You probably remember the
riot in Kabul on May 29th and 30th. A military truck lost its breaks and crashed into 12 civilian vehicles.
At least seven people were killed in the shooting and the riots which followed. No US soldier was hurt in the incident.
US president George W Bush has promised Afghan leader Hamid Karzai "a full investigation" into the incident, a White House spokesman said on Wednesday.
A preliminary investigation by the US military has found that its soldiers retaliated in "self-defence", an army spokesman told reporters.
"Our initial investigation... shows fire came from the crowd and our soldiers used their weapons to defend themselves," Col Tom Collins said.
Col Collins said video footage showed US soldiers firing over the heads of the stone throwing crowds from a machine gun mounted on one of the 12 vehicles in the convoy.
But now it turns out that the soldiers
weren't under fire.
The pictures were taken by an Afghan passer-by on 29 May in Khair Kane, a district of north Kabul. The 20 photographs appear to show a group of unarmed Afghan civilians being killed by gunfire from an American Humvee.
[...]
A sequence of pictures show US vehicles leaving at high speed as the crowd stones them. In one sequence, a clearly unarmed Afghan man is seen with an American Humvee in the background, then as part of a group of men throwing stones towards the Americans. Two frames later his lifeless body is on the ground, having apparently been shot in the chest.
The photographer, Atif Ahmadzai, 34, said: "I thought at first they were firing into the air. I was on the hill taking the pictures and, as they fired towards me, I ducked. One bullet grazed my thigh. Two people were killed behind me." He said he saw six bodies in total.
All the witnesses to the incident reported at least one US vehicle opened fire on the civilians. "I saw with my own eyes that the soldier fired on the people," said Nazir Akhmad, 32, who owns a petrol station near where the accident occurred. "Her gun was pointed in the air but then she brought it down and started firing. The first bullet killed a boy called Khaled."
It's important to note what has happened in Kabul since the riot. Kabul was relatively violence-free compared to the rest of Afghanistan for the last several years. That
peacefulness has been broken since our troops fired into an angry crowd.
Kabul has long been seen as an island of stability in Afghanistan. But after four bombs this week ripped through the city in 48 hours, leaving one person dead and over 50 injured, the kind of violence that has become an almost daily occurrence in the south and east of Afghanistan came within the gates of the Afghan capital.
You might remember something similar in Iraq on
April 28th and 30th, 2003, in a town few of us had heard of at the time called Fallujah. At the time there was no real rebellion in Iraq. But when protestors took to the streets they were met with bullets.
New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) challenged the military's contention that its troops came under direct fire in either of the April 28 and April 30 incidents. The group also took issue with the military's insistence that its soldiers responded with "precision fire" against what they assumed to be Iraqi gunmen.
In the six weeks since the fatal demonstrations al-Falluja, located about 35 miles west of Baghdad, has become a major center of resistance to the U.S. occupation. At least four U.S. soldiers have been killed in a series of guerrilla attacks, while many more have been injured.
[...]
Five days later a demonstration called to protest the military presence in the town turned violent. According to the military, soldiers returned "precision fire" on gunmen in the crowd who were shooting at them. But the Iraqi protesters insist that the troops fired on them without provocation, killing 17 people and wounding more than 70, in what was the worst incident of its kind to date.
On April 30 a U.S. military convoy driving through the town in the midst of another demonstration opened fire on protesters, killing three and wounding at least 16 more. The soldiers said they thought they had come under fire, while the townspeople insisted that no shots had been fired from the Iraqi side. They admitted that rocks had been thrown at the army vehicles, breaking the window of a truck and injuring a soldier.
In the first incident HRW said it could find no conclusive evidence of bullet damage to the walls of the school where the soldiers were based, "placing into serious question the assertion that they had come under fire from individuals in the crowd," the report said.
Most of the fighting recently has centered on southern Afghanistan, where NATO is engaged in a major push against Taleban forces in a region that hasn't been under
government control for at least 30 years. To give you an idea of the amount of fighting going on, the air force has engaged in
twice as many airstrikes in Afghanistan than in Iraq in recent months. The Afghan government is so clueless on how to fight the insurgency that they are
arming the local warlords in the hope that they will use them against the Taleban. Many of these warlords either worked with the Taleban when they were in control, or committed human rights abuses before the Taleban, or both.
Just this week a senior British officer told the Telegraph that UK troops
'on brink of exhaustion' in Afghanistan.
"The men are knackered - they are on the brink of exhaustion. They are under considerable duress and have suffered great hardship," he told the newspaper.
"This is a situation which is ultimately unsustainable. The shock of battle, the lack of sleep and back-to-back operations are beginning to impact on the troops.
"They are now close to what is realistically achievable - even for the Paras."
What makes it all the more disturbing is that NATO intelligence is saying that the rise of the
rebellion in Afghanistan is NOT linked to al-Qaeda, or even to the Taleban!
In other words, we are fighting Afghanis.