Somehow, in a matter of minutes, a jubilant family event had become a massacre. Seven people had died in all, according to family members. Two of the women had been pregnant. The women had sixteen children among them.
IT WAS 7:00 A.M. A few hours earlier, Mohammed Sabir had just seen his brother, his wife, his niece and his sister-in-law gunned down. Now he stood, shell-shocked, above their corpses in a room filled with American soldiers. The masked commandos had burst into the home and proceeded to raid it, searching every room. Sabir told me that Daoud and Gulalai were still alive at that point. US soldiers kept saying they would get them medical attention. “They didn’t let us take them to the hospital and kept saying that they have doctors and they would take care of the injured folks,” he said. “I kept asking them to let me take my daughter to the hospital because she had lost a lot of blood and we had a car right there,” Mohammed Tahir, Gulalai’s father, recalled. “But they didn’t let me take her to hospital. My daughter and Daoud were still alive. We kept asking, but we were told that a helicopter is coming and our injured will be taken to the hospital.” Both of them died before any helicopter came to retrieve them.
Even as the American raid was under way, Mohammed Sabir and his nephew Izzat, along with the wives of Daoud and Sabir, prepared burial shrouds for those who had died. The Afghan custom involves binding the feet and head. A scarf secured around the bottom of the chin is meant to keep the mouth of the deceased from hanging open. They had managed to do this before the Americans began handcuffing them and dividing the surviving men and women into separate areas. Several of the male family members told me that it was around this time that they witnessed a horrifying scene: US soldiers digging the bullets out of the women’s bodies. “They were putting knives into their injuries to take out the bullets,” Sabir told me. I asked him bluntly, “You saw the Americans digging the bullets out of the women’s bodies?” Without hesitation, he said, “Yes.” Tahir told me he saw the Americans with knives standing over the bodies. “They were taking out the bullets from their bodies to remove the proof of their crime,” he said.
Mohammed Sabir would not be able to attend his own wife’s burial, nor those of any of his dead family members. Following the raid, the American forces made everyone kneel or stand in the courtyard, barefoot, on a brutal winter morning, with their hands tied behind their backs. Witnesses told me that those who tried to speak or plead with the soldiers were beaten. “They told me to raise my hands, but I thought it was my own house, why should I?” Daoud’s eldest son, Abdul Ghafar, told me. “They hit me several times. They fired on me and around me. I put myself on the ground. I told the [American’s Afghan] translator to tell them not to kill women, just do their search. We are pro-government people. We work with the government. They kicked me several times. I tried to stand, but they kicked me.” A witness later told a UN investigator that at least ten people were assaulted by the US and Afghan team, including Hajji Sharabuddin, the sixty-five-year-old head of the household. “They told us that they were informed that forty to fifty Taliban are here,” Sharabuddin told me. “But, in fact, all of them were from my family and work for the government.” Sharabuddin demanded to know why they burst into his home in the middle of the night. “You could have searched my house in the morning,” he recalled telling them. “And if you could find any Talib in my house, then you could do anything to me or destroy and spoil my house and I would not blame you.”
A subsequent UN investigation conducted two days after the raid, which was never publicly released, determined that the survivors of the raid “suffered from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by being physically assaulted by US and Afghan forces, restrained and forced to stand bare feet for several hours outside in the cold,” adding that witnesses alleged “that US and Afghan forces refused to provide adequate and timely medical support to two people who sustained serious bullet injuries, resulting in their death hours later.”
Mohammed Sabir was one of the men singled out for further interrogation after the raid. With his clothes still caked with the blood of his loved ones, Sabir and seven other men were hooded and shackled. “They tied our hands and blindfolded us,” he recalled. “Two people grabbed us and pushed us, one by one, into the helicopter.” They were flown to a different Afghan province, Paktika, where the Americans held them for days. “My senses weren’t working at all,” he recalled. “I couldn’t cry, I was numb. I didn’t eat for three days and nights. They didn’t give us water to wash the blood away.” The Americans ran biometric tests on the men, photographed their irises and took their fingerprints. Sabir described to me how teams of interrogators, including both Americans and Afghans, questioned him about his family’s connections to the Taliban. Sabir told them that his family was against the Taliban, had fought the Taliban and that some of them had been kidnapped by the Taliban.
“The interrogators had short beards and didn’t wear uniforms. They had big muscles and would fly into sudden rages,” Sabir recalled, adding that, at times, they would shake him violently. “We told them truthfully that there were not Taliban in our home.” One of the Americans, he said, told him they “had intelligence that a suicide bomber had hidden in your house and that he was planning an operation.” Sabir told them, “If we would have had a suicide bomber at home, then would we be playing music in our house? Almost all guests were government employees.” After three days in captivity, he told me, the Americans released him and the others. “They told us that we were innocent, that they are very sorry, and it was a very bad thing that they did in our house.” In public, however, the United States and its allies put forward a very different story about what happened that night in the compound in Gardez.
WHILE MOHAMMED SABIR and the others were in US custody, the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force wasted little time in issuing a statement on the incident. Just hours after the raid, ISAF and the Afghan Ministry of Interior put out a joint press release. They asserted that a combined Afghan-international “security force” had made a “gruesome discovery” the night before. The force had been on a fairly routine operation near the village of Khataba. Intelligence had “confirmed” the compound to be the site of “militant activity.” As the team approached, they were “engaged” in a “fire fight” by “several insurgents,” the statement read. The force killed the insurgents and was securing the compound when they made their discovery: three women who had been “bound,” “gagged” and then executed inside the compound. The force, the press release alleged, found them “hidden in an adjacent room.”
“ISAF continually works with our Afghan partners to fight criminals and terrorists who do not care about the life of civilians,” Canadian army brigadier general Eric Tremblay, ISAF’s spokesman, told the press, referring to the raid. He portrayed the commandos who had raided the home as heroes. A number of men, women and children were detained by the force as they tried to leave the compound, the release stated, and eight men had been taken into custody for further questioning. During the incident, medical support had been called in, the statement said.
A few news agencies picked up the story that day and published more assertions from US, Afghan and ISAF officials. A “senior U.S. military official” told CNN that four victims had been found at the compound, two men and two women. The official confirmed the original statement’s lurid details of the women’s executions, adding that the killings seemed to have extreme cultural motives. “It has the earmarks of a traditional honor killing,” the official said, the implication being that the four people could have been murdered by their own family members. The official speculated that adultery or collusion with NATO forces could have been the motivation.
The New York Times put out a brief the following day, largely summarizing NATO’s account. The Times reporter, Rob Norland, spoke to the Paktia Province police chief, Aziz Ahmad Wardak, who, he wrote, confirmed many details of the incident but said that three women and two men had been killed. He claimed the group had
been killed by Taliban militants who attacked during a party celebrating a birth. US officials would later tell the press that the victims appeared to have deep cuts and puncture wounds, suggesting they had been stabbed.
While international news agencies largely put forward the US version of events, local reporters began speaking with Afghan officials and family members. The Pajhwok Afghan News Agency spoke with the deputy police chief in the province, Brigadier General Ghulam Dastagir Rustamyar, who said that “US Special Forces” had killed the five people during an operation, evidently in response to an inaccurate or falsified tip-off. “Last night, the Americans conducted an operation in a house and killed five innocent people, including three women,” Shahyesta Jan Ahadi, a deputy provincial council member in Gardez, told a local reporter for the Associated Press. “The people are so angry.” Ahadi denied the NATO claim that it was a joint Afghan–US force. “The [Afghan] government didn’t know about this,” he said. “We strongly condemn this.”
Within days of the raid, UN human rights investigators in Gardez spoke to “local authorities,” who said that US Special Forces had come from Bagram to Gardez days before the operation. They were also told that Afghan security officials had been notified about an impending operation but had not been given any details about the time or place. The United Nations concluded that neither the local Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) nor ISAF troops were involved in the raid.
NATO had promised a “joint investigation,” but it never happened. After the incident, Afghan officials from the provincial capital were barred from entering the compound. “By the time we got there, there was a foreign guy guarding the bodies, and they wouldn’t let us come near,” said Wardak, of the Paktia police. Ultimately, the Interior Ministry in Kabul dispatched a delegation, headed by Kabul’s top criminal investigator, to investigate the raid. The group appeared to have worked largely independent of NATO.
By the time Mohammed Sabir returned home after being held in American custody, he had missed the burial of his wife and other family members. Racked with grief, he imagined avenging his loved ones. “I didn’t want to live anymore,” he told me. “I wanted to wear a suicide jacket and blow myself up among the Americans. But my brother and father wouldn’t let me. I wanted jihad against the Americans.”
THERE WAS CLEARLY A COVER-UP. The family knew it. The United Nations knew it. And the Afghan investigators knew it. The force that raided the home was US-led, but who were the Americans who had stormed into that home in the middle of the night?
It wasn’t until a British reporter, Jerome Starkey, began a serious investigation of the Gardez killings a month after they took place that the full story would begin to unfold. When Starkey first read the ISAF press release, he said he “had no reason to believe it wasn’t true.” When I visited him at his home in Kabul, Starkey told me, “I thought it was worth investigating because if that press release was true—a mass honor killing, three women killed by Taliban who were then killed by Special Forces—that in itself would have made an extraordinary and intriguing story.” But when he visited Gardez and began assembling witnesses to meet him in the area, he immediately realized ISAF’s story was likely false.
The family had significant evidence that undercut the story circulated by ISAF and picked up by many news organizations. The family in Gardez showed Starkey and me a video from the night of the raid in which the musicians are seen playing and Daoud and his relatives are dancing in celebration of the naming ceremony for Daoud’s son. “I suppose the closest approximation we’d have is like a christening party,” Starkey recalled. “It’s the sixth night after a child is born. It’s named, usually by its grandparents, and you celebrate that by inviting all your friends and neighbors and cousins over to your house, effectively for a sort of feast or banquet and the dancing and music.” Starkey realized that the nature of the celebration “didn’t chime with the suggestion that they were Taliban. The Taliban are notorious for their very strict rules, and musical instruments were banned when they were in power. So here we’ve got video of guys, of a three-piece band, and we interviewed the musicians, who corroborated the story. It just, it really didn’t stack up. They clearly weren’t Talibs.”
Starkey visited Gardez about a month after the raid and spoke to more than a dozen survivors, as well as local government and law enforcement officials and a religious leader. He also spoke to UN human rights investigators in the area who had conducted an investigation of their own. All of the people Starkey spoke to insisted that the mysterious US and Afghan shooters had killed the five people. In addition to learning new details about the killings on February 12, Starkey found that conventional coalition forces had likely not been behind the strike, suggesting that US “Special Forces” had been involved. US soldiers based in the area denied having been a part of any night raid in Khataba that day. And Afghan officials who, according to NATO protocol, should have been notified of an operation within their jurisdiction said they’d received no notice of a planned raid. “Nobody informed us,” said the deputy governor of Gardez, Abdul Rahman Mangal. “This operation was a mistake.”
Under NATO rules, the team conducting the operation should have left information about its unit with the local people, but the family said they had received nothing. The family further accused the soldiers of trying to cover up the raid, abetted by NATO’s misinformation.
Starkey contacted Rear Admiral Greg Smith, General McChrystal’s deputy chief of staff for communications, and confronted him with the discrepancies. NATO was guilty, Smith said—of poor word choice. The women, he conceded, had probably been prepped for a funeral, rather than “bound and gagged.” But Smith denied that a “cover-up” had taken place and insisted that the women had been dead for hours. He confirmed that the men had been killed by the US and Afghan forces. “They were not the targets of this particular raid,” Smith admitted. But they had been armed and showing “hostile intent,” he claimed, justifying the escalation of force. “I don’t know if they fired any rounds,” he said. “If you have got an individual stepping out of a compound, and if your assault force is there, that is often the trigger to neutralize the individual. You don’t have to be fired upon to fire back.”
Despite the UN investigation and a smattering of mostly local news reports questioning ISAF’s version of events, the US-led NATO command wasn’t forced to publicly account for the wild discrepancies between what the family said happened and ISAF’s assertions. That is, until Starkey published a story in the Times of London, headlined: “Nato ‘Covered Up’ Botched Night Raid in Afghanistan That Killed Five.” Within hours of his story coming out, Starkey was receiving phone calls from his colleagues, warning him. “I was getting information from other journalists in Kabul, who were my friends, that NATO was briefing against me,” Starkey told me. “NATO was trying to discredit me, trying to say that the story was inaccurate, and effectively trying to kill it dead.”
Rear Admiral Smith had put out a statement that dispensed with the diplomacy and allusion typical of official press releases. McChrystal’s press team was naming names. “The allegation made by Times UK reporter Jerome Starkey that NATO ‘covered up’ an incident that was conducted outside Gardez in Paktia province is categorically false,” the statement read. It went on to accuse Starkey of misquoting Admiral Smith in the article and claimed that the ISAF Joint Command had sent an investigative team to the compound within twelve hours of the incident. Smith and Duncan Boothby, McChrystal’s civilian press aide at the time, also “called up rival outlets and reporters to ‘brief’ against Starkey, saying he wasn’t a credible journalist” because of a stint at a British tabloid. “I’ve been living in Afghanistan for four years,” Starkey said. “I can’t remember another case where that has happened. To my knowledge, that was the only time that they’ve named a journalist, and singled out a journalist so specifically in a denial.”
NATO “claimed to have a recording of my conversation which contradicted my shorthand record,
” Starkey wrote in a Nieman Watchdog blog post the following week, referring to the alleged misquote. “When I asked to hear it, they ignored me. When I pressed them, they said there had been a misunderstanding. When they said recording, they meant someone had taken notes. The tapes, they said, do not exist.”
Starkey pressed on, publishing another story describing the community’s anger over the raid and subsequent responses of NATO and the Afghan authorities. “I don’t want money. I want justice,” the family’s patriarch, Hajji Sharabuddin, told Starkey. He said that the government had offered them compensation for each slain family member after protests paralyzed the provincial capital. “All our family, we now don’t care about our lives. We will all do suicide attacks and [the whole province] will support us.”
“Nato officials continued to brief journalists in Kabul yesterday that the women were victims of an ‘honour’ killing,” Starkey wrote. “However, they did not explain why the bodies would have been kept in the house overnight, against Islamic custom, nor why the family had invited 25 guests to celebrate the naming of a newborn child the same evening.”
“My father was friends with the Americans and they killed him,” Daoud’s son, Abdul Ghafar, told Starkey, showing him a photograph of his father with three smiling American soldiers. “They killed my father. I want to kill them. I want the killers brought to justice.”
ON MARCH 15, 2010, the New York Times reported that General McChrystal had decided to bring most of the US Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan under his command. The decision was motivated in part by concerns about civilian casualties, the article noted, which were often caused by elite forces operating outside of the NATO command structure. The Times report largely seconded Starkey’s account of the Gardez raid, confirming that “Afghan police special forces paired with American Special Operations forces” had been behind the operation. Again, Admiral Smith avoided taking responsibility for the deaths of the women. “The regret is that two innocent males died,” Admiral Smith said. “The women, I’m not sure anyone will ever know how they died.” He added, however, “I don’t know that there are any forensics that show bullet penetrations of the women or blood from the women.” Smith added that the women appeared to have been stabbed and slashed by knives, rather than shot. The Times spoke to Sayid Mohammed Mal, the father of Gulalai’s fiancé and the vice chancellor of Gardez University. “They were killed by the Americans,” he said. “If the government doesn’t listen to us, I have 50 family members, I’ll bring them all to Gardez roundabout and we’ll pour petrol on ourselves and burn ourselves to death.”
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