The Convoy of Death: Will Obama Investigate The Afghan Massacre Of November 2001?

[Orwellian_Ghost]

The Convoy of Death: Will Obama Investigate The Afghan Massacre Of November 2001?

13.7.09



In my book The Guantánamo Files, I devoted a chapter to the “Convoy of Death,” which includes the following passages, reproduced here to establish a context for the massacre, based on descriptions from survivors, and from those who covered the story at the time, or who investigated it afterwards:

A map of northern AfghanistanOn Sunday, November 25, 2001, as the uprising began in Qala-i-Janghi , a far larger group of Taliban soldiers — at least 4,500, but possibly as many as 7,000 — made their way from Kunduz to Yerghanek, five miles west of the city, where they surrendered to General Dostum. What no one either knew or cared about, however, was that among the surrendering soldiers were hundreds of civilians who had been caught up in the chaos or who were fleeing the hard-core al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters making a last stand in Kunduz itself.

Very few of those who made their way to Yerghanek — 70 at most — were eventually transferred to Guantánamo. Of these, only a handful have spoken about their experiences, and none were in the first convoys that set off for Sheberghan on the Sunday. Overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people flooding out of the city, Dostum was obliged to keep thousands of them marooned in the desert while they arranged additional transportation over the next few days. As a result, neither the men from Tipton nor the others who ended up in Guantánamo — including Abdul Rahman, a 25-year old shopkeeper from Kunduz, and Mohammed Saghir, a 49-year old woodcutter from Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province — had any inkling of the grisly fate that awaited them.

While the vast crowds of fighters and civilians were disarmed, Dostum’s men recruited drivers to go to Qala Zeini, an old fort on the road between Mazar-e-Sharif and Sheberghan, where those transported from Yerghanek were transferred into containers for the last stage of the journey to Sheberghan. One of the drivers, who was in the fort when a convoy of prisoners arrived that evening, said that, as soon as the Northern Alliance soldiers began stripping them of their turbans and vests, tying their hands behind their backs and transferring them to the containers, some of the prisoners — those who were familiar with recent Afghan history — realized that Dostum was planning to kill them. Since 1997, when a brutal Uzbek general had first seen the viability of containers as cheap and convenient killing machines, murdering 1,250 Taliban soldiers by leaving them in containers in the summer sun, they had become a familiar weapon of Afghan warfare. When the Taliban took Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998, they disposed of their conquered enemies in the same fashion.

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http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/07/13/the-convoy-of-death-will-obama-investigate-the-afghan-massacre-of-november-2001/

[HamdenRice]

1. Less than Zero nt

[scarletwoman]

2. k&r -- and fuck those who don't want to know the truth. (nt)

[Gregorian]

3. I will recommend this subject every time I see it come up.

We have committed, and watched being committed, crimes that defile what this country stands for.

[Just-plain-Kathy]

8. I'm with you. ..n/t

[katandmoon]

4. I will believe it when I see it

[chill_wind]

5. I will keep following. K n R. n/t

[slipslidingaway]

6. #8 n/t

[maryf]

7. K&R

The inhumanity can still stun me, omg...