 miles to the west, and recruited a driver we’ll call Mohammed, a bearded man in his mid-40s. (NEWSWEEK has changed the names of several witnesses in this report to lessen the chance of reprisals.) Mohammed was told that his container truck was needed to ship captive Taliban fighters to Sheberghan prison. He was to pick them up that evening at the old fort in Qala Zeini, which lies on the road between Mazar-e Sharif and Sheberghan. The road actually passes through the fort: one gate in, one gate out.
Mohammed arrived at Qala Zeini about 7 that evening. Several other container trucks were already waiting inside the fort. So were about 150 soldiers, all Afghans. At about 9, the prisoners—a mix of Afghans, Pakistanis, Arabs and Chechens—arrived from Yerganak in open trucks and pickups. Soldiers ordered the prisoners down from the trucks and stripped them of their turbans, caps and vests. Then they herded the captives into the containers, as many as 200 to a truck. The fighters realized they were not going home, as promised. “F—- Shamuk Naseri,” one driver recalls a prisoner’s screaming. “He betrayed us.” The doors of the container trucks were locked.
The prisoners probably realized their fate. “Death by container” has been a cheap means of mass murder used by both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance for at —least five years. Abandoned freight containers—international standard size, 40 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet—litter the roads of Afghanistan, rusting reminders of the many tons of aid that have poured into the country over the past 20 years. It was reputedly a savage Uzbek general named Malik Pahlawan who first saw the container’s potential as a killing machine in 1997. After a Taliban assault on Mazar-e Sharif had been repulsed, Pahlawan—according to a subsequent U.N. report—killed some 1,250 Taliban by leaving them in containers in the desert sun. When the containers were opened, it was found the inmates had been grilled black. When the Taliban took Mazar-e Sharif in 1998, they in turn killed several hundred enemies in the same fashion.
In the case of the Taliban prisoners from Konduz, the November temperatures weren’t hot enough to blacken them. But after a few hours, they started beating on the sides of their overstuffed cells. “We’re dying. Give us water!” some shouted. “We are human, not animals.” Mohammed used a hammer and spike to bang holes in his container, until one of Dostum’s soldiers heard the banging and angrily demanded to know what he was doing. Mohammed said that he was sealing holes to prevent the prisoners’ escape.
After the soldier had gone, one of the prisoners in the container stuck his face close to one of the holes. “Are you a Muslim?” he asked. “Yes,” Mohammed replied. “Look at my tongue,” said the prisoner, and stuck it out. It was cracked from dehydration. Mohammed filled a two-liter Fanta bottle with water and passed it in through the hole. He also pushed in 10 pieces of bread, all he had. “Thank Allah you are a Muslim,” the prisoner said. |
