Dirty Wars (64 page)

Within days of the raid, UN human rights investigators in Gardez spoke to “local authorities,” who said that US Special Forces had come from Bagram to Gardez days before the operation. They were also told that Afghan security officials had been notified about an impending operation but had not been given any details about the time or place. The United Nations concluded that neither the local Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) nor ISAF troops were involved in the raid.

NATO had promised a “joint investigation,” but it never happened. After the incident, Afghan officials from the provincial capital were
barred from entering
the compound. “By the time we got there, there was a foreign guy guarding the bodies, and they
wouldn't let us come near
,” said Wardak, of the Paktia police. Ultimately, the Interior Ministry in Kabul dispatched a delegation, headed by Kabul's
top criminal investigator
, to investigate the raid. The group appeared to have worked largely independent of NATO.

By the time Mohammed Sabir returned home after being held in American custody, he had missed the burial of his wife and other family members. Racked with grief, he imagined avenging his loved ones. “I didn't want to live anymore,” he told me. “I wanted to wear a suicide jacket and blow myself up among the Americans. But my brother and father wouldn't let me. I wanted jihad against the Americans.”

THERE WAS CLEARLY A COVER-UP
. The family knew it. The United Nations knew it. And the Afghan investigators knew it. The force that raided the home was US-led, but who were the Americans who had stormed into that home in the middle of the night?

It wasn't until a British reporter, Jerome Starkey, began a serious investigation of the Gardez killings a month after they took place that the full story would begin to unfold. When Starkey first read the ISAF press release, he said he “had no reason to believe it wasn't true.” When I visited him at his home in Kabul, Starkey told me, “I thought it was worth investigating because if that press release was true—a mass honor killing, three women killed by Taliban who were then killed by Special Forces—that in itself would have made an
extraordinary and intriguing story
.” But when he visited Gardez and began assembling witnesses to meet him in the area, he immediately realized ISAF's story was likely false.

The family had significant evidence that undercut the story circulated by ISAF and picked up by many news organizations. The family in Gardez showed Starkey and me a video from the night of the raid in which the musicians are seen playing and Daoud and his relatives are dancing in celebration of the naming ceremony for Daoud's son. “I suppose the closest approximation we'd have is like a christening party,” Starkey recalled. “It's the sixth night after a child is born. It's named, usually by its grandparents, and you celebrate that by inviting all your friends and neighbors and cousins over to your house, effectively for a sort of feast or banquet and the dancing and music.” Starkey realized that the nature of the celebration “didn't chime with the suggestion that they were Taliban. The Taliban are notorious for their very strict rules, and musical instruments were banned when they were in power. So here we've got video of guys, of a three-piece band, and we interviewed the musicians, who corroborated the story. It just, it really didn't stack up. They clearly weren't Talibs.”

Starkey visited Gardez about a month after the raid and spoke to more than a dozen survivors, as well as local government and law enforcement officials and a religious leader. He also spoke to UN human rights investigators in the area who had conducted an investigation of their own. All of the people Starkey spoke to insisted that the mysterious US and Afghan shooters had killed the five people. In addition to learning new details about the killings on February 12, Starkey found that conventional coalition forces had likely not been behind the strike, suggesting that US “Special Forces” had been involved. US soldiers based in the area
denied having been a part of
any night raid in Khataba that day. And Afghan officials who, according to NATO protocol, should have been notified of an operation within their jurisdiction said they'd received no notice of a planned raid. “Nobody informed us,” said the deputy governor of Gardez, Abdul Rahman Mangal. “
This operation was a mistake
.”

Under NATO rules, the team conducting the operation
should have left information
about its unit with the local people, but the family said they had received nothing. The family further accused the soldiers of trying to cover up the raid, abetted by NATO's misinformation.

Starkey contacted Rear Admiral Greg Smith, General McChrystal's deputy chief of staff for communications, and confronted him with the discrepancies. NATO was guilty, Smith said—of poor word choice. The women, he conceded, had probably been prepped for a funeral, rather than “bound and gagged.” But Smith denied that a “cover-up” had taken place and insisted that the women had been dead for hours. He confirmed that the men had been killed by the US and Afghan forces. “They were not the targets of this particular raid,” Smith admitted. But they had been armed
and showing “hostile intent,” he claimed, justifying the escalation of force. “I don't know if they fired any rounds,” he said. “If you have got an individual stepping out of a compound, and if your assault force is there, that is often the trigger to neutralize the individual.
You don't have to be fired upon
to fire back.”

Despite the UN investigation and a smattering of mostly local news reports questioning ISAF's version of events, the US-led NATO command wasn't forced to publicly account for the wild discrepancies between what the family said happened and ISAF's assertions. That is, until Starkey published a story in the
Times
of London, headlined: “Nato ‘Covered Up' Botched Night Raid in Afghanistan That Killed Five.” Within hours of his story coming out, Starkey was receiving phone calls from his colleagues, warning him. “I was getting information from other journalists in Kabul, who were my friends, that NATO was briefing against me,” Starkey told me. “NATO was trying to discredit me, trying to say that the story was inaccurate, and effectively trying to kill it dead.”

Rear Admiral Smith had put out a statement that dispensed with the diplomacy and allusion typical of official press releases. McChrystal's press team was naming names. “The allegation made by Times UK reporter Jerome Starkey that NATO ‘covered up' an incident that was conducted outside Gardez in Paktia province is
categorically false
,” the statement read. It went on to accuse Starkey of misquoting Admiral Smith in the article and claimed that the ISAF Joint Command had sent an investigative team to the compound within twelve hours of the incident. Smith and Duncan Boothby, McChrystal's civilian press aide at the time, also “
called up rival outlets
and reporters to ‘brief' against Starkey, saying he wasn't a credible journalist” because of a stint at a British tabloid. “I've been living in Afghanistan for four years,” Starkey said. “I can't remember another case where that has happened. To my knowledge, that was the only time that they've named a journalist, and singled out a journalist so specifically in a denial.”

NATO “claimed to have a recording of my conversation which contradicted my shorthand record,” Starkey wrote in a Nieman Watchdog blog post the following week, referring to the alleged misquote. “When I asked to hear it, they ignored me. When I pressed them, they said there had been a misunderstanding. When they said recording, they meant someone had taken notes. The tapes, they said,
do not exist
.”

Starkey pressed on, publishing another story describing the community's anger over the raid and subsequent responses of NATO and the Afghan authorities. “
I don't want money
. I want justice,” the family's patriarch, Hajji Sharabuddin, told Starkey. He said that the government had offered
them compensation for each slain family member after protests paralyzed the provincial capital. “All our family, we now don't care about our lives. We will all do suicide attacks and [the whole province] will support us.”

“Nato officials continued to brief journalists in Kabul yesterday that the women were victims of an ‘honour' killing,” Starkey wrote. “However, they did not explain why the bodies would have been kept in the house overnight, against Islamic custom, nor why the family had invited 25 guests to celebrate the
naming of a newborn child
the same evening.”

“My father was friends with the Americans and they killed him,” Daoud's son, Abdul Ghafar, told Starkey, showing him a photograph of his father with three smiling American soldiers. “They killed my father. I want to kill them.
I want the killers brought to justice
.”

ON MARCH
15, 2010, the
New York Times
reported that
General McChrystal had decided
to bring most of the US Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan under his command. The decision was motivated in part by concerns about civilian casualties, the article noted, which were often caused by elite forces operating outside of the NATO command structure. The
Times
report largely seconded Starkey's account of the Gardez raid, confirming that “Afghan police special forces paired with American Special Operations forces” had been behind the operation. Again, Admiral Smith avoided taking responsibility for the deaths of the women. “The regret is that two innocent males died,” Admiral Smith said. “The women, I'm not sure anyone will
ever know how they died
.” He added, however, “I don't know that there are any forensics that show bullet penetrations of the women or blood from the women.” Smith added that the women appeared to have been stabbed and slashed by knives, rather than shot. The
Times
spoke to Sayid Mohammed Mal, the father of Gulalai's fiancé and the vice chancellor of Gardez University. “They were killed by the Americans,” he said. “If the government doesn't listen to us, I have 50 family members, I'll bring them all to Gardez roundabout and we'll pour petrol on ourselves and
burn ourselves to death
.”

Weeks later, in early April, Starkey received an unexpected phone call. “NATO phoned me up,” Starkey told me, “and they said, ‘Jerome, we just wanted to let you know that we're preparing to put out a press release. We're changing our version of events.'” A so-called joint investigation had “determined that international forces were responsible for the deaths of three women who were in the same compound where two men were killed by the joint Afghan-international patrol searching for a Taliban insurgent.” The report added, “While investigators could not conclusively determine
how or when the women died, due to lack of forensic evidence, they concluded that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the
joint force firing at the men
.”

The statement maintained that the men had shown “hostile intent” but were “later determined not to be insurgents.” “The [original] statement noted the women had been bound and gagged, but this information was taken from an initial report by the international members of the joint force who were not familiar with Islamic burial customs,” the statement said. When Starkey received the phone call, he had just filed another story for the
Times
of London. This was his most explosive story to date, based on a conversation with a senior Afghan official involved in the government investigation, as well as members of the family.

The delegation had finished its report, and McChrystal was briefed on the findings as well. The press release, followed by news that McChrystal was ordering a second review of the incident, was meant to preempt a gruesome revelation. “US special forces
soldiers dug bullets out
of their victims' bodies in the bloody aftermath of the botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened,” Starkey asserted in his story, which came out the following day. Afghan investigators told Starkey that the US soldiers had also removed bullets from the scene. Their investigation had determined that eleven bullets were fired, but only seven had been found. The missing bullets, combined with photographic evidence and witness testimony, had brought them to their conclusion about what the US Special Forces had done. “In what culture in the world do you invite...people for a party and meanwhile kill three women?” the senior Afghan official told Starkey. “The dead bodies were just eight meters from where they were preparing the food. The Americans, they told us the women were dead for 14 hours.” The Afghan government investigators had confirmed what the family had told Starkey—and later me—about the US forces digging bullets out of the women's bodies. “Because we were aware that what we were looking into was potentially so controversial, we wanted to make sure that we were on solid ground,” Starkey told me, referring to the digging out of the bullets. “That allegation I left out of my original story. But when I heard it again, from this very senior, very credible Afghan source, we published that.”

THAT SAME DAY
, the
New York Times
reported some of the conclusions of the Afghan investigation. “We came to the conclusion that the NATO patrol was responsible for the killing of the two men and the three women, and that there was evidence of tampering in the corridor inside the
compound by the members” of the assault team, said the lead investigator, Merza Mohammed Yarmad. “
There was a mess
at the scene.” NATO said the allegations had prompted another investigation but nonetheless rejected them outright. “We strongly deny having dug any bullets out of bodies. There
simply is no evidence
,” said a NATO military official. The officer appointed to conduct the second review was put under McChrystal's direct “
operational control
” while still conducting the investigation. The results remained classified, but NATO continued to insist that there was “
no evidence of a cover-up
.”