(Updated; originally published April 15, 2007)
Look at the "terrorists" of Afghanistan.
Actually, they are just innocent people we wasted -- all based on a DAMNABLE LIE!!!
"by CARLOTTA GALL
KABUL, Afghanistan, April 14 — American marines reacted to a bomb ambush with excessive force in eastern Afghanistan last month, hitting groups of bystanders and vehicles with machine-gun fire in a rampage that covered 10 miles of highway and left 12 civilians dead, including an infant and three elderly men, according to a report published by an Afghan human rights commission on Saturday.
Families of the victims said this week that they had demanded justice from the American military and the Afghan government, and they described the aftermath of the marines’ shooting, in Nangarhar Province. One victim, a 16-year-old newly married girl, was cut down while she was carrying a bundle of grass to her family’s farmhouse. A 75-year-old man walking to his shop was hit by so many bullets that his son did not recognize the body when he came to the scene.
In its report, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission condemned the suicide bomb attack that initially struck a convoy of a Marine Special Operations unit on March 4, wounding one American, and said there may also have been small-arms fire directed at the convoy immediately after the blast. But it said the response was disproportionate, especially given the obviously non-military nature of the marines’ targets long after the ambush.
“In failing to distinguish between civilians and legitimate military targets, the U.S. Marine Corps Special Forces employed indiscriminate force,” the report said. “Their actions thus constitute a serious violation of international humanitarian standards.”
The bombing and subsequent shooting was the most high profile of a number of human rights violations in the fighting in Afghanistan that were documented by the human rights commission. The report comes amid resurgent Taliban violence and coalition reprisals that are costing an increasing number of civilian lives and that have brought harsh criticism of the government and international forces.
And that was last year!
Those criticisms have only grown louder, although you wouldn't know it reading AmeriKa's Zionist press!
A spokesman for the military’s Central Command said the report had been forwarded to Adm. William J. Fallon, the senior American officer in the region, for review.
The military, which is conducting its own criminal investigation, has said that the marines involved were being kept in Afghanistan and that the rest of their 120-man company has been pulled out of the country. One senior official who has served in Afghanistan said in a recent interview that such a recall was unprecedented and was a sign of the seriousness of the incident.
The deputy director of the human rights commission, Nader Nadery, warned that incidents like the highway shooting have greatly contributed to outrage in Afghanistan, contradicting efforts by coalition forces to win people’s support away from the Taliban.
“There is a high level of frustration among the public and civilians that they are victims of both sides of the conflict,” he added.
In Spinpul, where the incident happened, and in the whole province of Nangarhar, that frustration is evident. Still mourning, the families of the victims said this week that they had demanded from President Hamid Karzai and the American generals they had met that those responsible be punished. Some of them said the soldiers should be tried under Islamic law and face the death penalty if found guilty of the killings.
“They committed a great cruelty; they should be punished,” said Ghor Ghashta, 65, whose daughter-in-law was killed at the door of their farmhouse compound, several hundred yards from the road and the scene of the blast. The American troops were firing from the road and raked the river bed where workers were digging a ditch and the surrounding fields with gunfire, he and other witnesses said.
“She was cutting grass in the field and she was carrying the bundle of grass on her head back into the house for the animals,” said his eldest son, Abdel Muhammad, 25.
“There was a big blast and then I heard firing. I started walking toward my house,” he said. “When I reached the house, my sister called and said my sister-in-law had been killed,” he said. The young woman, Yadwaro, 16, was shot in the back and fell dead across the threshold, he said. Her husband, Tera Gul, 18, sat listening silently to his brother and then got up and walked away.
The suicide bomb attack happened some 500 yards along the road from the bridge that gives the village its name, White Bridge, on the main highway about 25 miles east of the town of Jalalabad. A man driving a minibus in the opposite direction to the Marine unit exploded his vehicle as he passed the convoy of five or six Humvees, according to the commission’s report, which was drawn from interviews with witnesses, police officers, community leaders and hospital officials. One marine was wounded by shrapnel from the blast, it said.
The convoy may then have come under small arms fire from one vehicle on the same side of the road as the bomber, Mr. Nadery said. In the days after the episode, the United States military said that the convoy had come under a “complex ambush from several directions,” but the human rights commission questioned this.
“If such an attack did indeed occur, as it is claimed by the U.S. military, it was almost certainly very limited in scope and restricted to the immediate site” of the suicide bombing, it said in its report.
Two Humvees then moved forward 500 yards to the bridge and opened fire with roof-mounted machine-guns on a car that had stopped on a side road, some yards from the highway. The gunners then swung their weapons around and began firing on the nearby river bed and fields. They killed six people instantly and wounded at least another, the report said.
The driver of the car, a veteran mujahedeen fighter who goes by the name of Lewanai, 45, was wounded but survived the shooting by diving out of his door and scrambling behind a mound of earth. But the big guns shredded his car and the three people inside: his father, Hajji Zarpadshah, 80; his uncle, Hajji Shin Makhe, 75; and his nephew, Farid Gul, 16.
“It was an illegal action,” he said. “I know the army rules, and when I heard the blast I stopped my car, I was thinking in case they shoot me,” he said in an interview at his home nearby. “They opened fire and were shooting for 10 minutes.”
The car, now parked at a nearby gas station, is torn by gashes from the bullets over its hood, side and roof and the seats are shredded from the power of the gunfire, the ceiling is smattered with debris and bits of blood and bone. Mr. Nadery said that the vehicle had been hit by 250 bullets.
“Their insides were all coming out,” said Noor Islam, 22, who saw the dead men in the car after the attack. “We were very upset. Two of them were old men with white beards, and one was young,” he said. “They had no weapons.”
Near the car was Shin Gul, 70, who was waiting for a ride to the nearby bazaar of Markoh where the family had a shop selling sacks of flour. He was cut down on the spot and his body so torn apart that his son, Muhammad Ayub, 35, said he could not recognize him when he first came on the scene. “I saw a notebook in his pocket and then I knew it was him,” he said.
Oh, Fatima, I can't take anymore!!!
Please collect my tears and present them to Allah!
I am SO ASHAMED at what is being carried out in my name!
Oh, God, please, please, please FORGIVE US for ALLOWING this MASS-MURDER by our ANTI-CHRISTIAN LEADERS!!!
Nearby a 30-year-old shepherd named Farid was shot. He died two weeks later in the hospital.
Mr. Ayub said he was with a group of workers digging a ditch in the river bed when they came under fire from the Humvees at the bridge. They all survived by taking cover in the ditch, but the bullets went over their heads. Those were the shots that killed the newlywed girl, Yadwaro, about 100 yards beyond.
As the Humvees pulled away across the bridge they opened fire on a gas station and other vehicles, killing four people in one minibus, including a 1-year-old child, the report said.
Killed a BABY!!!!! You get that, readers?
Bush has turned our soldiers into BABY-KILLERS!!!
No wonder the suicide rates are skyrocketing!
How would you like to wake up and realize you are a Nazi in service to the Anti-Christ and HIS Empire?!
May God DAMN George W. Bush to ETERNAL HELL!!!!!
In more incidents over the 10-mile stretch of road from Spinpul, the marines killed six more people and wounded 25.
The report covered other civilian killings in recent weeks, including extensive human-rights violations by Taliban fighters and their allies, like beheadings and the mutilation of victims.
In other cases involving coalition troops in Afghan, the report detailed an airstrike in Kapisa Province in March that killed a family of nine people, including two pregnant women and four children younger than 5.
MURDERING MOTHERS and BABIES!!!!
Aaaaaaaahhhh!
The report also criticized ongoing house raids by American forces, including one on the house of one of the human rights commission’s staff members, who the report said was hooded and handcuffed to a detonator and told not to move in case it exploded."
"A human rights commish was "hooded and handcuffed to a detonator and told not to move in case it exploded?"
Is that NOT TERRORISM?!
And IF NOT, then WHAT IS?!?!
