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August 6, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
The
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August 5, 2002
Rahul Mahajan
Iraq
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Jordy Cummings
The
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Inside
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US Mute
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Norman Madarasz
Brazil:
the Most Important Election of 2002?
August 4, 2002
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
August 3, 2002
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Nuclear
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Gilad Atzmon
The End
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Gavin Keeney
Everybody's
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Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
August 2, 2002
Ralph Nader
The Labor
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Chris Floyd
Moral Maze:
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Jeremy Scahill
Saddam,
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Jeffrey St. Clair
Dark Deeds in the Black Hills:
Daschle Dooms the
Sacred Land of the Sioux
August 1, 2002
Steven Higgs
Activists
Under Siege
Anthony Gancarski
Draft
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Staffing the Latest War
Zeynep Toufe
Invisible
Children: AIDS,
Africa and Selective Vision
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel and Squawk:
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and the Attack on McKinney
July 31, 2002
Amelia Peltz
Inside
Ramallah:
How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing?
M. Shahid Alam
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
Bernard Weiner
20 Things
We've Learned Since 9/11
Philip Cryan
Discourse
and War in Colombia
Neve Gordon
A Feast
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Sharon's Endgame for Palestine
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August
6, 2002
The Return to
Afghanistan:
Collateral
Damage
by Robert Fisk
The
Independent
President George Bush's "war on terror"
reached the desert village of Hajibirgit at midnight on 22 May.
Haji Birgit Khan, the bearded, 85-year-old Pushtu village leader
and head of 12,000 local tribal families, was lying on a patch
of grass outside his home. Faqir Mohamed was sleeping among
his sheep and goats in a patch of sand to the south when he
heard "big planes moving in the sky". Even at night,
it is so hot that many villagers spend the hours of darkness
outside their homes, although Mohamedin and his family were
in their mud-walled house. There were 105 families in Hajibirgit
on 22 May, and all were woken by the thunder of helicopter engines
and the thwack of rotor blades and the screaming voices of the
Americans.
Haji Birgit Khan was seen running stiffly
from his little lawn towards the white-walled village mosque,
a rectangular cement building with a single loudspeaker and
a few threadbare carpets. Several armed men were seen running
after him. Hakim, one of the animal herders, saw the men from
the helicopters chase the old man into the mosque and heard
a burst of gunfire. "When our people found him, he had
been killed with a bullet, in the head," he says, pointing
downwards. There is a single bullet hole in the concrete floor
of the mosque and a dried bloodstain beside it. "We found
bits of his brain on the wall."
Across the village, sharp explosions
were detonating in the courtyards and doorways of the little
homes. "The Americans were throwing stun grenades at us
and smoke grenades," Mohamedin recalls. "They were
throwing dozens of them at us and they were shouting and screaming
all the time. We didn't understand their language, but there
were Afghan gunmen with them, too, Afghans with blackened faces.
Several began to tie up our women--our own women--and the Americans
were lifting their burqas, their covering, to look at their
faces. That's when the little girl was seen running away."
Abdul Satar says that she was three years old, that she ran
shrieking in fear from her home, that her name was Zarguna,
the daughter of a man called Abdul-Shakour--many Afghans have
only one name--and that someone saw her topple into the village's
60ft well on the other side of the mosque. During the night,
she was to drown there, alone, her back apparently broken by
the fall. Other village children would find her body in the
morning. The Americans paid no attention. From the description
of their clothes given by the villagers, they appeared to include
Special Forces and also units of Afghan Special Forces, the
brutish and ill-disciplined units run from Kabul's former Khad
secret police headquarters. There were also 150 soldiers from
the US 101st Airborne, whose home base is at Fort Campbell in
Kentucky. But Fort Campbell is a long way from Hajibirgit,
which is 50 miles into the desert from the south-western city
of Kandahar. And the Americans were obsessed with one idea:
that the village contained leaders from the Taliban and Osama
bin Laden's al-Qa'ida movement.
A former member of a Special Forces unit
from one of America's coalition partners supplied his own explanation
for the American behaviour when I met him a few days later.
"When we go into a village and see a farmer with a beard,
we see an Afghan farmer with a beard," he said. "When
the Americans go into a village and see a farmer with a beard,
they see Osama bin Laden."
All the women and children were ordered
to gather at one end of Hajibirgit. "They were pushing
us and shoving us out of our homes," Mohamedin says. "Some
of the Afghan gunmen were shouting abuse at us. All the while,
they were throwing grenades at our homes." The few villagers
who managed to run away collected the stun grenades next day
with the help of children. There are dozens of them, small cylindrical
green pots with names and codes stamped on the side. One says
"7 BANG Delay: 1.5 secs NIC-01/06-07", another "1
BANG, 170 dB Delay: 1.5s." Another cylinder is marked:
"DELAY Verzagerung ca. 1,5s." These were the grenades
that terrified Zarguna and ultimately caused her death. A regular
part of US Special Forces equipment, they are manufactured in
Germany by the Hamburg firm of Nico-Pyrotechnik--hence the "NIC"
on several of the cylinders. "dB" stands for decibels.
Several date stamps show that the grenades
were made as recently as last March. The German company refers
to them officially as "40mm by 46mm sound and flash (stun)
cartridges". But the Americans were also firing bullets.
Several peppered a wrecked car in which another villager, a
taxi driver called Abdullah, had been sleeping. He was badly
wounded. So was Haji Birgit Khan's son.
A US military spokesman would claim later
that US soldiers had "come under fire" in the village
and had killed one man and wounded two "suspected Taliban
or al-Qa'ida members". The implication--that 85-year-old
Haji Birgit Khan was the gunman--is clearly preposterous.
The two wounded were presumably Khan's
son and Abdullah, the taxi driver. The US claim that they were
Taliban or al-Qa'ida members was a palpable lie--since both
of them were subsequently released. "Some of the Afghans
whom the Americans brought with them were shouting 'Shut up!'
to the children who were crying," Faqir Mohamed remembers.
"They made us lie down and put cuffs
on our wrists, sort of plastic cuffs. The more we pulled on
them, the tighter they got and the more they hurt. Then they
blindfolded us. Then they started pushing us towards the planes,
punching us as we tried to walk."
In all, the Americans herded 55 of the
village men, blindfolded and with their hands tied, on to their
helicopters. Mohamedin was among them. So was Abdul-Shakour,
still unaware that his daughter was dying in the well. The
56th Afghan prisoner to be loaded on to a helicopter was already
dead: the Americans had decided to take the body of 85-year-old
Haji Birgit Khan with them.
When the helicopters landed at Kandahar
airport-- headquarters to the 101st Airborne--the villagers were,
by their own accounts, herded together into a container. Their
legs were tied and then their handcuffs and the manacle of
one leg of each prisoner were separately attached to stakes
driven into the floor of the container. Thick sacks were put
over their heads. Abdul Satar was among the first to be taken
from this hot little prison. "Two Americans walked in and
tore my clothes off," he said. "If the clothes would
not tear, they cut them off with scissors. They took me out
naked to have my beard shaved and to have my photograph taken.
Why did they shave off my beard? I had my beard all my life."
Mohamedin was led naked from his own
beard-shaving into an interrogation tent, where his blindfold
was removed. "There was an Afghan translator, a Pushtun
man with a Kandahar accent in the room, along with American
soldiers, both men and women soldiers," he says. "I
was standing there naked in front of them with my hands tied.
Some of them were standing, some were sitting at desks. They
asked me: 'What do you do?' I told them: 'I am a shepherd--why
don't you ask your soldiers what I was doing?' They said: 'Tell
us yourself.' Then they asked: 'What kind of weapons have you
used?' I told them I hadn't used any weapon.
"One of them asked: 'Did you use
a weapon during the Russian [occupation] period, the civil war
period or the Taliban period?' I told them that for a lot of
the time I was a refugee." From the villagers' testimony,
it is impossible to identify which American units were engaged
in the interrogations. Some US soldiers were wearing berets
with yellow or brown badges, others were in civilian clothes
but apparently wearing bush hats. The Afghan interpreter was
dressed in his traditional salwah khameez. Hakim underwent a
slightly longer period of questioning; like Mohamedin, he says
he was naked before his interrogators.
"They wanted my age and my job.
I said I was 60, that I was a farmer. They asked: 'Are there
any Arabs or Talibans or Iranians or foreigners in your village?'
I said 'No.' They asked: 'How many rooms are there in your house,
and do you have a satellite phone?' I told them: 'I don't have
a phone. I don't even have electricity.' They asked: 'Were the
Taliban good or bad?' I replied that the Taliban never came
to our village so I had no information about them. Then they
asked: 'What about Americans? What kind of people are Americans?'
I replied: 'We heard that they liberated us with [President
Hamid] Karzai and helped us--but we don't know our crime that
we should be treated like this.' What was I supposed to say?"
A few hours later, the villagers of Hajibirgit
were issued with bright-yellow clothes and taken to a series
of wire cages laid out over the sand of the airbase--a miniature
version of Guantanamo Bay--where they were given bread, biscuits,
rice, beans and bottled water. The younger boys were kept in
separate cages from the older men. There was no more questioning,
but they were held in the cages for another five days. All the
while, the Americans were trying to discover the identity of
the 85-year-old man. They did not ask their prisoners--who could
have identified him at once--although the US interrogators may
not have wished them to know that he was dead. In the end, the
Americans gave a photograph of the face of the corpse to the
International Red Cross. The organisation was immediately told
by Kandahar officials that the elderly man was perhaps the most
important tribal leader west of the city.
"When we were eventually taken out
of the cages, there were five American advisers waiting to talk
to us," Mohamedin says. "They used an interpreter
and told us they wanted us to accept their apologies for being
mistreated. They said they were sorry. What could we say? We
were prisoners. One of the advisers said: 'We will help you.'
What does that mean?" A fleet of US helicopters flew the
55 men to the Kandahar football stadium--once the scene of Taliban
executions--where all were freed, still dressed in prison clothes
and each with a plastic ID bracelet round the wrist bearing
a number. "Ident-A-Band Bracelet made by Hollister"
was written on each one. Only then did the men learn that old
Haji Birgit Khan had been killed during the raid a week earlier.
And only then did Abdul-Shakour learn that his daughter Zarguna
was dead.
The Pentagon initially said that it found
it "difficult to believe" that the village women had
their hands tied. But given identical descriptions of the treatment
of Afghan women after the US bombing of the Uruzgan wedding
party, which followed the Hajibirgit raid, it seems that the
Americans--or their Afghan allies--did just that. A US military
spokesman claimed that American forces had found "items
of intelligence value", weapons and a large amount of cash
in the village. What the "items" were was never clarified.
The guns were almost certainly for personal protection against
robbers. The cash remains a sore point for the villagers. Abdul
Satar said that he had 10,000 Pakistani rupees taken from him--about
$200 (lbs130). Hakim says he lost his savings of 150,000 rupees--$3,000
(lbs1,900). "When they freed us, the Americans gave us
2,000 rupees each," Mohamedin says. "That's just $40
[lbs25]. We'd like the rest of our money."
But there was a far greater tragedy to
confront the men when they reached Hajibirgit. In their absence--without
guns to defend the homes, and with the village elder dead and
many of the menfolk prisoners of the Americans--thieves had
descended on Hajibirgit. A group of men from Helmand province,
whose leader is Abdul Rahman Khan--once a brutal and rapacious
"mujahid" fighter against the Russians, and now a
Karzai government police commander--raided the village once
the Americans had taken away so many of the men. Ninety-five
of the 105 families had fled into the hills, leaving their mud
homes to be pillaged.
The disturbing, frightful questions that
creep into the mind of anyone driving across the desert to Hajibirgit
today are obvious. Who told the US to raid the village? Who
told them that the Taliban leadership and the al-Qa'ida leadership
were there? Was it, perhaps, Abdul Rahman Khan, the cruel police
chief whose men were so quick to pillage the mud-walled homes
once the raid was over? For today, Hajibirgit is a virtual ghost
town, its village leader dead, most of its houses abandoned.
The US raid was worthless. There are scarcely 40 villagers left.
They all gathered at the stone grave of Zarguna some days later,
to pay their respects to the memory of the little girl. "We
are poor people--what can we do?" Mohamedin asked me. I
had no reply. President Bush's "war on terror", his
struggle of "good against evil" descended on the innocent
village of Hajibirgit.
And now Hajibirgit is dead.
Today's Features
Alexander Cockburn
The
Fox in the Pension Fund
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