US Army sergeant kills 16 in Afghan villages

Anar Gul ges­tures to the body of her grand­child, who was allegedly killed by a U.S. ser­vice mem­ber Sun­day in Pan­jwai, Kan­da­har province south of Kabul, Afghanistan. Afghan Pres­i­dent Hamid Karzai says a U.S. ser­vice mem­ber has killed more than a dozen peo­ple in a shoot­ing includ­ing nine chil­dren and three women. Karzai called the attack Sun­day “an assas­si­na­tion” and demanded an expla­na­tion from the United States. He says sev­eral peo­ple were also wounded in the attack on two vil­lages near a U.S. base in the south­ern province of Kan­da­har. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Allaud­din Khan)

HEIDI VOGT, MIRWAIS KHAN

Asso­ci­ated Press

BALANDI, Afghanistan — Mov­ing from house to house, a U.S. Army sergeant opened fire Sun­day on Afghan vil­lagers as they slept, killing 16 peo­ple — mostly women and chil­dren — in an attack that reignited fury at the U.S. pres­ence fol­low­ing a wave of deadly protests over Amer­i­cans burn­ing Qurans.

The attack threat­ened the deep­est breach yet in U.S.-Afghan rela­tions, rais­ing ques­tions both in Wash­ing­ton and Kabul about why Amer­i­can troops are still fight­ing in Afghanistan after 10 years of con­flict and the killing of Osama bin Laden.

The killing spree, the worst atroc­ity com­mit­ted by U.S. forces dur­ing the Afghan war, comes amid deep­en­ing pub­lic out­rage spurred by last month’s Quran burn­ings and an ear­lier video pur­port­edly show­ing Amer­i­can Marines uri­nat­ing on dead Tal­iban militants.

The Quran burn­ings sparked weeks of vio­lent protests and attacks that left some 30 Afghans dead, despite an apol­ogy from Pres­i­dent Barack Obama. Six U.S. ser­vice mem­bers were also killed by their fel­low Afghan sol­diers, although the ten­sions had just started to calm down.

Res­i­dents said Sunday’s attack began around 3 a.m. in two vil­lages in Pan­jwai dis­trict, a rural region out­side Kan­da­har that is the cra­dle of the Tal­iban and where coali­tion forces have fought for con­trol for years. The vil­lages are about 500 yards (meters) from a U.S. base in a region that was the focus of Obama’s mil­i­tary surge strat­egy in the south start­ing in 2009.

Vil­lagers described cow­er­ing in fear as gun­shots rang out as a sol­dier stalked house after house fir­ing on those inside. They said he entered three homes in all and set fire to some of the bod­ies. Eleven of the dead were from a sin­gle fam­ily, and nine of the vic­tims were children.

Some res­i­dents said they believed there were mul­ti­ple attack­ers, given the carnage.

“One man can’t kill so many peo­ple. There must have been many peo­ple involved,” said Bacha Agha of Balandi vil­lage. “If the gov­ern­ment says this is just one person’s act we will not accept it. … After killing those peo­ple they also burned the bodies.”

But U.S. offi­cials said the shooter, iden­ti­fied as an Army staff sergeant, acted alone, leav­ing his base in south­ern Afghanistan and open­ing fire on sleep­ing fam­i­lies in two vil­lages. Ini­tial reports indi­cated he returned to the base after the shoot­ing and turned him­self in. He was in cus­tody at a NATO base in Afghanistan.

The sus­pect, from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash., was assigned to sup­port a spe­cial oper­a­tions unit of either Green Berets or Navy SEALs engaged in a vil­lage sta­bil­ity oper­a­tion, said a U.S. offi­cial, speak­ing on con­di­tion of anonymity because the inves­ti­ga­tion is still ongoing.

Such oper­a­tions are among NATO’s best hopes for tran­si­tion­ing out of Afghanistan, pair­ing spe­cial oper­a­tions troops with vil­lagers cho­sen by vil­lage elders to become essen­tially a sanc­tioned, armed neigh­bor­hood watch.

In a state­ment, Afghan Pres­i­dent Hamid Karzai left open the pos­si­bil­ity of more than one shooter. He ini­tially spoke of a sin­gle U.S. gun­man, then referred to “Amer­i­can forces” enter­ing houses. The state­ment quoted a 15-year-old sur­vivor named Rafi­ul­lah, who was shot in the leg, as telling Karzai in a phone call that “sol­diers” broke into his house, woke up his fam­ily and began shoot­ing them.

“This is an assas­si­na­tion, an inten­tional killing of inno­cent civil­ians and can­not be for­given,” Karzai said.

Obama phoned the Afghan leader to express his shock and sad­ness, and offered con­do­lences to the griev­ing fam­i­lies and to the peo­ple of Afghanistan.

In a state­ment released by the White House, Obama called the attack “tragic and shock­ing” and not rep­re­sen­ta­tive of “the excep­tional char­ac­ter of our mil­i­tary and the respect that the United States has for the peo­ple of Afghanistan.” He vowed “to get the facts as quickly as pos­si­ble and to hold account­able any­one responsible.”

The vio­lence over the Quran burn­ings had already spurred calls in the U.S. for a faster exit strat­egy from the 10-year-old Afghan war. Obama even said recently that “now is the time for us to tran­si­tion.” But he also said he had no plan to change the cur­rent timetable that has Afghans tak­ing con­trol of secu­rity coun­try­wide by the end of 2014.

In the wake of the Quran burn­ings, the top U.S. com­man­der in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, vis­ited troops at a base that was attacked last month and urged them not to give in to the impulse for revenge.

The ten­sions between the two coun­tries had appeared to be eas­ing as recently as Fri­day, when the two gov­ern­ments signed a mem­o­ran­dum of under­stand­ing about the trans­fer of Afghan detainees to Afghan con­trol — a key step toward an even­tual strate­gic part­ner­ship to gov­ern U.S. forces in the country.

Now, another wave of anti-American hatred could threaten the entire future of the mis­sion, fuel­ing not only anger among the Afghans whom the coali­tion is sup­posed to be defend­ing but also encour­ag­ing doubts among U.S. polit­i­cal fig­ures that the long and costly war is worth the sac­ri­fice in lives and treasury.

“This is a fatal ham­mer blow on the U.S. mil­i­tary mis­sion in Afghanistan. What­ever sliver of trust and cred­i­bil­ity we might have had fol­low­ing the burn­ings of the Quran is now gone,” said David Cor­tright, the direc­tor of pol­icy stud­ies at Notre Dame’s Kroc Insti­tute for Inter­na­tional Peace Stud­ies and an advo­cate for a quick with­drawal from Afghanistan.

Gen. Allen offered his regret and “deep­est con­do­lences” to the Afghan peo­ple for the shoot­ings and vowed to make sure that “any­one who is found to have com­mit­ted wrong-doing is held fully accountable.”

“This deeply appalling inci­dent in no way rep­re­sents the val­ues of ISAF and coali­tion troops or the abid­ing respect we feel for the Afghan peo­ple,” Allen said in a state­ment, using the abbre­vi­a­tion for NATO’s Inter­na­tional Secu­rity Assis­tance Force.

In Pan­jwai dis­trict on Sun­day, griev­ing res­i­dents tried to make sense of why they were targeted.

“No Tal­iban were here. No gun­bat­tle was going on,” cried out one woman, who said four peo­ple were killed in the vil­lage of Alokzai, all mem­bers of her fam­ily. “We don’t know why this for­eign sol­dier came and killed our inno­cent fam­ily mem­bers. Either he was drunk or he enjoyed killing civilians.”

The other 12 dead were from Balandi vil­lage, said Samad Khan, a farmer who lost all 11 mem­bers of his fam­ily, includ­ing women and chil­dren. Khan was away from the vil­lage when the attack occurred and returned to find his fam­ily mem­bers shot and burned. One of his neigh­bors was also killed, he said.

“This is an anti-human and anti-Islamic act,” Khan said. “Nobody is allowed in any reli­gion in the world to kill chil­dren and women.”

One woman opened a blue blan­ket with pink flow­ers to reveal the body of her 2-year-old child, who was wear­ing a blood-soaked shirt.

“Was this child Tal­iban? There is no Tal­iban here” said Gul Bushra. The Amer­i­cans “are always threat­en­ing us with dogs and heli­copters dur­ing night raids.”

Dozens of vil­lagers crowded the streets as minibuses and trucks car­ried away the dead to be washed for bur­ial. One man used the edge of his brown shawl to wipe away tears.

Offi­cials wear­ing white plas­tic gloves picked up bul­let cas­ings from the floor of a house and put them in a plas­tic bag.

An AP pho­tog­ra­pher saw 15 bod­ies in the two vil­lages, some of them burned and other cov­ered with blan­kets. A young boy par­tially wrapped in a blan­ket was in the back of a minibus, dried blood crusted on his face and pooled in his ear. His loose-fitting brown pants were partly burned, reveal­ing a leg charred by fire.

It was unclear how or why the bod­ies were burned, though vil­lagers showed jour­nal­ists the blood-stained cor­ner of a house where blan­kets and pos­si­bly bod­ies were set on fire.

Inter­na­tional forces have fought for con­trol of Pan­jwai for years, try­ing to sub­due the Tal­iban in their rural strong­holds. The Tal­iban move­ment started just to the north of Pan­jwai and many of the mil­i­tant group’s senior lead­ers, includ­ing chief Mul­lah Mohammed Omar, were born, raised, fought or preached in the area.

The dis­trict has also been a key Tal­iban base for tar­get­ing neigh­bor­ing Kan­da­har city and U.S. forces flooded the province as part of Obama’s strat­egy to surge in the south start­ing in 2009.

The Tal­iban called the shoot­ings the lat­est sign that inter­na­tional forces are work­ing against the Afghan people.

“The so-called Amer­i­can peace­keep­ers have once again quenched their thirst with the blood of inno­cent Afghan civil­ians in Kan­da­har province,” the Tal­iban said in a state­ment posted on a web­site used by the insur­gent group.

U.S. forces have been impli­cated before in other vio­lence in the same area.

Four sol­diers from a Stryker brigade out of Lewis-McChord, Wash­ing­ton, have been sent to prison in con­nec­tion with the 2010 killing of three unarmed men dur­ing patrols in Kan­da­har province’s Mai­wand dis­trict, which is just north­west of Pan­jwai. They were accused of form­ing a “kill team” that mur­dered Afghan civil­ians for sport — slaugh­ter­ing vic­tims with grenades and pow­er­ful machine guns dur­ing patrols, then drop­ping weapons near their bod­ies to make them appear to have been combatants.

Obama has apol­o­gized for the Quran burn­ings and said they were a mis­take. The Qurans and other Islamic books were taken from a deten­tion facil­ity and dumped in a burn pit last month because they were believed to con­tain extrem­ist mes­sages or inscrip­tions. A mil­i­tary offi­cial said at the time that it appeared detainees were exchang­ing mes­sages by mak­ing nota­tions in the texts.

Posted by AP News on Mar 11 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.