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>One Year On In Afghanistan
>By Robert Fisk
>
>President George Bush's "war on terror" reached the desert village of
>Hajibirgit at midnight on 22 May. Haji Birgit Khan, the bearded,
>85-year-old Pushtu village leader and head of 12,000 local tribal
>families, was lying on a patch of grass outside his home. Faqir Mohamed
>was sleeping among his sheep and goats in a patch of sand to the south
>when he heard "big planes moving in the sky". Even at night, it is so
>hot that many villagers spend the hours of darkness outside their homes,
>although Mohamedin and his family were in their mud-walled house. There
>were 105 families in Hajibirgit on 22 May, and all were woken by the
>thunder of helicopter engines and the thwack of rotor blades and the
>screaming voices of the Americans.
>
>Haji Birgit Khan was seen running stiffly from his little lawn towards
>the white-walled village mosque, a rectangular cement building with a
>single loudspeaker and a few threadbare carpets. Several armed men were
>seen running after him. Hakim, one of the animal herders, saw the men
>from the helicopters chase the old man into the mosque and heard a burst
>of gunfire. "When our people found him, he had been killed with a
>bullet, in the head," he says, pointing downwards. There is a single
>bullet hole in the concrete floor of the mosque and a dried bloodstain
>beside it. "We found bits of his brain on the wall."
>
>Across the village, sharp explosions were detonating in the courtyards
>and doorways of the little homes. "The Americans were throwing stun
>grenades at us and smoke grenades," Mohamedin recalls. "They were
>throwing dozens of them at us and they were shouting and screaming all
>the time. We didn't understand their language, but there were Afghan
>gunmen with them, too, Afghans with blackened faces. Several began to
>tie up our women $B!& (Bour own women $B!& (Band the Americans were
>lifting their
>burqas, their covering, to look at their faces. That's when the little
>girl was seen running away." Abdul Satar says that she was three years
>old, that she ran shrieking in fear from her home, that her name was
>Zarguna, the daughter of a man called Abdul-Shakour $B!& (Bmany Afghans
>have
>only one name $B!& (Band that someone saw her topple into the village's
>60ft
>well on the other side of the mosque. During the night, she was to drown
>there, alone, her back apparently broken by the fall. Other village
>children would find her body in the morning. The Americans paid no
>attention. From the description of their clothes given by the villagers,
>they appeared to include Special Forces and also units of Afghan Special
>Forces, the brutish and ill-disciplined units run from Kabul's former
>Khad secret police headquarters. There were also 150 soldiers from the
>US 101st Airborne, whose home base is at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. But
>Fort Campbell is a long way from Hajibirgit, which is 50 miles into the
>desert from the south-western city of Kandahar. And the Americans were
>obsessed with one idea: that the village contained leaders from the
>Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida movement.
>
>A former member of a Special Forces unit from one of America's coalition
>partners supplied his own explanation for the American behaviour when I
>met him a few days later. "When we go into a village and see a farmer
>with a beard, we see an Afghan farmer with a beard," he said. "When the
>Americans go into a village and see a farmer with a beard, they see
>Osama bin Laden."
>
>All the women and children were ordered to gather at one end of
>Hajibirgit. "They were pushing us and shoving us out of our homes,"
>Mohamedin says. "Some of the Afghan gunmen were shouting abuse at us.
>All the while, they were throwing grenades at our homes." The few
>villagers who managed to run away collected the stun grenades next day
>with the help of children. There are dozens of them, small cylindrical
>green pots with names and codes stamped on the side. One says "7 BANG
>Delay: 1.5 secs NIC-01/06-07", another "1 BANG, 170 dB Delay: 1.5s."
>Another cylinder is marked: "DELAY Verzagerung ca. 1,5s." These were the
>grenades that terrified Zarguna and ultimately caused her death. A
>regular part of US Special Forces equipment, they are manufactured in
>Germany by the Hamburg firm of Nico-Pyrotechnik $B!& (Bhence the "NIC" on
>several of the cylinders. "dB" stands for decibels.
>
>Several date stamps show that the grenades were made as recently as last
>March. The German company refers to them officially as "40mm by 46mm
>sound and flash (stun) cartridges". But the Americans were also firing
>bullets. Several peppered a wrecked car in which another villager, a
>taxi driver called Abdullah, had been sleeping. He was badly wounded. So
>was Haji Birgit Khan's son.
>
>A US military spokesman would claim later that US soldiers had "come
>under fire" in the village and had killed one man and wounded two
>"suspected Taliban or al-Qa'ida members". The implication $B!& (Bthat
>85-year-old Haji Birgit Khan was the gunman $B!& (Bis clearly
>preposterous.
>
>The two wounded were presumably Khan's son and Abdullah, the taxi
>driver. The US claim that they were Taliban or al-Qa'ida members was a
>palpable lie $B!& (Bsince both of them were subsequently released. "Some
>of
>the Afghans whom the Americans brought with them were shouting 'Shut
>up!' to the children who were crying," Faqir Mohamed remembers.
>
>"They made us lie down and put cuffs on our wrists, sort of plastic
>cuffs. The more we pulled on them, the tighter they got and the more
>they hurt. Then they blindfolded us. Then they started pushing us
>towards the planes, punching us as we tried to walk."
>
>In all, the Americans herded 55 of the village men, blindfolded and with
>their hands tied, on to their helicopters. Mohamedin was among them. So
>was Abdul-Shakour, still unaware that his daughter was dying in the
>well. The 56th Afghan prisoner to be loaded on to a helicopter was
>already dead: the Americans had decided to take the body of 85-year-old
>Haji Birgit Khan with them.
>
>When the helicopters landed at Kandahar airport $B!& (Bheadquarters to the
>101st Airborne $B!& (Bthe villagers were, by their own accounts, herded
>together into a container. Their legs were tied and then their handcuffs
>and the manacle of one leg of each prisoner were separately attached to
>stakes driven into the floor of the container. Thick sacks were put over
>their heads. Abdul Satar was among the first to be taken from this hot
>little prison. "Two Americans walked in and tore my clothes off," he
>said. "If the clothes would not tear, they cut them off with scissors.
>They took me out naked to have my beard shaved and to have my photograph
>taken. Why did they shave off my beard? I had my beard all my life."
>
>Mohamedin was led naked from his own beard-shaving into an interrogation
>tent, where his blindfold was removed. "There was an Afghan translator,
>a Pushtun man with a Kandahar accent in the room, along with American
>soldiers, both men and women soldiers," he says. "I was standing there
>naked in front of them with my hands tied. Some of them were standing,
>some were sitting at desks. They asked me: 'What do you do?' I told
>them: 'I am a shepherd $B!& (Bwhy don't you ask your soldiers what I was
>doing?' They said: 'Tell us yourself.' Then they asked: 'What kind of
>weapons have you used?' I told them I hadn't used any weapon.
>
>"One of them asked: 'Did you use a weapon during the Russian
>[occupation] period, the civil war period or the Taliban period?' I told
>them that for a lot of the time I was a refugee." From the villagers'
>testimony, it is impossible to identify which American units were
>engaged in the interrogations. Some US soldiers were wearing berets with
>yellow or brown badges, others were in civilian clothes but apparently
>wearing bush hats. The Afghan interpreter was dressed in his traditional
>salwah khameez. Hakim underwent a slightly longer period of questioning;
>like Mohamedin, he says he was naked before his interrogators.
>
>"They wanted my age and my job. I said I was 60, that I was a farmer.
>They asked: 'Are there any Arabs or Talibans or Iranians or foreigners
>in your village?' I said 'No.' They asked: 'How many rooms are there in
>your house, and do you have a satellite phone?' I told them: 'I don't
>have a phone. I don't even have electricity.' They asked: 'Were the
>Taliban good or bad?' I replied that the Taliban never came to our
>village so I had no information about them. Then they asked: 'What about
>Americans? What kind of people are Americans?' I replied: 'We heard that
>they liberated us with [President Hamid] Karzai and helped us $B!& (Bbut
>we
>don't know our crime that we should be treated like this.' What was I
>supposed to say?"
>
>A few hours later, the villagers of Hajibirgit were issued with
>bright-yellow clothes and taken to a series of wire cages laid out over
>the sand of the airbase $B!& (Ba miniature version of Guantanamo Bay
> $B!& (Bwhere
>they were given bread, biscuits, rice, beans and bottled water. The
>younger boys were kept in separate cages from the older men. There was
>no more questioning, but they were held in the cages for another five
>days. All the while, the Americans were trying to discover the identity
>of the 85-year-old man. They did not ask their prisoners $B!& (Bwho could
>have identified him at once $B!& (Balthough the US interrogators may not
>have
>wished them to know that he was dead. In the end, the Americans gave a
>photograph of the face of the corpse to the International Red Cross. The
>organisation was immediately told by Kandahar officials that the elderly
>man was perhaps the most important tribal leader west of the city.
>
>"When we were eventually taken out of the cages, there were five
>American advisers waiting to talk to us," Mohamedin says. "They used an
>interpreter and told us they wanted us to accept their apologies for
>being mistreated. They said they were sorry. What could we say? We were
>prisoners. One of the advisers said: 'We will help you.' What does that
>mean?" A fleet of US helicopters flew the 55 men to the Kandahar
>football stadium $B!& (Bonce the scene of Taliban executions $B!& (Bwhere
>all were
>freed, still dressed in prison clothes and each with a plastic ID
>bracelet round the wrist bearing a number. "Ident-A-Band Bracelet made
>by Hollister" was written on each one. Only then did the men learn that
>old Haji Birgit Khan had been killed during the raid a week earlier. And
>only then did Abdul-Shakour learn that his daughter Zarguna was dead.
>
>The Pentagon initially said that it found it "difficult to believe" that
>the village women had their hands tied. But given identical descriptions
>of the treatment of Afghan women after the US bombing of the Uruzgan
>wedding party, which followed the Hajibirgit raid, it seems that the
>Americans $B!& (Bor their Afghan allies $B!& (Bdid just that. A US
>military
>spokesman claimed that American forces had found "items of intelligence
>value", weapons and a large amount of cash in the village. What the
>"items" were was never clarified. The guns were almost certainly for
>personal protection against robbers. The cash remains a sore point for
>the villagers. Abdul Satar said that he had 10,000 Pakistani rupees
>taken from him $B!& (Babout $200 ( $B!W (B130). Hakim says he lost his
>savings of
>150,000 rupees $B!& (B$3,000 ( $B!W (B1,900). "When they freed us, the
>Americans
>gave us 2,000 rupees each," Mohamedin says. "That's just $40 [ $B!W (B25].
>We'd
>like the rest of our money."
>
>But there was a far greater tragedy to confront the men when they
>reached Hajibirgit. In their absence $B!& (Bwithout guns to defend the
>homes,
>and with the village elder dead and many of the menfolk prisoners of the
>Americans $B!& (Bthieves had descended on Hajibirgit. A group of men from
>Helmand province, whose leader is Abdul Rahman Khan $B!& (Bonce a brutal
>and
>rapacious "mujahid" fighter against the Russians, and now a Karzai
>government police commander $B!& (Braided the village once the Americans
>had
>taken away so many of the men. Ninety-five of the 105 families had fled
>into the hills, leaving their mud homes to be pillaged.
>
>The disturbing, frightful questions that creep into the mind of anyone
>driving across the desert to Hajibirgit today are obvious. Who told the
>US to raid the village? Who told them that the Taliban leadership and
>the al-Qa'ida leadership were there? Was it, perhaps, Abdul Rahman Khan,
>the cruel police chief whose men were so quick to pillage the mud-walled
>homes once the raid was over? For today, Hajibirgit is a virtual ghost
>town, its village leader dead, most of its houses abandoned. The US raid
>was worthless. There are scarcely 40 villagers left. They all gathered
>at the stone grave of Zarguna some days later, to pay their respects to
>the memory of the little girl. "We are poor people $B!& (Bwhat can we do?"
>Mohamedin asked me. I had no reply. President Bush's "war on terror",
>his struggle of "good against evil" descended on the innocent village of
>Hajibirgit.
>
>And now Hajibirgit is dead.
>
>Michael Albert
>Z Magazine / ZNet
>sysop@zmag.org
>www.zmag.org
>
>
>
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