arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

Storm over Afghan civilian victims
Guardian reveals botched raids on anti-Taliban forces

Ian Traynor in Kabul and Julian Borger in Washington
Guardian

Tuesday February 12, 2002

The Pentagon yesterday came under the most intense questioning over civilian casualties since the start of the Afghan war, after allegations that US special forces executed and beat men wrongly suspected of being Taliban or al-Qaida fighters, and tied up their women relatives.

On at least two occasions in the past month, the Guardian has also established, the US raids were botched and anti-Taliban forces were targeted as a result of bungled intelligence. According to western officials in Kabul, village women were tied up by the Americans and hair samples taken for DNA analysis to try to establish links with Osama bin Laden.

In village raids last month south of Kabul, the homes of mistaken Taliban suspects were torched, the officials said.

The revelations add to the pressure on the Pentagon resulting from the mounting toll of civilian or innocent dead in Afghanistan from the US campaign in the air and on the ground. A Guardian investigation into the level of civilian casualties has found that thousands of civilians have died since the US launched its bombardment on October 7.

While the precise figure remains unclear, experts and informed sources put the total deaths of innocents at between 2,000 and 8,000. "It is definitely in the four figures," said a UN source in Kabul.

Recent blunders include:

· A night raid by US special forces in early January on a village outside Gardez, south-east of Kabul. The Americans were searching for a local leader thought to be a prominent Taliban. Western sources say he was an anti-Taliban supporter of the interim government in Kabul. His wife and other women were bound with plastic handcuffs and hair samples were taken from them for DNA analysis, the sources say.

· A US bombing raid on the village of Qalaye Niazi, also outside Gardez, on December 29, killed at least 52 civilians, including 25 children, according to the UN. The International Committee for the Red Cross has instituted an investigation, the only inquiry it has ordered during the war.

US military officials, who had routinely rejected earlier accounts of civilian casualties as enemy propaganda, were forced back on the defensive at a Pentagon press conference yesterday at which every question focused on targeting errors and the treatment of captives. The press grilling came on a day of potentially embarrassing revelations that cast doubt on the accuracy of intelligence used to trigger US attacks and the reliability of the Pentagon press machine.

The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has ordered an inquiry into a special forces raid on Uruzgan, central Afghanistan, on January 24, in which 21 local men were killed and 27 taken prisoner. Two of the victims were found shot dead with their hands bound behind their backs, fuelling suspicion that they were handcuffed and then executed.

The Pentagon first described it as a successful strike on an al-Qaida compound, then suggested the targets were Taliban fighters before being forced to release them last week when it emerged they were locals who had fought alongside US forces against the Taliban.

An alleged al-Qaida weapons cache supposedly uncovered in the raid turned out to be a pile of weapons confiscated weeks earlier from Taliban fighters and locked up.

The Pentagon's embarrassment deepened further yesterday when the newly released captives told US newspapers they had been badly beaten while in detention.

A Pentagon spokesman last week claimed the two victims found with their hands bound behind their backs might have been tied up by Afghan forces operating alongside US soldiers. But a survivor of the raid told the Los Angeles Times that he had seen his cousin lying face down in the dirt being handcuffed by American soldiers. He later found his corpse with gunshots in the neck, chest, and stomach.

In the face of a barrage of questions yesterday, the Pentagon press team, Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem and Victoria Clarke, refused to acknowledge the US military had made a mistake, saying the investigation was still under way. But the CIA is reported to have begun distributing compensation of about $1,000 (£700) to the bereaved relatives, in what appeared to be the clearest admission so far that something had gone badly wrong.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002