Dirty Wars (63 page)

Hoh said there were also times when a JSOC task force “would kill someone who was important to us. They would kill a tribal leader or some type of government administrator who was working with us or we were
making inroads with. In the middle of the night, you end up shooting the guy.” He added: “There's nothing like going into a village in the middle of the night, knocking a door down and killing a woman or child to just undo” any progress civilian or conventional military officials had made in areas around Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, I investigated several botched night raids, in which it was clear that innocent people had been targeted. None of them was more gruesome than what happened just outside of Gardez in Paktia Province, in February 2010.

ON FEBRUARY
12, 2010, Mohammed Daoud Sharabuddin had much to celebrate. He was a respected police officer who had recently received an
important promotion
, becoming head of intelligence in one of the districts of Paktia Province, in southeast Afghanistan. He was also the father of a
newborn son
. That night, Daoud and his family were celebrating the naming of the boy, a ritual that takes place on the
sixth day of a child's life
. The party was taking place at their compound, in the village of Khataba, a short distance from Gardez, the capital of Paktia. There were
two dozen people
at their home for the celebration, along with three musicians. “
We invited many guests
and had music,” Daoud's brother-in-law Mohammed Tahir told me when I visited the family. “During the party, people were dancing our traditional dance, the Attan.”

The Sharabuddin family was
not ethnic Pashtun
, the dominant—almost exclusive—ethnicity of the Taliban. Their main language was Dari. Many of the men in the family were clean-shaven, or wore only mustaches. They had long opposed the Taliban. Daoud, the police commander, had gone through dozens of US training programs, and his home was filled with photos of himself with American soldiers. Another family member was a prosecutor for the US-backed local government, and a third was the vice chancellor at the local university. The area where they lived was near a Taliban stronghold, and the Haqqani network—an insurgent group that the United States alleged had close ties to al Qaeda and Pakistan's ISI spy organization—had been staging attacks against government and NATO forces. So when they began to notice something was amiss outside their compound, the family feared it might be a Taliban attack on their home.

It was around 3:30 a.m., as the celebration was winding down, that the family and their guests noticed the
main light
to the compound had been shut off by someone outside the party. Around that time, one of the musicians went into the courtyard to use the outhouse and saw
lasers scoping the grounds
from the perimeter. The man ran back inside and told the others. “Daoud went to see what was happening,” Tahir told me. “He thought the Taliban had come. They were already on the roof.” As soon as Daoud
and his fifteen-year-old son, Sediqullah, stepped out into the courtyard, they were
both hit by sniper rounds
and fell to the ground. The family began hearing the voices of their attackers. Some were shouting commands in English, others in Pashtun. The family suspected the attackers were Americans.

Panic broke out inside the house.

“All the children were shouting, ‘Daoud is shot! Daoud is shot!'” Tahir recalled. Daoud's eldest son was behind his father and younger brother when they were hit. “
When my father went down
, I screamed,” he told me. “Everybody—my uncles, the women, everybody came out of the home and ran to the corridors of the house. I sprinted to them and warned them not to come out as there were Americans attacking and they would kill them.” Meanwhile, Daoud's brothers, Mohammed Saranwal Zahir and Mohammed Sabir, tried to come to his aid. “
When I ran outside
, Daoud was lying here,” Mohammed Sabir told me as we stood in the dusty courtyard at the very spot where Daoud was shot. “We carried Daoud inside.”

As Daoud lay bleeding out on the floor in a hallway inside the compound, his brother Zahir said he was going to try to stop the attack by speaking to the Americans. He was a local district attorney and knew some English. “We work for the government!” he shouted outside. “Look at our police vehicles. You have wounded a police commander!” Three women from the family, Bibi Saleha, aged thirty-seven, and Bibi Shirin, aged twenty-two, and Gulalai, aged eighteen, clutched at Zahir's clothes, pleading with him not to step outside. It didn't make a difference. Zahir was gunned down where he stood, with sniper rounds hitting him and the three women. Zahir, Bibi Saleha and Bibi Shirin died quickly. Gulalai and Daoud held on for hours, but their besieged family members could do nothing for them and they eventually died from their injuries.

Somehow, in a matter of minutes, a jubilant family event had become a massacre. Seven people had died in all, according to family members. Two of the women had been
pregnant
. The women had
sixteen children among them
.

IT WAS
7:00
A.M.
A few hours earlier, Mohammed Sabir had just seen his brother, his wife, his niece and his sister-in-law gunned down. Now he stood, shell-shocked, above their corpses in a room filled with American soldiers. The masked commandos had burst into the home and proceeded to raid it, searching every room. Sabir told me that Daoud and Gulalai were still alive at that point. US soldiers kept saying they would get them medical attention. “They didn't let us take them to the hospital and kept saying that they have doctors and they would take care of the injured folks,”
he said. “I kept asking them to let me take my daughter to the hospital because she had lost a lot of blood and we had a car right there,” Mohammed Tahir, Gulalai's father, recalled. “But they didn't let me take her to hospital. My daughter and Daoud were still alive. We kept asking, but we were told that a helicopter is coming and our injured will be taken to the hospital.” Both of them died before any helicopter came to retrieve them.

Even as the American raid was under way, Mohammed Sabir and his nephew Izzat, along with the wives of Daoud and Sabir,
prepared burial shrouds
for those who had died. The Afghan custom involves binding the feet and head. A scarf secured around the bottom of the chin is meant to keep the mouth of the deceased from hanging open. They had managed to do this before the Americans began
handcuffing them
and dividing the surviving men and women into separate areas. Several of the male family members told me that it was around this time that they witnessed a horrifying scene: US soldiers digging the bullets out of the women's bodies. “They were putting knives into their injuries to take out the bullets,” Sabir told me. I asked him bluntly, “You saw the Americans digging the bullets out of the women's bodies?” Without hesitation, he said, “Yes.” Tahir told me he saw the Americans with knives standing over the bodies. “They were taking out the bullets from their bodies to remove the proof of their crime,” he said.

Mohammed Sabir would not be able to attend his own wife's burial, nor those of any of his dead family members. Following the raid, the American forces made everyone kneel or stand in the courtyard,
barefoot, on a brutal winter morning, with their hands tied
behind their backs. Witnesses told me that those who tried to speak or plead with the soldiers were beaten. “They told me to raise my hands, but I thought it was my own house, why should I?” Daoud's eldest son, Abdul Ghafar, told me. “They hit me several times. They fired on me and around me. I put myself on the ground. I told the [American's Afghan] translator to tell them not to kill women, just do their search. We are pro-government people. We work with the government. They kicked me several times. I tried to stand, but they kicked me.” A witness later told a UN investigator that at least ten people were
assaulted by the US and Afghan team
, including Hajji Sharabuddin, the sixty-five-year-old head of the household. “
They told us that they were informed
that forty to fifty Taliban are here,” Sharabuddin told me. “But, in fact, all of them were from my family and work for the government.” Sharabuddin demanded to know why they burst into his home in the middle of the night. “You could have searched my house in the morning,” he recalled telling them. “And if you could find any Talib in my house, then you could do anything to me or destroy and spoil my house and I would not blame you.”

A subsequent UN investigation conducted two days after the raid, which was never publicly released, determined that the survivors of the raid “
suffered from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment
by being physically assaulted by US and Afghan forces, restrained and forced to stand bare feet for several hours outside in the cold,” adding that witnesses alleged “that US and Afghan forces refused to provide adequate and timely medical support to two people who sustained serious bullet injuries, resulting in their death hours later.”

Mohammed Sabir was one of the men singled out for further interrogation after the raid. With his clothes still caked with the blood of his loved ones, Sabir and seven other men were hooded and shackled. “They tied our hands and blindfolded us,” he recalled. “Two people grabbed us and pushed us, one by one, into the helicopter.” They were flown to a different Afghan province, Paktika, where the Americans held them for days. “My senses weren't working at all,” he recalled. “I couldn't cry, I was numb. I didn't eat for three days and nights. They didn't give us water to wash the blood away.” The Americans ran biometric tests on the men, photographed their irises and took their fingerprints. Sabir described to me how teams of interrogators, including both Americans and Afghans, questioned him about his family's connections to the Taliban. Sabir told them that his family was against the Taliban, had fought the Taliban and that some of them had been kidnapped by the Taliban.

“The interrogators had short beards and didn't wear uniforms. They had big muscles and would fly into sudden rages,” Sabir recalled, adding that, at times, they would shake him violently. “We told them truthfully that there were not Taliban in our home.” One of the Americans, he said, told him they “had intelligence that a suicide bomber had hidden in your house and that he was planning an operation.” Sabir told them, “If we would have had a suicide bomber at home, then would we be playing music in our house? Almost all guests were government employees.” After three days in captivity, he told me, the Americans released him and the others. “They told us that we were innocent, that they are very sorry, and it was a very bad thing that they did in our house.” In public, however, the United States and its allies put forward a very different story about what happened that night in the compound in Gardez.

WHILE MOHAMMED SABIR
and the others were in US custody, the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force wasted little time in issuing a statement on the incident. Just hours after the raid, ISAF and the Afghan Ministry of Interior put out a joint press release. They asserted that a combined Afghan-international “security force” had made a “gruesome
discovery” the night before. The force had been on a fairly routine operation near the village of Khataba. Intelligence had “confirmed” the compound to be the site of “militant activity.” As the team approached, they were “engaged” in a “fire fight” by “several insurgents,” the statement read. The force killed the insurgents and was securing the compound when they made their discovery: three women who had been “bound,” “gagged” and then executed inside the compound. The force, the press release alleged, found them “
hidden in an adjacent room
.”

“ISAF continually works with our Afghan partners to fight
criminals and terrorists
who do not care about the life of civilians,” Canadian army brigadier general Eric Tremblay, ISAF's spokesman, told the press, referring to the raid. He portrayed the commandos who had raided the home as heroes. A number of
men, women and children
were detained by the force as they tried to leave the compound, the release stated, and eight men had been taken into custody for further questioning. During the incident, medical support had been called in, the statement said.

A few news agencies picked up the story that day and published more assertions from US, Afghan and ISAF officials. A “senior U.S. military official” told CNN that four victims had been found at the compound, two men and two women. The official confirmed the original statement's lurid details of the women's executions, adding that the killings seemed to have extreme cultural motives. “
It has the earmarks
of a traditional honor killing,” the official said, the implication being that the four people could have been murdered by their own family members. The official speculated that adultery or collusion with NATO forces could have been the motivation.

The
New York Times
put out a brief the following day, largely summarizing NATO's account. The
Times
reporter, Rob Norland, spoke to the
Paktia Province police chief
, Aziz Ahmad Wardak, who, he wrote, confirmed many details of the incident but said that three women and two men had been killed. He claimed the group had been killed by Taliban militants who attacked during a party celebrating a birth. US officials would later tell the press that the victims appeared to have
deep cuts and puncture wounds
, suggesting they had been stabbed.

While international news agencies largely put forward the US version of events, local reporters began speaking with Afghan officials and family members. The Pajhwok Afghan News Agency spoke with the deputy police chief in the province, Brigadier General Ghulam Dastagir Rustamyar, who said that “US Special Forces” had killed the five people during an operation, evidently in response to an
inaccurate or falsified tip-off
. “Last night, the Americans conducted an operation in a house and killed five innocent people, including three women,” Shahyesta Jan Ahadi, a deputy
provincial council member in Gardez, told a local reporter for the Associated Press. “The people are so angry.” Ahadi denied the NATO claim that it was a joint Afghan-US force. “The [Afghan] government didn't know about this,” he said. “
We strongly condemn this
.”