Military Resistance 11E9
“Authorities In Afghanistan Are Seeking The Arrest On Murder And Torture Charges Of A Man They Say Is An American And Part Of A Special Forces Unit”
“Afghan Officials Who Have Seen The Videotape Say A Person Speaking English With An American Accent Can Be Heard Supervising The Torture Session”
May 13, 2013By ROD NORDLAND, The New York Times
MAIDAN SHAHR, Afghanistan -- The authorities in Afghanistan are seeking the arrest on murder and torture charges of a man they say is an American and part of a Special Forces unit operating in Wardak Province, three Afghan officials have confirmed.
The accusations against the man, Zakaria Kandahari, and the assertion that he and much of his unit are American are a new turn in a dispute over counterinsurgency tactics in Wardak that has strained relations between Kabul and Washington.
American officials say their forces are being wrongly blamed for atrocities carried out by a rogue Afghan unit.
But the Afghan officials say they have substantial evidence of American involvement.
They say they have testimony and documents implicating Mr. Kandahari and his unit in the killings or disappearances of 15 Afghans in Wardak.
Mr. Kandahari is of Afghan descent but was born and raised in the United States, they say.
Included in the evidence, the Afghan officials say, is a videotape of Mr. Kandahari torturing one of the 15 Afghans, a man they identified as Sayid Mohammad.
Mr. Mohammad was picked up by the unit in Wardak six months ago and has not been seen since, the officials said.
The partial remains of Mohammad Qassim, another of the 15 Afghans, were found in a trash pit just outside the fence around the unit's base in the Nerkh district, according to Mr. Qassim's family and Afghan officials.
Afghan officials who have seen the videotape say a person speaking English with an American accent can be heard supervising the torture session, which Mr. Kandahari is seen conducting.
An American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with official policy, confirmed the existence of the video showing Mr. Kandahari but denied that he was an American citizen. "Everybody in that video is Afghan; there are no American voices," the official said.
At the center of the Afghans' accusations is an American Special Forces A Team that had been based in the Nerkh district until recently.
An A Team is an elite unit of 12 American soldiers who work with extra resources that the military calls "enablers," making it possible for the team to have the effect of a much larger unit. Those resources can include specialized equipment, air support and Afghan partner troops or interpreters.
The American official said Mr. Kandahari had been an interpreter working for the team in the Nerkh district without pay in exchange for being allowed to live on the base.
Afghan officials give a different account of his role.
They say he and others working with the team wore American-style military uniforms, but had long beards and often, bizarrely, rode motorized four-wheeled bikes on hunts for insurgents.
The Afghan officials said Mr. Kandahari appeared to be in a leadership position in the unit.
Afghan investigators say the team detained the 15 Afghan civilians in sweeps, apparently on suspicion of having ties to insurgents, although their family members deny any association with either the Taliban or Hezb-i-Islami, another group fighting the government in Wardak.
The investigators say that 7 of the 15 are known to have been killed and that the other 8 are still missing and almost certainly dead.
The American official said the team was not to blame. "We have done three investigations down there, and all absolve ISAF forces and Special Forces of all wrongdoing," the official said, referring to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. "It is simply not true."
Relatives of the victims and their supporters have staged noisy protests in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. They say the International Committee of the Red Cross has been investigating the disappearances. In keeping with standard practice, the Red Cross has made no public comment on the matter.
In February, President Hamid Karzai ordered all American Special Operations forces to leave Wardak Province, an area near the capital where insurgents have been active. Afghan and American officials then reached a compromise under which the A Team was removed from the Nerkh district but that allowed other Special Operations units to remain in at least four locations in the province.
It is not known where the team that left the Nerkh district went.
Afghan officials investigated the events in the Nerkh district, and when they concluded that the accusations of misconduct by the team were true, the head of the Afghan military, Gen. Sher Mohammad Karimi, personally asked the American commander at the time, Gen. John R. Allen, to hand Mr. Kandahari over to the Afghan authorities.
According to a senior Afghan official, General Allen personally promised General Karimi that the American military would do so within 24 hours, but the promise was not kept, nor was a second promise a day later to hand him over the following morning.
"The next morning they said he had escaped from them and they did not know where he was," the official said.
The American official said the military was not trying to shield Mr. Kandahari. "The S.F. guys tried to pick him up, but he got wind of it and went on the lam, and we lost contact with him," the official said. "We would have no reason to try to harbor this individual."
And a spokesman for the American military, David E. Nevers, said General Allen "never had a conversation with General Karimi about this issue."
The Special Forces A Team originally moved into its Nerkh district base in Wardak in the autumn of 2012, around the time that a bomb wiped out much of the provincial government center here in Maidan Shahr, the provincial capital.
The senior Afghan official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of political sensitivities about the case, said that top Afghan officials understood that the unit had been transferred from Camp Gecko in Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan. Afghan officials and human rights investigators say Camp Gecko, formerly the home of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, now includes a C.I.A. paramilitary base and some Special Operations facilities.
Gen. Sharafuddin Sharaf, a senior official of the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan intelligence service, said that his agency has issued a warrant for the arrest of Mr. Kandahari on charges of murder, torture and mistreatment of prisoners, but that he could not be found.
The Afghan attorney general filed a formal criminal case against him last week, General Sharaf said. Another Afghan official confirmed that those charges had been filed.
Mr. Kandahari is described by Afghans who have seen him as in his late 20s or early 30s and fluent in Pashto, which he speaks with a Kandahar accent, and English.
General Sharaf said that it was not known whether Zakaria Kandahari is his real name or an alias, and that the authorities had no information about his family or original home.
A 16-year-old student named Hikmatullah, who said he was tortured by Mr. Kandahari, said his tormentor had a tattoo of a large green sword on his upper right arm.
Hikmatullah said he had been picked up with two of his brothers, Sadiqullah and Ismatullah, from the village of Amer Kheil. Whenever he denied being an insurgent, he said, Mr. Kandahari beat and kicked him until his shoulder was dislocated.
He was released after three days, he said, but his brothers are missing.
AFGHANISTAN WAR REPORTS
Three Georgian Soldiers Killed By Attack Inside Base; More Wounded
13 May 2013 BBC
Three Georgian soldiers serving in Afghanistan have been killed in an insurgent attack on a base in the south of the country.
Defence Minister Irakli Alasania told Georgian TV the servicemen had been killed when a bomber drove a lorry carrying explosives into their base in Helmand province.
In all, 22 Georgian troops have been killed in Afghanistan since 2009.
In his televised statement, Mr Alasania said the militants who had broken into the base had all been killed.
Giving his condolences to the families of the three dead soldiers, he said other members of their battalion, the 42nd, had also been wounded.
Eric Christian, Warwick Marine Killed In Afghanistan, Arrives In U.S.
Staff Sgt. Eric D. Christian, 39, of Warwick, died May 4, 2013, while conducting combat operations in Afghanistan. Photo credit: Courtesy of Staff Sgt. Eric Christian's family
May 7, 2013By KEN SCHACHTER, Newsday
The plane carrying the remains of Staff Sgt. Eric D. Christian, the 39-year-old Marine from Warwick killed on patrol in western Afghanistan on Saturday, is scheduled to land at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Tuesday, officials said.
Christian, born in White Plains and raised in Poughkeepsie and Ramsey, N.J., was fatally shot along with another Marine, Cpl. David M. Sonka, 23, of Parker, Colo., by an Afghan army soldier embedded with an American unit for patrol duty, his younger brother, Phillip Christian, told Newsday in a phone interview Monday.
The Afghan soldier also killed Sonka's working dog, Flex, before other Marines killed him, the brother said.
Christian's family members were transported to the base to meet the plane, a Marine spokesman said.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo directed that flags on state buildings be flown at half-staff Thursday to honor Christian's service. "I join with all New Yorkers in mourning the loss of Staff Sgt. Christian," Cuomo said in a statement. "We will honor his service and sacrifice and his dedication to our nation."
Phillip Christian, 36, described his brother as a veteran of the Marine intelligence unit who re-enlisted several times because he felt his unit needed him.
"The team that he led, he depended on them and they depended on him," he said. "That's why he kept re-upping. He wasn't going to be a career guy, I can tell you that. He had thought about when he was going to get out, but his feeling was, they needed him, so, he was just kind of seeing how long his body would hold out."
A Defense Department official declined to discuss the details of the two deaths, saying the incident is being investigated. Eric Christian was attached to the 2nd Marine Special Operations Battalion in Camp Lejeune, N.C.
His mother, Linda, acknowledged the news from her Warwick home Monday but said she was not prepared to discuss her son. Eric Christian called Warwick home for more than eight years while in the Marines, returning there when he was on leave, the family said.
Phillip Christian explained that he and his three brothers -- Eric; Chris, 40; and Mark, 32 -- spent their early childhood in the Poughkeepsie area, then moved with the family to Ramsey, where the brothers graduated from Ramsey High School. Eric played varsity football at Ramsey, graduating in 1993.
"I know a lot of people talk about being a better person," Phillip Christian said of his brother. "But he actually tried to be a better person every day.
"I remember, I went to high school with him for two years. It was really cliquey; you know how high school can be. You had your jocks, your cool kids, the band kids, the stoners or whatever you want to call them. And Eric had the broadest group of friends of any of us. He could sit at the athletes' table, the cool kids' table. He was friends with everyone."
Eric Christian attended college at Grambling in Louisiana for a year, played football there and "hated it," his brother said. He lived in Seattle and San Francisco, then returned to New Jersey and was back in college when the 9/11 terrorist attacks changed his perspective on life.
"My brother Mark was in ROTC in college and enlisted (in the Marines) after 9/11, out of a sense of patriotism," Phillip Christian said. "Eric enlisted when Mark was deployed, also out of a sense of patriotism, and a sense of responsibility to his family and his country, I think. He was always the one to look after us and defend us when we were all in school."
Eric Christian never married, his brother said.
"We received a phone call from the base commander," Phillip Christian said, referring to his brother's unit in Afghanistan. "He said when Eric's body was put on the plane, there were 150 Marines at full attention as the plane took off. He said he had never seen anything like that before."
The family plans to hold a memorial service in Ramsey after Eric Christian's burial in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington. The dates are still to be determined.
POLITICIANS REFUSE TO HALT THE BLOODSHED
THE TROOPS HAVE THE POWER TO STOP THE WAR
MILITARY NEWS
FORWARD OBSERVATIONS
“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. Oh had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.
“For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder.
“We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.”
Frederick Douglass, 1852
People do not make revolutions eagerly any more than they do war. There is this difference, however, that in war compulsion plays the decisive role, in revolution there is no compulsion except that of circumstances.
A revolution takes place only when there is no other way out. And the insurrection, which rises above a revolution like a peak in the mountain chain of its events, can be no more evoked at will than the revolution as a whole. The masses advance and retreat several times before they make up their minds to the final assault.
-- Leon Trotsky; The History of the Russian Revolution
Love, Dad
[From GI Special, March 2009]
From: Dennis Serdel
To: GI Special
Sent: March 03, 2009
Subject: Love, Dad
By Dennis Serdel, Vietnam 1967-68 (one tour) Light Infantry, Americal Div. 11th Brigade, purple heart, Veterans For Peace 50 Michigan, Vietnam Veterans Against The War, United Auto Workers GM Retiree.
**************************
Love, Dad
Son, we can’t send you
any packages
like we have sent you before
because the shop
that I worked for for 27 years
has just went bankrupt
my pension money is gone
didn’t get severance pay
after all those years
and I would have to pay
Cobra for health care but
I don’t have money for that
they didn’t even give me
my vacation pay
they gave me nothing
nothing at all
I took our savings and paid off
our home but now all I get is
unemployment checks
and food stamps
that will stop in months
I don’t know what I will do then,
I’m old and nobody will hire me
but even the young
can’t find any jobs
Soon they will take our car
turn off electricity
and turn off the heat
Son, I know you have troubles
of your own in Iraq
but I think you are fighting
the wrong enemy over there
I think all of you should come home
fight the government
the corporations
and defend us from
the bill collectors
kill the white shirt bank criminals
the oil company criminals
kill all the Madoof’s
that have taken over our country
because nothing works
over here anymore.
Love, Dad
DO YOU HAVE A FRIEND OR RELATIVE IN THE MILITARY?
U.S. soldier in Beijia village Iraq, Feb. 4, 2008. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
Forward Military Resistance along, or send us the email address if you wish and we’ll send it regularly with your best wishes. Whether in Afghanistan or at a base in the USA, this is extra important for your service friend, too often cut off from access to encouraging news of growing resistance to injustices, inside the armed services and at home. Send email requests to address up top or write to: Military Resistance, Box 126, 2576 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10025-5657.
“People Need Not Be Helpless Before The Power Of Illegitimate Authority”
“By Getting Together And Acting Upon Their Convictions People Can ChangeSociety And, In Effect, Make Their Own History”
From: SOLDIERS IN REVOLT: DAVID CORTRIGHT, Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1975. [Excerpts]
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In the final analysis the stationing of American forces abroad serves not the national interest but the class interest of the corporate and political elite.
The maintenance of a massive, interventionist-oriented military establishment is based not on the nation’s legitimate defense requirements but on the need to protect multinational investment and preserve regimes friendly to American capital.