In what witnesses are reporting as a massacre a U.S Army Sargent gunned down 16 Afghan civilians including 9 children after forcing his way into three homes in the middle of the night. Five others were wounded, no word if any of those were children. This the most serious incident of its kind in the 10 years U.S. troops have been fighting in Afghanistan.
Sixteen Afghan civilians killed in U.S. shooting spree
By Ahmad Nadem and Ahmad Haroon
(Reuters) - One or more U.S. soldiers shot dead 16 civilians, including nine children according to Afghan officials, in Afghanistan's south on Sunday in what witnesses described as a massacre.
NATO said they had detained one U.S. soldier in the killings. U.S. officials said the soldier was a staff sergeant.
The incident, one of the worst of its kind since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, quickly inflamed the severely strained relations between Washington and Kabul.
The U.S. Embassy in Kabul said anti-U.S. reprisals were possible following the killings, which come weeks after U.S. soldiers burned copies of the Koran at a NATO base, triggering widespread anti-Western protests in which at least 30 people died.
This is abhorrent beyond words.
With the incredible stress our service members in Afghanistan are under I'm almost surprised something like this took this long to occur. I think its a credit to our troops and their training that these kind of incidents have been rare and the transgressors were prosecuted as we saw with the recent trial of a Stryker Brigade's "Kill Team" at Fort Lewis.
What do we realistically expect to accomplish by staying in Afghanistan until 2014?
It is time for us to go.
UPDATE: From the New York Times:
Army Sergeant Accused of Slaying 16 in Afghan Villages
By TAIMOOR SHAH and GRAHAM BOWLEY
Published: March 11, 2012
PANJWAI, Afghanistan — Stalking from home to home, a United States Army sergeant methodically killed at least 16 civilians, 9 of them children, in a rural stretch of southern Aghanistan early Sunday, igniting fears of a new wave of anti-American hostility, Afghan and American officials said.
Residents of three villages in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province described a terrifying string of attacks in which the soldier, who had walked more than a mile from his base, tried door after door, eventually breaking in to kill within three separate houses. At the first, the man gathered 11 bodies, including those of four girls younger than 6, and set fire to them, villagers said.
In Panjwai, a reporter for The New York Times who inspected bodies that had been taken to the nearby American military base counted 16 dead, and saw burns on some of the children’s legs and heads. “All the family members were killed, the dead put in a room, and blankets were put over the corpses and they were burned,” said Anar Gula, an elderly neighbor who rushed to the house after the soldier had left. “We put out the fire.”
This account is absolutely horrifying.
UPDATE # 2:
Afghans express skepticism over shooting account
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghans are expressing growing skepticism that a shooting rampage that killed 16 civilians was carried out by a single U.S. soldier.