U.S. Forces Beat Afghans After Deadly Assault, Ex-Prisoners Say

ORUZGAN, Afghanistan —  After killing 21 Afghans, at least some of them loyal to the U.S.-backed interim government, American forces beat and kicked some of the dead men’s colleagues who were held prisoner for 16 days before being released last week with an apology, according to several of those held.

The 27 men, captured during a Jan. 24 nighttime raid in which U.S. troops appear to have mistakenly targeted friendly forces in this remote village, were treated harshly at first, several of them said--with two saying they blacked out from their beatings and two others claiming they suffered broken ribs. Then the ill treatment stopped, they said, perhaps because the U.S. special operations forces realized they had captured and killed friendly troops, not Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters.

The accounts of recently released captives, as well as those of soldiers who escaped the attack and others here, add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that the U.S. killed and captured innocent people, then denied for more than two weeks that anything had gone awry.

On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld acknowledged for the first time that U.S. troops might have killed Afghan allies in the operation, and a military spokesman conceded that the detainees did not belong to either the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

Marine Capt. Robert A. Riggle Jr., reached late Sunday at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., and asked to comment on the alleged prisoner abuse, said, “We’ve heard absolutely no reports of this,” and he referred questions to the Pentagon. Pentagon officials did not return a call.

“Everybody knows there are no Taliban here,” said Abdul Qudus Irfani, the newly appointed Oruzgan district chief and a close ally of interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai. “The Americans should have asked us.”

“Something very bad happened,” Ahmed Karzai, the prime minister’s brother and a member of the governing council in the southern city of Kandahar, said in an interview last week. “That’s all I can say right now.”

The attack began about 2 a.m. in Oruzgan, a village that is a two-day drive northeast of Kandahar along riverbeds and across high, rocky deserts. From the beginning of the operation, confusion apparently reigned on all sides.

Guard Allah Noor was awakened by a noise--maybe gunfire, he’s not sure--and stepped from his mat on the floor of the main district office building out into the darkness. He saw soldiers in black masks and goggles with flashlights attached to the ends of their assault weapons, and they were speaking a language he didn’t recognize.

The 40-year-old Noor stepped quickly back inside the room and told his commander.

“It’s OK, they’re our friends,” the commander, Police Chief Abdul Rauf, told him. “Just stay in here.”

Then the firing broke out.

When the sun rose a few hours later, 21 people were dead; the district building and the village school had been pounded into rubble by rifle, rocket and cannon fire; and Noor and 26 others, having been bound hand and foot and flown by helicopter 150 miles south, were lying face down in the gravel at the Kandahar air base; being kneed in the sides; having their faces shoved into the ground; and being walked on by U.S troops, several of them said in separate interviews.

The day before the prisoners were released last week, a U.S. military officer at Kandahar placed his hands together and held them in front of his face in what looked like a gesture of supplication, Rauf recalled. The police chief said that the American, speaking through an interpreter, said: “We are sorry. We made a mistake.”

Little Anger at U.S.

Most of the former prisoners interviewed echoed the sentiments of this shellshocked village. They aren’t necessarily angry at the U.S. In a country where allegiances shift continually, the Americans have had difficulty since the war began determining who is friend and who is foe.

The former prisoners are angry at whoever told the U.S. that Taliban and Al Qaeda soldiers were holed up in the school and the district building.

What they want from the U.S. is the name, or names, of the informants.

Many here believe, and evidence suggests, that the U.S. acted on deeply flawed intelligence in carrying out the raid--perhaps allowing itself to be lured into the kind of tribal dispute that has bedeviled this country for centuries or duped into helping undermine the shaky rule of Karzai.

Among those whom Afghan officials would like to question are former moujahedeen commander Mohammed Yunus, who was appointed district chief after the fall of the Taliban regime and was collecting Taliban weapons at the school--only to be ousted a few weeks later when a new governor picked his archrival, Irfani, for the job. Yunus disappeared the day after the raid and has not been seen since, people here say.

Another longtime moujahedeen commander, Abdul Qyum, who, because of his reputation for duplicity, is sometimes called Mullah Kafir, or “nonbeliever,” went to the district office the morning after the raid with two men, stole a pickup truck and loaded it with rockets and mortars, people say. He too has vanished.

Qyum is close to Kandahar’s powerful governor, Gul Agha Shirzai, who oversees security for five provinces in southern Afghanistan, including Oruzgan. U.S. special operations forces can be seen daily at Shirzai’s compound.

Shirzai and Karzai both received U.S. support as they marched with their personal armies toward Kandahar late last year, but the two often clash over political matters. Qyum’s being shut out of the power circle here undermines Shirzai as well as Qyum himself.

“They are looking for him in Oruzgan province. They are looking for him in Kandahar. They are looking for him all over Afghanistan,” one released prisoner said of Qyum.

In addition to the overarching question of where the U.S got its intelligence, many other details of the raid remain unclear. For example, the Pentagon says the Afghans fired first. The Afghans who survived say they don’t think their comrades fired first, and some say Afghans didn’t fire at all.

Numerous interviews, often conducted separately, nonetheless paint an unnerving if incomplete picture of the deadly attack and of the imprisonment.

Between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. that Thursday, helicopters settled into a barren wheat field near the school and even nearer the mud-walled home of Abdul Wali. The helicopters disgorged at least two vehicles and numerous special operations forces--some of whom would return two hours later, blow the door off Wali’s house, tie him up and terrorize his two wives and 14 children, according to his 16-year-old son, Fazal Rabi.

The school, like the district building, was a weapons collection site, where a special commission appointed by Oruzgan’s provincial governor, Jan Mohammed, was overseeing the gathering of Taliban and Al Qaeda arms.

Everyone Was Asleep

The first attack on the school came from the ground. With the exception of one or two guards, everyone was asleep on the floor.

“When I woke up, I saw Americans on the ground,” said Amanullah, 25, a guard for the commission. “They were shooting people.”

Amanullah leaped from a window and ran, he said. His cousin, Tor Jan, 26, was running behind him. Shoeless and coatless, sprinting across the frozen ground, Amanullah fell. There was heavy firing. He looked back, he said, to see American soldiers appearing to handcuff his cousin, who was lying face down.

He would find the body of his cousin the next morning on a rock pile outside the school, in a spot where dried blood is still visible. Tor Jan had been shot three times--once in the neck, once in the chest and once in the stomach, Amanullah said. All the rounds appeared to have come from behind, with small entry wounds in the back and large exit wounds on the front.

Tor Jan, Amanullah said, was one of eight men found dead the next morning with their hands tied behind their backs with plastic handcuffs. Two sets of plastic cuffs that residents say came from two of the dead are imprinted with the phrases “MADE IN USA” and “THE USER ASSUMES RESPONSIBILITY FOR INJURY RESULTING FROM NEGLIGENCE.”

No evidence of executions has arisen here. Rather, the U.S. soldiers may have handcuffed anyone who appeared to be wounded or dead so they could move on quickly.

Nineteen men were killed at the school, residents and survivors say. Six to eight bloodstains are on the floor of one classroom used for sleeping, two or three in another.

The chief of the disarmament commission and his deputy, people say, were found dead in a room that is badly burned out. Another bloodstain marks a spot 50 yards from the school where another guard died, and another dried pool is on the walkway outside a classroom.

Only four men escaped from the school, including Amanullah. The U.S. took no prisoners there, people here say.

The Americans also took none of the thousands of rounds of ammunition, it appears.

Most accounts suggest that the attack on the district office began about the same time as the one on the school, perhaps a few minutes later.

Akhtar Mohammed, who is 17 or 18--he’s not certain--was a farmer before becoming a guard a month ago. He awoke at the district office to the sound of shooting, got up and was met by a flashlight beam in his eyes, he said. Soldiers in black masks threw him on the ground and handcuffed him.

Like the other 26 detainees, his feet were bound with a chain long enough so he could shuffle. He was blindfolded, and a mask was pulled over the blindfold, he said.

“They were beating us. They made us bow down. They were beating us with their hands, their guns,” he said.

Two men were killed, escapees say. Those who were detained were tied to one another, marched to helicopters and flown to Kandahar.

After the ground operation concluded, the witnesses say, a gunship took over, firing rockets, cannons and guns as it circled the two sites.

One wing of the district office, containing munitions, was leveled. Two bunkers filled with Taliban munitions were left untouched. Most of the rest of the building was badly damaged.

Locked in a Cage in Kandahar

The school had been struck much harder. Most of the eight reinforced-concrete rooms have rocket holes in them, some through the walls, some through the roof. Nine trucks and a mobile antiaircraft platform, which the weapons commissioners say they had collected from the Taliban along with the arms, sit in front of the building.

Most of the vehicles were all but shredded by the rocket and cannon rounds, which were coming in, it appears, as the captives were on their way to the Kandahar air base.

Once there, the prisoners were tied together again, several said. Then they were pushed onto their stomachs on a gravel floor, several said, where they were struck again. That day, their traditional shalwar kameez pants and shirts were torn off them, they said, and they were given blue uniforms.

They were locked in a sort of cage, with wooden slats held together by metal strips. The structure was outdoors, they said, and they could see soldiers moving about.

Several of the prisoners were questioned for a few minutes the first or second day--asked their names, their duties, whether they were Taliban or Al Qaeda members. The interrogators, speaking through an interpreter dressed in a U.S. uniform, were not pleasant but did not strike them, the men said. Over the next few days, they were questioned for an hour or two in a much friendlier manner, they said.

They ate MREs, or meals-ready-to-eat, or, in the case of Rauf, the police chief, didn’t eat them, with the exception of the candy. Two female doctors issued them a tablet for pain each day if they wanted it.

For reasons that aren’t clear, Akhtar Mohammed, the 17- or 18-year-old, was the only one separated from the group, members say. He was held for eight days by himself in a shipping container, with two guards sitting by the open door, and then returned to the main pen.

The prisoners never knew they were in Kandahar. They never knew why they were being held. They had no idea that 21 people had been killed that night. “Dost, dost, dost!” they had yelled when they were first captured. “Friend, friend, friend!”