More than a year ago, a horrifying war-crime massacre was committed by at least one American soldier stationed in the Zangabad area of Panjwai district, Kandahar province, Afghanistan. Seven months ago (or eight months later), the U.S. Army held a pre-trial “Article 32” hearing, in accordance with the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), at a military base in Washington state, to assess the evidence against SSG Robert Bales, who was taken into custody on March 11, 2012 and charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder on March 23, 2012. That November, 2012 hearing took sworn testimony from other American soldiers, and from Afghan survivors. The media was allowed to cover the hearing – but not to film it, or record the audio – in an overflow room of the small military courtroom. There, over seven straight days, they saw Americans testify in person, and then, late at night, Pacific time, watched 11 Afghan survivors, 2 Afghan National Army guards, and 1 Afghan Uniform National Police investigator testify by video link from an Army base in Kandahar city.
The official transcript of that pivotal Army Article 32 hearing, however, remains secret – concealed from the public and the press. Thus, the only sworn testimony of Afghan survivors and witnesses, describing what happened that night, exists in the snippets of testimony that the handful of reporters present managed to capture and preserve for the public record, during the three late nights of Afghan testimony heard at the conclusion of seven days of attack testimony. Also concealed from the public is the subsequent report by the investigating officer, based upon the evidence produced at the hearing (including four days of testimony by American soldiers), that formally recommended to the Army that SSG Bales be referred for a court-martial trial (advice that the Army commander implemented in late December, 2012).
The U.S. Army has similarly concealed the names of all of the children listed on their two Charge Sheets for SSG Bales – March 23, 2012 Charge Sheet; June 1, 2012 Charge Sheet – and thus the identities of the victims behind the numbers remained a secret until January 17, 2013, when Gene Johnson of the Associated Press obtained the full list of Charge Sheet victim names from defense attorneys for the accused. (The names of the adult victims on the current Army Charge Sheet were only pried out of the Army by the media in November, 2012.) The AP’s January list confirmed that the only existing, semi-official (Afghan-sourced) public list of massacre victims’ names was not the same as the June 1, 2012 Army Charge Sheet. The AP’s list of victims also publicly confirmed for the first time that there are not “nine children” listed among the dead on the current Army Charge Sheet, as has been – and continues to be – unquestioningly accepted, and repeated as fact by members of the media, since President Karzai and U.S. military spokesmen first made unsupported statements to that effect soon after the massacre. Yet such unexplained discrepancies, like all the many other disturbing discrepancies in the U.S. government’s version of this story (for particulars, see my repeatedly-updated July, 2012 post and its maps, in addition to the reporting below), remain unmentioned and uninvestigated by our Free Press (whose reporting is largely responsible for the obvious existence of those discrepancies), and by our representatives in the House and Senate. (While Panjwai Massacre victims still living in the war zone that is Zangabad, like Haji Mohammad Naim – who’s had one son killed since the massacre by a NATO airstrike, and another arrested – now plead for help and justice from “human rights organizations” – see subtitled June 5 video below.)
Congress, to the best of my knowledge, has convened not a single public hearing to examine what happened that night, during the commission of the worst American war crime in decades. Significant monetary compensation from U.S. taxpayers, however, was hurriedly issued by the Department of Defense (or the CIA) to the subsistence farmers affected, the day after Bales was charged – before Army investigators had even made it to the scenes of the crime to investigate.
And today, June 5, 2013, his lawyers announced a week ago, SSG Bales will be pleading guilty, effectively as charged (thus, to 16 counts of premeditated murder and six counts of attempted murder), in order to avoid the death penalty – and, evidently, so that the Army can avoid having its evidence tested at trial.
Bales guilty plea: Victims’ reactions, from 2470media on Vimeo. Click on image to play June 5, 2013 video.
June 23rd UPDATE: As blogged by Hal Bernton of the Seattle Times June 5, “During the hearing [Wednes]day, [SSG] Bales did not offer an apology to his victims,” but he did plead guilty, as expected, to all but one of the counts charged to him on June 1, 2012. The one count to which Bales did not plead guilty was an alleged violation of Article 134 of the UCMJ – Charge IV, Specification 1 – which stated that Bales did “wrongfully endeavor to impede an investigation . . . by damaging a laptop computer.” Here’s how Gene Johnson of the Associated Press reported the sworn testimony of U.S. Army Sgt. Ross O’Rourke, in that regard, during November’s Article 32 hearing:
But Bales also deliberately mangled his laptop, said two soldiers assigned to guard him as he gathered his things.
One of them, Sgt. Ross O’Rourke, testified that he removed the laptop from Bales’ rucksack after the defendant told him he didn’t want to take it with him. O’Rourke said Bales then grabbed the computer and folded the screen back, breaking it.
That didn’t damage the hard drive, O’Rourke said, and investigators still could have retrieved information from the computer. O’Rourke didn’t testify about what information might have been uncovered.
On Monday, Cpl. David Godwin testified that Bales asked him to bleach his blood-soaked clothes.
And here’s how Adam Ashton of The News Tribune blog described the pertinent Article 32 testimony of U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class James Stillwell:
Two soldiers who guarded him that day said they gave Bales the benefit of the doubt when he told them he wanted to retrieve his laptop while he awaited a helicopter flight out of Belambay. Bales told them he wanted to make sure it wouldn’t get destroyed, [SFC James] Stillwell remembered.
Stillwell lifted it out of a rucksack containing Bales’ clothes and left it for the captive staff sergeant. Bales promptly snapped it, Stillwell testified today.
At the conclusion of the June 5 plea hearing, a press conference was held by defense attorneys, including the military defense counsel for SSG Bales. Hal Bernton attended the news conference, and reported as follows on his Seattle Times blog:
[Defense co-counsel Army Maj. Greg] Malson said that “what [Bales] wants more than anything” is for Afghans to understand that other soldiers now on the ground in Afghanistan had nothing to do with what happened in those two villages.
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I linked above (as an example of “nine children” reporting) to a June 2nd Guardian article by Emma Graham-Harrison and Afghan reporter Mokhtar Amiri, on the Bales plea deal and reactions to it. Notably, this pair of reporters is responsible for one of the Panjwai Massacre’s multiple, never-explained March, 2012 ‘ghost’ victim/witness articles. Meaning reporting about a victim – in this case, the wounded “father” of 26-year-old “Muhammad Zahir” from “just south” of COP Belamby, about whom the Associated Press also reported – who we now know was not charged to SSG Bales.
Remarkably, this same Guardian pair may have just repeated that feat in their June 2, 2013 article – again without explanation, or apparently any recognition of, or appreciation for, the import of and public interest in what they, or at least Mokhtar Amiri, have reported. Specifically, Afghan journalist Amiri (I assume) reportedly had a conversation, within the last month, with an “eyewitness” to the Panjwai Massacre named “Haji Satar Khan” – no village or location mentioned by the Guardian – whose existence is news to me, and whose “eyewitness” account of the massacre has never been publicly heard in English-language reporting, as far as I know. Furthermore, Amiri (or Graham-Harrison) spoke within the last month to “Abdul Halim Noorzai, a former mujahideen commander from Panjwai district,” who told the Guardian that “[t]wo of his family members were injured in the attack” – again, however, no names, no ages, no village, no location for those victims is mentioned. Noorzai may well be a (close or distant) relative of two of the six Panjwai wounded charged to Bales (all of whom are from one Alkozai neighborhood). For example, Noorzai could be, and I believe would have to be, a relative of the unnamed and uninterviewed wife of wounded Haji Mohammad Naim of Alkozai, and thus of her two wounded children (Parmina and Sadiqullah) – but there’s no way to tell if that’s the case from the Guardian’s reporting. And unless “Haji Satar Khan” is not in fact an “eyewitness,” his unheard account of what he saw that night ought to be considered worthy of recounting by any journalist, given the paucity of massacre accounts by adult eyewitnesses available in English.
Meanwhile, to tout the “local uprising” in the Zangabad region – AFP; embedded NYT; AAN; embedded CBS; embedded LATimes; embedded NPR – in late May this year U.S. Army special forces hosted an embedded CBS News reporter inside Camp Belamby itself – the first visit, to my knowledge, of any U.S. reporter to Camp Belamby (or massacre homes), period, since before the massacre. During her Army-arranged tour, London-based reporter Elizabeth Palmer visited and filmed (screen captures: 1, 2, 3, 4) what may well be Haji Mohammad Naim’s former Alkozai home – now being used as an Afghan Local Police (ALP) post (Palmer doesn’t mention it, but Haji Naim told Mamoon Durrani June 5 that he’s relocated his family to another village, and has himself refused to join the ALP). There, Palmer spoke off-camera to, and filmed on-camera, an unnamed massacre survivor – apparently a witness to his unnamed Alkozai father (perhaps Naim, or one of the two adult male neighbors of Naim who were killed) being “mowed down” – who has joined the ALP. Palmer too assures us, in her one-sided, Army-directed CBS Evening News report, four full months after the Associated Press demonstrated otherwise, that the deaths of “nine children” were charged to SSG Bales.
In lieu of compiling a list of the many unanswered questions that SSG Bales should be, but probably will not be [and, as it turned out, in fact was not], required to answer as part of his plea deal, the rest of this post is my (reporting-derived) version of a public transcript of November’s Article 32 hearing testimony by Afghan survivors – now unable to travel to the U.S. to testify in person at a future court-martial for SSG Bales – as they answered questions about what was done to them in our name. [Unanswered questions like why SSG Robert Bales – while under guard waiting to be airlifted out of COP Belamby – said to a fellow soldier, with regard to the number of people he thought had been killed: “My count is 22” (according to U.S. Army SGT Jason McLaughlin’s sworn testimony). Another reporter in attendance heard (and tweeted) either the prosecutor’s opening argument or actual testimony stating that Bales told a fellow soldier (presumably McLaughlin): “he thought he killed 20 people.” (Including the ‘ghost’ victims in media reports – see the excerpts immediately following the casualty box in the July post – I count descriptions of 29 separate deaths in the Panjwai Massacre.)] As with the high-profile Bradley Manning court-martial now underway in Maryland, this effort to create a partial substitute for the official transcript is made necessary because the military is being allowed to close the doors of the UCMJ-governed military justice system, in all but name, by withholding essential court documents from the press and public.
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On January 19, 2014, at Storify.com – as introduced here (this link’s also at the top of the sidebar) – I posted a “partial substitute” for the August, 2013 Bales sentencing hearing transcript, as well. That hearing relayed, for the first time, 32 pages of uncontested facts about the massacre, including, as recorded by reporters who were present, the following undisputed stipulated facts:
• He called Afghans “muzzis,” said soldiers could cover up anything they did in Afghanistan
• Jury hears #Bales told fellow soldiers under his command not to worry about actions in Afghanistan b/c they could “always cover up” actions
• A fellow soldier had a limb blown off. [] #Bales wasn’t there and wasn’t a friend.
• After the attack, Sgt Bales told colleagues: “[] My count is 20,” referring to the number of Afghans he believed he had killed.
• After returning to Afghan base from his killings, Sgt #Bales said, “My count is 20.” And “we shouldn’t worry about collateral consequences.”
• #Bales to soldiers: [] “My count was 20,” referring to number of people killed.
• [] #Bales told soldiers “My count was 20” referring to victims he killed #jblm
• #Bales “[] My count is 20. That MFer with the PKM won’t bother us anymore.”
• #Bales asked a fellow soldier to help him destroy evidence after massacre while being held. He didn’t. Bales did destroy a computer #jblm
• [] #Bales destroyed his laptop to get rid of evidence
• #Bales stomped on his laptop. [] Bales knew it had porn & video of casualties. []
Then, in unsworn answers to his attorney later in the hearing, SSG Bales finally apologized – apparently mostly to his “Patriot Brotherhood” (as tweeted by reporters who were present):
• More #Bales: “I love the army. I’ve stood next to some really good guys, some real heroes. I can’t say I’m sorry to those guys enough.”
• #Bales choked up esp when apologizing to soldiers: I love the Army …I can’t say I’m sorry to those guys enough. #Afghanistan
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I believe the long collection of excerpted testimony reports below – supplemented by the few English-language media interviews of survivors that exist – speaks for itself. I’ll only add this sampling of Article 32 testimony by American soldiers at Camp Belamby (testimony that’s not otherwise included in this post, but may be in future, depending on what develops today). This relates to the alleged movements of SSG Bales that night, according to American and Afghan witnesses, in connection with the murders both north of the base, and at the Wazir and Dawood homes south of Camp Belamby:
[Bales defense attorney Emma] Scanlan said the timeline laid out by prosecutors also raises questions, beginning with the Afghan guard who testified that he checked his watch, and was certain that the U.S. soldier he saw — returning from the initial killings in Alkozai, prosecutors allege — had returned to Camp Belambay at 1:30 a.m.
The shots heard from the direction of Alkozai didn’t stop till 1:50 a.m., the defense attorney said [apparently quoting Article 32 testimony that didn’t otherwise make it into the media with such specificity -pow wow].
“I don’t know what that means,” Scanlan said. “But one thing it means is, if you believe what the government is telling you, that Sgt. Bales is the one who came back through that wire at 1:30, then somebody else was firing for another 20 minutes.” – Kim Murphy, The Los Angeles Times, Nov. 14, 2012
Emma Scanlan was similarly quoted by Hal Bernton of the Seattle Times on November 13, 2012 (in a hearing/closings summary article that, in introducing this statement, seems to confuse or merge testimony by U.S. soldiers with testimony by an Afghan soldier):
“We need to know why there are shots fired after they say Sgt. Bales returned to the base.”
– Bales defense attorney Emma Scanlan, Nov. 13, 2012
More on the timing from a Najiban woman interviewed on March 11, 2012 about the Wazir home murders, but never again since (a neighbor, and possibly a relative, whose name may be either “Gul Bashra” or “Anar Gul”) – she was already awake when the attack began:
“It was 2:00 in the morning [she holds up two fingers, apparently to represent the time -pw]. I woke up for my fasting breakfast. When I turned the light on, I heard noises. I told my son [looks at and gestures toward him on the other side of the minivan -pw] not to speak because the Americans are here. They were telling us to be quiet, and not to come out. When he kicked the door, my door had a stone so it didn’t open. They moved from my door, and went next door and the first thing they did was to shoot the dog, and then there was a muffled bang inside the room – but who could go and see. And then there were two planes overhead.” – The BBC, March 11, 2012
I’ve now (as of June 13th) compiled some of the American and Afghan soldier Article 32 hearing testimony, as reported, into a timeline, along with media accounts from Afghan villagers (the sworn Article 32 testimony entries are bolded, the unsworn media accounts are not):
TIMELINE
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Of the 11 Afghan family members who testified at the Article 32 hearing, the prosecution apparently called nine (all male), and the defense two (both young girls, one of whom was the only survivor called to testify about the deaths of Haji Nazar Mohammad and his two-year-old daughter Tora/Gulalai). The lone adult eyewitness present during the attack who was called to testify was Haji Mohammad Naim of Alkozai (Naim was shot three times at close range, and lost consciousness for four days). Apparently Leona Mansapit – the U.S. Army investigator who had interviewed Massouma, eyewitness widow of Mohammad Dawood – was a defense witness too; Mansapit was called to testify (on November 10-11) about what Massouma had privately told Mansapit in June, 2012. (See the foot of the post for Massouma’s accounts.) “The prosecution says that 17 Afghans have said they are willing to testify via video,” Ernesto Londono of The Washington Post wrote during the early portion of the Article 32 hearing, when Americans were testifying. Of the 14 Afghans (including two Army soldiers and a police investigator) who in fact testified by video link later that week, I’ve never seen English-language media interviews of Faizullah or Quadratullah from Alkozai, or of Khamal Adin about the Najiban scene he sorted through, or of Major Khudai Dad about the Afghan police investigation. Most of the other Afghans who testified have been interviewed very rarely by English-language reporters – only once or twice each, in general, as documented below. And, as noted at the beginning of my July, 2012 post, multiple (often key female) eyewitnesses have never been heard from at all (in the media or in the Article 32 hearing), including the eyewitness widow of Haji Nazar Mohammad of Alkozai.
This is the order in which the Afghans appear to have given their testimony in November (I followed a different order below):
Fri-Sat PT, Nov. 9-10, 2012
ANA soldier Naimatullah (12:00-2:00 AM Camp Belamby guard shift 3/11)
ANA soldier Tosh Ali (2:00-4:00 AM Camp Belamby guard shift 3/11, relieving Naimatullah)Khamal Adin – (Najiban); Mohammad Wazir cousin
Faizullah – (Alkozai); Mohammad Naim son
Sadiqullah – Alkozai; Mohammad Naim son
Quadratullah – Alkozai; Mohammad Naim son
Mohammad Naim – Alkozai
Sat-Sun PT, Nov. 10-11, 2012
Samiullah – (Alkozai); Sayed Jan son
Zardana – Alkozai; Sayed Jan granddaughter
Rafiullah – Alkozai; Sayed Jan grandson
Robina – Alkozai; Nazar Mohammad daughter
Hekmatullah “Khan” Gul – South of Belamby; Mohammad Dawood son
Mullah Baraan – (South of Belamby); Mohammad Dawood brother
Sun-Mon PT, Nov. 11-12, 2012
Major Khudai Dad/Khudaydad,
Chief of Criminal Techniques,
Afghan Uniform Police
Rare map made possible by Afghan reporter Mamoon Durrani‘s invaluable on-site Zangabad research. Superimposed graphic design by Lela Ahmadzai of 2470Media. Click for larger version. *The identities of the victims listed on the still-redacted June 1, 2012 Army Charge Sheet are only known because of a January 17, 2013 Associated Press report that named them.
________________________________________________________________
ALKOZAI
(Ibrahim Khan Houses & Mosque)
(About 0.60 kilometer north of Camp Belamby; 4 killed; 7 wounded) ________________________________________________________________
Before I begin quoting the Article 32 reporting about Rafiullah’s testimony (which is quite abbreviated and confusing), this is my summary – based on a careful transcription of the translation of a lengthy interview of Rafiullah conducted in Kabul in October, 2012 (the month before the sworn Article 32 testimony quoted below was given) – of much of what Rafiullah said he experienced that night, first in his own home, and then in the home of his neighbor to the east, Haji Mohammad Naim, during the attack at the Ibrahim Khan Houses neighborhood of Alkozai village (north of COP Belamby):
Rafiullah is the grandson of farmer or “gardener” Haji Sayed Jan and his wife Nikmarghah – who’d raised him since he was one month old. Rafiullah’s grandmother Khalida (aka Nikmarghah, the wife of Sayed Jan) was shot and killed on March 11 while trying to protect her grandchildren from an American soldier – first in her own home, and then in the home of her neighbor Haji Mohammad Naim, where she and her family had fled. Rafiullah first awoke that night when a bare-headed American soldier (wearing no helmet) kicked open the door of the room in which he, his younger sister and grandmother were sleeping, in the home of his grandfather Haji Sayed Jan, and his grandmother began to scream. Upon awaking, Rafiullah saw the soldier standing in the doorway and heard his grandmother’s screams. Rafiullah too began to scream. The soldier beckoned them outside, while saying something Rafiullah did not understand. His sister Zardana ran ahead, and his grandmother and Rafiullah soon followed, first to an unused or damaged area of their home where they kept animals, and then east to the nearby home of their neighbor Haji Mohammad Naim. Left behind in a guest room of the Sayed Jan home was farm laborer Khudaydad (a cousin of Rafiullah’s father Samiullah), who was killed sometime during the attack (possibly while running to help in response to their screams, based on an April, 2013 Associated Press interview of Zardana – her first media interview). The family cow followed them part way to Haji Mohammad Naim’s home next door, and at some point was shot but not killed. The three fled to the middle room of three in an area of the home of Haji Mohammad Naim (next to the room of Naim and his wife) where Naim’s son Sadiqullah and daughter Parmina were present, and Rafiullah lit the lantern and warned them that “an American guy is here.” At least two family members of Haji Nazar Mohammad (two young daughters, neither of whom testified, or have ever been interviewed) apparently also ran to that room from their home (on the east side of the Naim residence) during the 30-minute attack, before a soldier entered and started shooting. The seven in that room at Haji Naim’s when the shooting began, according to Rafiullah, were Zulheja and her sister “Rubbinah”/”Robina” (both young daughters of Haji Nazar Mohammad, from a home that shared the east wall – with a connecting door – of Haji Naim’s); Rafiullah, Zardana, and Nikmarghah (from a detached home on the west side of Haji Naim’s); and Haji Naim’s son Sadiqullah and daughter Parmina. The soldier shot Rafiullah in both legs with a pistol (a single bullet hit him in the left thigh – possibly after he’d jumped under a bed – ricocheted off the wall, and then hit him in the right thigh), causing Rafiullah to lose consciousness, and his 7-year-old sister Zardana was shot in the head and critically wounded. Rafiullah stated that, of the seven people present in that room when a soldier started shooting, Zulheja was the only one who was not injured – and yet her name (but not those of her sisters) appears on Al Jazeera’s unsourced March, 2012 list of Panjwai wounded. Rafiullah repeatedly stated during the October interview that on his way from Haji Sayed Jan’s home to Haji Mohammad Naim’s home with a soldier behind him (that is, while running between the high walls of the neighboring “compounds”), he “saw many lights in the garden” at different levels, and “heard footsteps,” indicating the presence of other soldiers. (The first media interview of Zardana, by the Associated Press in April, 2013, appears to corroborate this account by her brother.) Rafiullah’s parents (his father Samiullah and mother, whose name is unknown to me) were then (as Rafiullah is now) residing in Kandahar city with his older brother and younger sister Zardana – who was on a brief visit to the home of her grandparents in Alkozai on the night of the attack. Rafiullah’s grandfather Haji Sayed Jan was away from home that night because he was delivering firewood to heat Rafiullah’s father’s Kandahar city home. (See also 2470media’s important, English/German-subtitled October, 2012 video interview of Rafiullah.)
The reports of November, 2012 testimony given – under oath – by Afghan witnesses and survivors of the attack – as recorded by members of the media in attendance during the Bales Article 32 hearing (who struggled to hear the translated testimony, conveyed via late-night video link from Afghanistan to a military courtroom) – are collected and enclosed in gray boxes below. Normal background is used for other, non-Article 32 reporting. [Underlining/emphasis is mine.]
RAFIULLAH – grandson of Haji Sayed Jan & Nikmarghah, who raised him; son of Samiullah and wife
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Rafiullah’s first interview in the English-language media, by Jon Stephenson of McClatchy, was published May 16, 2012 (with an important accompanying graphic; Stephenson’s graphic, however, is evidently inaccurate in certain key respects, based on both the lengthy Rafiullah interview summarized above, and the quoted Article 32 testimony – as is his article’s opening description of how Rafiullah awoke that night):
Posted on Wednesday, May 16, 2012
By Jon Stephenson | McClatchy Newspapers
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — It was early in the morning, perhaps 2 a.m., when gunfire awoke 14-year-old Rafiullah.
He looked outside the house he’d been sleeping in with his grandmother, an aunt, two cousins and his sister, and he saw a man with a weapon walk to a shed that housed the family cow and open fire, shooting the animal dead.
“I told the women inside our room: ‘Let’s run! Let’s get out of here,'” recalled Rafiullah, who like many Afghans goes by only one name. In the next compound, a short distance from the house where Rafiullah had been sleeping, Haji Mohammad Naim awoke to the sound of dogs barking wildly in the street.
[…]
How valuable Naim’s and Rafiullah’s testimony would be in a U.S. military court is unclear. Both said they didn’t see the shooter’s face clearly enough to identify him, and both are uncertain about the exact time, noting that no one in the houses had a watch. Officials haven’t divulged which village they think was attacked first.
[…] Before the shooting ended in Alkozai, Rafiullah’s grandmother [Nikmarghah -pw] was dead, his sister [Zardana -pw] was critically wounded, three other people had been killed and five others were wounded in three adjacent houses. Most of the victims were related by blood or marriage.
[…]
Terror unfolded in the crowded space [at the Haji Naim home -pw], the frightened faces of women and children illuminated only by a light that Rafiullah said appeared to be affixed to an assault rifle. The shooter drove everyone before him, herding and hunting his victims like animals.
Spotting Rafiullah, he seized one of the boy’s arms. Rafiullah said his grandmother seized his other arm, to try to stop the soldier from dragging him away. The soldier turned on her.
“He shot my grandmother, he wounded my sister Zardana and wounded me,” Rafiullah said. “He opened fire on Naim’s son, Sadiqullah, and also opened fire on Naim’s daughter. Then the soldier left.”
Help for the wounded eventually arrived, although Rafiullah – like Naim – had fallen unconscious, and was unable later to say how long it took to get there. The survivors were rushed, by a relative who’d borrowed a car, to a nearby U.S.-Afghan base [FOB Zangabad -pw], then flown by helicopter to a U.S. military hospital at Kandahar airfield.
Rafiullah, who had a gunshot wound to each leg, found himself in a bed next to Naim’s son, Sadiqullah, who’d received a bullet wound to his right earlobe.
Rafiullah told McClatchy that Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, phoned him in the aftermath of the attack and U.S. authorities later interviewed him while he was in the hospital. “Two times they talked to me,” he said.
A day or two after the massacre, he also spoke to the man Karzai had appointed as his chief investigator into the killings, Gen. Sher Mohammad Karimi, the Afghan army chief .
“To all of them I said the same thing,” Rafiullah said. “I saw only one shooter.”
[…]
Rafiullah has largely recovered from the physical wounds.
Rafiullah’s second English-language media interview was published on the eve of the Article 32 hearing in November by the Los Angeles Times, and, like the summary above, was also based on a lengthy early October interview of Rafiullah in Kabul:
November 04, 2012|By Kim Murphy and Ned Parker, Los Angeles Times
“I saw the man in the door and my grandmother crying and screaming,” said a teenager named Rafiullah, who, like many Afghans, uses only one name. Rafiullah said he, his sister and grandmother ran next door and joined several others at the home of Haji Naim.
“The room was a mess, everyone was screaming…. Haji Naim stood up and demanded what is going on. And the American shot him,” he said. “We were seven people in the room when we were shot. My grandmother, my sister, me, two of Haji Naim’s kids [Parmina and Sadiqullah -pw] and two of Haji Nizar’s kids [evidently Haji Nazar’s young daughters Rubbinah and Zulheja -pw].”
The youth swept his hand in front of him as if raking a room with gunfire. “He used a pistol,” he said. Four people, including Rafiullah’s grandmother, died in Alkozai. Six people, among them Rafiullah and his sister, were injured.
[…]
Both youths [Rafiullah, from north of COP Belamby, and Mohammad Dawood’s son Hekmatullah, from south of COP Belamby -pw] described seeing bright lights outside the houses during the attacks.
[…]
Only one family is left in the area of Alkozai where Rafiullah lived; he and his grandfather moved to another village [and/or to the Kandahar city home of Rafiullah’s father Samiullah -pw]. Najiban is a ghost town; residents fled, fearing the Americans and the Taliban. Wazir has moved 2 1/2 hours away to live with his brother in Spin Buldak. He and the others are still haunted by the killings.
Rafiullah said: “I see his face in my dreams, and sometimes I hear my sister waking up at the same time, screaming. I am praying every night, please God don’t make this happen again.”
Then there’s a brief CBS News television interview of Rafiullah, aired the night before Afghan testimony began at the Article 32 hearing, which includes footage of one of Rafiullah’s leg wounds:
November 8, 2012 7:34 PM
Afghans recall massacre horror ahead of soldier’s trial
By Kelly Cobiella
At night, a survivor of the massacre named Rafiullah told CBS News, the nightmares return.
“I see everything clearly,” he said in [Pashto -pw], “Over and over.”
The 15-year-old is one of the few [male… -pw] eyewitnesses to survive the massacre.
Rafiullah said he was at home asleep on March 11th when a man broke down the door.
“He pushed me against the wall, and put the pistol to my sister’s head,” he said. “We all started shouting: ‘Don’t kill her.'”
When the shooting started, Rafiullah ran to another room.
“We heard gunshots,” he said. “My uncle [presumably meaning his great-uncle Nazar Mohammad (brother of Rafiullah’s grandfather Sayed Jan) -pw], my little cousin [Nazar Mohammad’s two-year-old daughter Toraki/Gulalai/Khatima -pw] and my grandmother [Khalida/Nikmarghah -pw] were killed. I was told to put my hands on the wall, and then he shot my sister [pre-teen Zardana -pw] in the head.
Rafiullah was wounded in both thighs. He told us the shooting lasted half an hour. When we asked how many gunmen he had seen that night, Rafiullah answered “One.”
“He wore an American uniform,” he said. “He had a gun but no helmet. He shot us with a pistol.”
Rafiullah’s next English-language media interview was conducted five months after the Article 32 hearing, by Kathy Gannon of the Associated Press, and published May 16, 2013:
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP)
From another home that was attacked that night, 16-year-old Rafiullah remembers the American soldier smashing through the door waving his pistol. Awakened in a small room with his grandmother and his sister Zardana, he said he didn’t know what to do. “We just ran and he ran after us.”
[…]
Gesturing with his hand as if spraying the room with gunfire, Rafiullah said the soldier “just went bang, bang, bang.”
Rafiullah was wounded in both his legs, his grandmother was killed and Zardana was shot in the head.
ZARDANA – granddaughter of Haji Sayed Jan & Nikmarghah; daughter of Samiullah and wife
JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. — Looking gravely across a courtroom in Afghanistan, 7-year-old Zardana raised her hand Saturday and swore to testify truthfully about the night a man who prosecutors say was a U.S. soldier shot her in the head, shot her brother in the leg and killed her grandmother.
|
On May 16, 2012, Jon Stephenson of McClatchy reported:
Zardana, Rafiullah’s sister, is the victim most in need of specialized care. Shot in the head, she remains partially paralyzed in the U.S. base hospital. Her uncle, Juma Khan, said U.S. officials had yet to follow through on a pledge to get her more sophisticated care in the United States.
“If the Americans can’t organize these simple things, they should return Zardana to us so the world can see her condition,” he said. “If America can’t help us, we will ask the international community for help.”
Zardana’s first, and so far only, English-language media interview was in April, 2013 with Kathy Gannon of the Associated Press, for a May 16, 2013 story (a year to the day after Stephenson’s valuable, singular report about Zardana’s condition):
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP)
Zardana, 11, said a cousin [Khudaydad, killed at the home of Haji Sayed Jan -pw] dashed over to help. He was shot and killed, she said. “We couldn’t stop. We just wanted somewhere to hide. I was holding on to my grandmother and we ran to our neighbors.” Their neighbor, Naim, came out of his house to see what the noise was all about and was shot and wounded. His daughter then ran to him but was killed [injured, if that daughter is Parmina -pw] by the American soldier, Zardana said, struggling to remember and fiddling with her green scarf decorated with tiny sequins.
Zardana, who said she saw soldiers in a nearby field as she ran from one house to the next, remembers trying to hide behind her grandmother at the neighbor’s house. But the soldier found them.
[…]
She removed her scarf to show where the wound had healed; the effects will last a lifetime. She suffered nerve damage on her left side and has to walk with a cane. Her hand is too weak to hold anything heavy.
Zardana spent about two months recovering at the Kandahar Air Base hospital and three more at a naval hospital in San Diego receiving rehabilitation therapy, accompanied by her father, Samiullah.
[…]
“They showed me so much love,” she said with a tiny smile. “They asked me about what happened and when I told them how my grandmother died and how afraid I was and how I was shot, they cried and cried.”
SAMIULLAH – of Kandahar city; son of Haji Sayed Jan & Nikmarghah; father of Rafiullah & Zardana
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In addition to a passing reference to a comment of his in April, 2013, during the first English-language media interview of his injured daughter Zardana (with whom Samiullah spent 2-3 months at a Navy hospital in San Diego in 2012), comments from Samiullah (a Kandahar city resident) have appeared in English-language media accounts about the massacre in March, 2012, March, 2013 (including for the first time on video) and June, 2013, as follows:
First, by Afghan reporter Sayed Salahuddin for the Washington Post, March 23, 2012:
Samisami-Ullah, a 30-year-old farmer, identified those [Alkozai -pw] victims as his mother, uncle and two cousins. Three others in his family were wounded, he said, along with three from his neighbors’ families. Five of the six wounded were transported to a U.S. military hospital, where three victims remain.
One girl, superficially wounded, was treated at a local hospital, villagers said.
[…]
To date [March 23rd, 2012, the date that Bales was charged with 17 murders -pw], the U.S. military has not contacted any witnesses or those who lost relatives, said [Mohammad -pw] Wazir, provincial officials and others who have talked to the massacre victims’ families. “None of them have come to investigate, or to talk to us, or seen the village,” Wazir said angrily. “We want justice.”
[…]
Samisami-Ullah said that wounded relatives told him, “There were 10 soldiers in our neighborhood alone.”
Second, by Afghan reporter Ibrahim Speasaly for Deutsche Welle, March 11, 2013:
Samiullah cannot forget how the members of his family lay there in a pool of blood. The images continue to give him nightmares a year later. He has trouble sleeping at night. He will forever be haunted by the scene, he says.
“The first person I saw dead on the floor was my old mother. Then I saw my old uncle Nazar Mohammad Aka, with his long, white beard. My [adult male cousin Khudaydad -pw] was also dead as well as my cousin, Tora. She was precious.”
Samiullah takes a deep breath. “These four people are martyrs. Then I saw my small children – my son [Rafiullah -pw] and daughter [Zardana -pw] and also my niece [presumably meaning one of the wounded sisters of his cousin Tora/Toraki (his father Haji Sayed Jan’s nieces) – Robina/Noorbinak, or Rubbinah -pw]. All three were injured.”
[…]
“We have waited for exactly a year now. Our government is weak and has not paid any attention to us,” the 35-year-old says angrily. “The trial should have taken place in Afghanistan. The murders were, after all, committed in Afghanistan. We lost members of our families. The injustice was done to us; the oppressors have done wrong and we are the ones who suffer from it. We want those responsible to be brought to justice.”
Third, on video, by Jennifer Glasse for Al Jazeera, March 12, 2013 (as transcribed):
“This ruthless man should be sentenced. He killed our women and children. He killed them at 3:00 o’clock in the morning. It was incredible brutality.
The president promised us there would be no bombing; no civilians would be killed. You can see it happening in Kandahar, Uruzgan, Kunar; in every area civilians are being killed. They haven’t fulfilled any of their promises.”
Fourth, by Kathy Gannon for the Associated Press, May 16, 2013:
Listening as she spoke, Samiullah smiled at his lanky daughter [Zardana -pw], encouraging her to say the only English phrase she knows: “Thank you.”
Fifth, by Hal Bernton for the Seattle Times, June 5-6, 2013:
Samiullah, another relative of the victims, also expressed dismay that Bales avoided a death sentence.
“We want the suspect to be punished. What can someone poor do against so much power?” he told [Lela] Ahmadzai.
SADIQULLAH – a son of Haji Mohammad Naim and his never-interviewed wife (name unknown)
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Sadiqullah (aka “Sediqullah”) gave his first (and only?) English-language media account of his experiences that night to Yalda Hakim of Australia’s DatelineSBS program, in late March, 2012:
[Yalda Hakim:] I wanted to ask survivors of the attack what they had seen, but I was blocked by the US military. The survivors were children, I was told, and the Americans now treating them said they didn’t want them traumatised by my questions. It was only after personal intervention by President Karzai himself that I was finally granted permission to see the survivors, and to hear the chilling accounts of what they’d been through.
SEDIQULLAH (Translation): The bullet hit my ear like this and went through here scraped here and came out here. When my father came out, he shot my father and then he entered our room. We ran from that room to the other room – he came and shot us in that room and then he left.
When Jon Stephenson of McClatchy interviewed Haji Mohammad Naim and Rafiullah in Kandahar in May, 2012, he also spoke to Sadiqullah, after which he reported:
A third survivor, Naim’s 11-year-old son, Sadiqullah, also was interviewed. But he said he’d remained hidden behind a curtain throughout the violence, and it was uncertain what he’d seen.
[…]
Sadiqullah had been wounded earlier by shrapnel from an American mortar round that had landed near his home.
Sadiqullah underwent surgery at the U.S. military hospital in Kandahar after that attack, too, and his wound had barely healed by the night of the massacre.
Haji MOHAMMAD NAIM – husband of never-interviewed wife (name unknown); father of teenagers Parmina (shot in chest & groin) and Sadiqullah (shot through ear); shared wall with east-side neighbor Haji Nazar Mohammad; neighbor on west side (no shared wall) was Haji Sayed Jan; father of at least 9 sons (married Naim son, and witness, Habibullah was killed by a NATO airstrike in September, 2012)
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In his only English-language media interview – with a New Zealand McClatchy correspondent in May, 2012 – before the June 5, 2013 video above, Haji Mohammad Naim said more:
Posted on Wednesday, May 16, 2012
By Jon Stephenson | McClatchy Newspapers
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — […]
In the next compound, a short distance from the house where Rafiullah had been sleeping, Haji Mohammad Naim awoke to the sound of dogs barking wildly in the street.
“Then there was shooting, and the dogs stopped barking,” said Naim, who’s in his 50s. Shortly afterward, there was pandemonium at Naim’s front door as Rafiullah and a handful of terrified women and children poured into his yard, seeking shelter. Minutes later, another woman and a young girl emerged from the darkness.
“She was screaming and crying,” Naim said of the woman. “She said, ‘My husband has been martyred,'” meaning that he’d been killed.
Suddenly a silhouette appeared, moving rapidly behind a bright light. Naim thought that U.S. forces were raiding his village, and he expected a squad of soldiers to arrive. Instead, he saw just one man.
“He got closer, and then he started shooting at me,” Naim said.
[…]
The gunfire seemed to come at him in bursts, perhaps as many as 10 shots altogether, Naim recalled, some fired from just feet away.
Two struck him in the upper left side of his chest and one ripped skin from the left side of his jaw. Then everything went black.
The shooter stepped past Naim’s unconscious body and entered his home, confronting Rafiullah and his relatives who’d taken refuge in the main room.
[…]
Help for the wounded eventually arrived, although Rafiullah – like Naim – had fallen unconscious, and was unable later to say how long it took to get there.
[…]
Naim, who said he regained consciousness four days after the attack, also told McClatchy that U.S. investigators had interviewed him in the hospital. But he said their Afghan counterparts hadn’t interviewed him, despite him being one of a handful of adults to survive the shootings.
[…]
The only official contact he’d had since his discharge from the hospital was when he was summoned, still wounded, to Kandahar city and interrogated by an officer from Afghanistan’s much-feared intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security.
“That man was a bastard,” Naim said. “He accused me of having laid IEDs” – improvised explosive devices, or homemade bombs – “before the massacre to target the American forces.”
QUADRATULLAH – a son of Haji Mohammad Naim & his never-interviewed wife (name unknown)
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FAIZULLAH – a son of Haji Mohammad Naim & wife (name unknown); lived elsewhere in Alkozai
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In connection with that Associated Press statement that “all five [wounded who were treated in U.S./ISAF military hospitals] survived,” note the following three (still unexplained and unreconciled) statements given to the media by U.S. Army spokesmen [5 of the 6 Alkozai wounded victims charged to Bales testified in November after these reports; only never-interviewed teenager Parmina, wounded daughter of Haji Mohammad Naim (and one of the referenced 5 treated at FOB Zangabad), did not testify]:
1. The day that SSG Bales was first charged (on March 23, 2012) with 17 murders:
KABUL — The U.S. military’s decision to formally charge Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales in the killing of 17 Afghan villagers on Friday did nothing to dampen the anger of Mohammed Wazir, who lost 11 family members — including his mother, wife, four daughters and two sons — in the rampage.
[…]
Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings, a U.S. military spokesman in Kabul, said none of the five people wounded in the shootings has died. He also ruled out the possibility that one of the slain women was pregnant.
– Richard Leiby & Sayed Salahuddin, The Washington Post, March 23, 2012
2. Three days after SSG Bales was first charged (on March 23, 2012) with 17 murders:
Early in the day, an Afghan police official in Kandahar Province, where the killings took place, said the 17th victim could be accounted for because a pregnant woman was among the dead. But he later retracted that assertion, and American military officials restated that their investigation showed evidence for 17 murder charges.
“At this time, the evidence available to the prosecution team indicates 17 victims of premeditated murder and 6 victims of assault and attempted premeditated murder,” Lt. Col. Jimmie E. Cummings Jr. said by telephone. “There were no wounded who died, and no fetus.”
He continued: “That breaks down to 4 males, 4 females and 9 children were murdered. One male, one woman and 4 children were wounded.” – Rod Nordland, The New York Times, March 26, 2012
3. Just before the SSG Bales Article 32 hearing began in November – five months after a murder count was, without explanation, dropped, and Bales was charged instead (on June 1, 2012) with 16 murders:
The pretrial hearing could include testimony from some of those wounded in the attack.
Of the six wounded, four were treated in coalition medical facilities and released in March and one was released from a coalition facility care in August. Another victim wounded in the attack died while under coalition care, according to Lt. Col. Gary Dangerfield, deputy public-affairs officer for I Corps at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
Dangerfield did not comment on whether that death would result in an additional murder charge being filed in the case.
Since this case involves Special Forces, the secrecy surrounding their operations may make it more difficult to ferret out evidence. “I would say it definitely creates another barrier that would not exist otherwise,” said Eric Montalvo, a military trial lawyer. – Hal Bernton, The Seattle Times, November 5, 2012
Before turning to the sole witness at the Article 32 hearing (or ever interviewed by the media) from the Haji Nazar Mohammad home (the east-side neighbor of Haji Naim in Alkozai), here’s what Habibullah – another son of Mohammad Naim – said he heard and saw that night, in his only English-language media interview, before being killed by a NATO airstrike in late September, 2012 (according to the reporting of Afghan journalist Mamoon Durrani, and, indirectly, that of other Afghan reporters who interviewed Habibullah’s cousin Abdul Baqi):
Habibullah, a 28-year-old farmer who saw parts of the massacre unfold, was one of those who met [President] Karzai [in Kabul on March 16, 2012; the video is linked here -pow wow]. He told GlobalPost he saw several soldiers in his compound when his father was shot. But he also admits he can’t remember everything that happened.
“My mind is too confused,” he said.
Habibullah tried his best to describe the shooting for GlobalPost. He drew a map of the three houses in his village, Alkozai, where four people were killed. His house was in the middle. He said his wife woke him up early in the morning — he can’t recall the exact time — shouting that American soldiers were at the house next door. Habibullah told her not to worry.
“This is a night raid,” he remembered telling her.
Night raids — surprise attacks by US soldiers on houses they suspect are associated with the Taliban, are common in this volatile region. “The Americans usually pick one house to raid, and then they leave.”
But a few moments later residents from neighboring houses began fleeing to Habibullah’s, telling everyone to hide. The attacker — or attackers — soon followed, he said.
“I didn’t hear a lot of shooting and I didn’t hear helicopters,” Habibullah recalled. But he did see “two or three Americans” enter his compound, “using lights and firing at my father, who was wounded.”– Bette Dam, GlobalPost, March 23, 2012
ROBINA/NOORBINAK – daughter of Haji Nazar Mohammad and wife (“Maryam”? “Shah Babo”?)
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There may be an AP courtroom sketch of Robina drawn by Lois Silver (who sketched many of the Afghan and American Article 32 witnesses), but, if so, I have yet to locate it. Such a sketch might make it possible to confirm, one way or the other, whether the “Robina” who testified at the Article 32 hearing is the same girl as “Noorbinak,” who was interviewed by Yalda Hakim for Australian public television’s DatelineSBS program in March, 2012. DatelineSBS did not identify Noorbinak’s village or parents, but in July, 2012, I learned through Afghan reporter Mamoon Durrani that Noorbinak is a daughter of Haji Nazar Mohammad. Noorbinak’s eyewitness mother (name unknown, but possibly “Maryam” or “Shah Babo”) has never been interviewed. If Nazar Mohammad is Noorbinak’s father (and Noorbinak’s account to DatelineSBS does closely parallel “Robina’s” Article 32 testimony above), Noorbinak lost not only her father, but also a younger sister (Tora/Toraki) that night – yet neither the Article 32 testimony of Robina nor the SBS interview of Noorbinak mentions that fact. There have been no other media interviews of Noorbinak (and none of a girl named “Robina”) since the DatelineSBS broadcast in March, 2012. No reporting that I’ve seen from the Article 32 hearing – where only those in attendance could see Robina on the monitor and compare her with public footage of Noorbinak – publicly connects Robina with Noorbinak. In fact, it appears that only one journalist at the Article 32 hearing – Adam Ashton – even mentions the name of Robina’s father.
Here’s what “8-year-old Noorbinak” told Yalda Hakim in late March, 2012 (from the SBS transcription of their television broadcast):
REPORTER: Yalda Hakim
MAN (Translation): You know where your father is?
CHILD (Translation): He died.
REPORTER: How did he die?
CHILD (Translation): The Americans.
[…]
NOORBINAK (Translation): He was shooting, he shot my father’s dog first, and then he shot my father in the foot, then he dragged my mother by the hair. My mother was screaming and he held a gun to her and my father said “Leave her alone” and then he shot him right there.
As 8-year-old Noorbinak watched her parents desperately trying to fend off the intruder, he turned his gun on her and shot her in the leg.
NOORBINAK (Translation): One entered the room and the others were standing in the yard, holding lights.
________________________________________________________________
NAJIBAN
(aka Najebyan or Balandi)
(1.25 kilometers south/southwest of Camp Belamby; 11 killed; 0 wounded) ________________________________________________________________
Only one man testified at the Article 32 hearing about the slaughter of the 11 people – Ages 2 to 60 – who were sleeping at the Mohammad Wazir residence in Najiban/Balandi on March 11th. At least one female eyewitness of the attack there – “Palwasha,” as described by Wazir to BusinessWeek/Bloomberg in late March, 2012 – was said to be willing to give testimony in court, but has apparently never been interviewed since [“Palwasha told me that the gunfire woke her about 2:30 in the night, and she came out and saw the light flashes from guns — not one gun, but different guns — at my house,” Wazir said.]. Another witness of the Najiban attack at or near the Wazir home – see the Reuters quotes below – was killed in an auto accident on June 30, 2012, Panjwai family members told Afghan reporter Mamoon Durrani in early July. The man who testified at the Article 32 hearing, Khamal Adin, evidently a resident of Kandahar city, did not witness the attack, but was the family member who was called (while Mohammad Wazir was still hours away in Spin Boldak with his sole surviving child) to deal with its gruesome aftermath. To supplement Khamal Adin’s testimony about what he confronted that morning, this is my summary of the translation of a lengthy interview of Haji Mohammad Wazir that was conducted in Kabul in October, 2012 (one month before the sworn Article 32 testimony of Khamal Adin):
Haji Mohammad Wazir was born and was living in his late father’s home in Belamby village – where he and his family were fourth-generation farmers growing grapes, pomegranates, mulberries and wheat – but after Combat Outpost Belamby was established in the village (more than a year before the massacre), Wazir moved his family to Najiban (about 1.25 KM southwest of COP Belamby). Soon, like Wazir, all remaining residents left Belamby village to try to avoid being caught in the crossfire between American and Afghan government forces and the Taliban. Wazir clearly describes in the interview the five rooms in which his family lived in Najiban, and the fifth room (at one end of the home) was the kitchen. Wazir makes clear that 10-11 burning bodies of his family were found by neighbors in the middle room of five, in what was usually the bedroom of his mother, three sons, and nephew (the son of his brother Mohammad Hussain of Spin Boldak, who Wazir and his youngest son Habib Shah were visiting on the night of the attack). The room closest to the main gate was a “guesthouse,” or guestroom/living room, which was not occupied that night. Wazir and his neighbors deduced from the aftermath of the slaughter that, with Wazir away from home, his wife and four daughters moved from the room in which they normally slept with Wazir (the room between his mother’s room and the guestroom), into the room of his mother, where they were all killed and burned. Notably, and contrary to the counts in the June 1 Army Charge Sheet for SSG Bales, Wazir (and neighbors?) seem to believe that Wazir’s mother Shah Tarina was shot at the main gate to the yard, while answering the door (as is the Afghan custom when the male head of household is away), but that her body was afterwards carried into the middle room and set on fire with the others. [The Article 32 testimony of Khamal Adin, however, appears to contradict the theory that Shah Tarina was burned; perhaps Wazir was not told the full details about the condition in which Khamal Adin found Shah Tarina’s body in the main gate entranceway where he testifed he found her?] Wazir’s younger brother Akhtar Mohammad and his wife of one year slept in the room between the kitchen and the middle, mother’s room. Based on evidence the neighbors and Wazir (and Adin, no doubt) found afterwards, Akhtar Mohammad and his wife Nadia were killed in their room, and then they too were carried into the middle room and burned. Also shot that night was a puppy dog in the yard – which survived, unlike the caged bird, visible in photos, kept by Wazir’s wife Bibi Zahra, which succumbed in the smoke from the burning bodies. (See also 2470media’s important, subtitled October, 2012 video interview of Haji Mohammad Wazir.)
KHAMAL ADIN – Cousin of Haji Mohammad Wazir of Najiban (son of a brother of Wazir’s father)
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The two newspaper accounts of apparent Najiban witness Agha Lala – not to be confused with the Kandahar Provincial Council member named Agha Lalai, who’s on the right in that screen capture, seated next to Haji Naim’s son Habibullah – follow. Agha Lala was reportedly killed in a car accident on June 30, 2012. These are the only two English-language media interviews of Agha Lala I’ve seen, although Lala was photographed and video-recorded on March 11 inside and outside the room where burned bodies were found at Mohammad Wazir’s; video-recorded while seated in the back row at the March 16, 2012 meeting with President Karzai in Kabul; and video-recorded during Yalda Hakim’s group interview at Kandahar Airfield military hospital in late March, 2012.
The first Reuters account:
By Ahmad Haroon
BELANDAI, Afghanistan | Sun Mar 11, 2012 2:22pm EDT
[…]
Another witness, Agha Lala who is in his 40s, said he was awoken by gunfire at about 2 a.m.
“I watched them from a wall for a while. Then they opened fire on me. The bullets hit the wall. They were laughing. They did not seem normal. It was like they were drunk,” he said.
After rushing to his home and hiding all night, Lala, who is no relation to Jan Agha, went to check on the neighbors.
“It was a slaughter. The bullet-riddled bodies were all over the room and it seemed they were burned with curtains and blankets that were torched,” he said.
“Is this what the Americans call an assistance force? They are beasts and have no humanity. The Taliban are much better than them.”
Blood was splattered in one house in the village and there were bullet holes in the walls.
The second Reuters account published later the same day:
By Ahmad Nadem and Ahmad Haroon
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan | Sun Mar 11, 2012 6:19pm EDT
The walls of the [Mohammad Wazir] house were blood-splattered.
“They (Americans) poured chemicals over their dead bodies and burned them,” [Abdul] Samad [Wazir’s uncle] told Reuters at the scene.
Neighbors said they had awoken to crackling gunfire from American soldiers, who they described as laughing and drunk.
“They were all drunk and shooting all over the place,” said neighbor Agha Lala, who visited one of the homes where killings took place.
“Their (the victims’) bodies were riddled with bullets.”
________________________________________________________________
DAWOOD HOME
(0.75 KM south of COP Belamby & .50 KM northeast of Wazir’s home; 1 killed; 0 wounded) ________________________________________________________________
At the isolated home of Mohammad Dawood – located .50 KM northeast of the Mohammad Wazir home, and .75 KM south of COP Belamby – six childen were apparently sleeping together in one room with their parents (Mohammad Dawood and his wife Massouma) on the night of March 11th. (A November, 2012 media account said the Dawood home had 11 rooms; a May, 2013 account said it had 2 rooms. Two March 11, 2012 photographs – 1, 2 – evidently show the Dawood home, and reveal some of the other family members and neighbors who were present.) The oldest Dawood boy – Hekmatullah “Khan” Gul, about Age 10 – was the only eyewitness from that home to testify at the Article 32 hearing. But the eyewitness account of Hekmatullah’s mother Massouma was indirectly conveyed to the Article 32 hearing, through the testimony of an Army investigator named Leona Mansapit. Massouma had been interviewed in June by the U.S. Army and her private account to the Army, as conveyed by Mansapit in November at the request of the defense, matched the three public interviews Massouma gave before November, 2012, as well as the testimony in November of her son Hekmatullah. Here’s part of the account that Hekmatullah gave in his 2470media video interview in Kabul, a month before he testified at the Article 32 hearing:
My father is Mohammad Dawood
One person was in front of the door,
One person came inside.
When he came in,
first he stepped on me,
then he stumbled over my brother.
He pulled my father out of his bed.
My mother ran after him.
Then he shot my father in front of the room,
and closed the curtains.
He said “Don’t come out or I’ll shoot you.”
Outside, there was bright light.
My father said only “Fazal ka” – have mercy,
when the man pulled him by his arm.[…]
That night there were helicopters flying above us,
and there were lights outside.
In that night it was so bright in the yard,
as if it were noon.
– Hekmatullah “Khan” Gul, October, 2012
But someone else at that November hearing contradicted Massouma and Hekmatullah – for the first time since the massacre – as to the number of soldiers seen at the Dawood home (that is – not just as to the number who came inside, but as to the number of soldiers both inside and outside the home). That someone else was non-eyewitness Haji Baran (aka Mullah Barraan, Baran Akhon, Nabaryan) of Kandahar city, the cousin and brother-in-law of Massouma, and a brother of Mohammad Dawood. Haji Baran is repeatedly recorded on video (more frequently than Massouma) giving the same version of events as Massouma – until the Article 32 hearing in November, 2012, where Baran testified but Massouma did not, for disputed reasons:
Army officials said Dawood did not testify because of “cultural differences,” and the reluctance of Afghan families to allow a woman to testify in an American courtroom, even by remote video from Afghanistan. But sources in Afghanistan have told the Los Angeles Times that Dawood was, in fact, willing to testify. – Kim Murphy, The Los Angeles Times, Nov. 14, 2012
No media interview of Haji Baran subsequent to the Article 32 hearing was conducted (although repeated efforts were made by a few to speak to him and/or to Massouma) until Kathy Gannon of the Associated Press traveled to Kandahar city in mid-April and succeeded in obtaining a four-hour interview with Massouma, in the presence of Haji Baran. Gannon’s interview – published May 16, 2013 – confirmed for the first time that Haji Baran had indeed changed his months-long story, and, as of Gannon’s April, 2013, interview, Massouma’s year-long eyewitness account as well, with regard to the number of soldiers present at her home on the night that she saw her husband killed.
Again I’ll let these accounts speak for themselves; collected together below – in chronological order – are all the accounts I’ve seen about the murder in the Mohammad Dawood home.
From Mamoon Durrani reporting for Agence France-Presse, March 11, 2012:
“May God kill the only son of Karzai, so he feels what we feel.”
Name Unknown – Mother of Dawood’s wife Massouma, and Aunt of Dawood; grandmother of their six children
From a translation by Lela Ahmadzai of 2470media (correcting an erroneous Agence France-Presse translation of 16 seconds of footage filmed by Mamoon Durrani on March 11, 2012):
“The murdered man [Mohammad Dawood] is my son-in-law and nephew [she used the non-specific Pashto word “lala” for Dawood; exact relationship confirmed by her nephew Haji Mullah Barraan, via Mamoon Durrani]. It happened last night, right here [she gestured toward the bloodstained rug on the floor]. The child [apparently meaning her 6-month-old grandson Hazratullah, seen here in his mother’s arms]: he held the gun in his mouth; pulled the woman’s hair [apparently meaning her daughter Massouma, Dawood’s wife]. He beat her head against the wall. I saw only one person. May I be blinded if I lie. I saw only one person.”
(16 seconds in a 1:00 video uploaded March 12) Name Unknown – Mother of Dawood’s wife Massouma, and Aunt of Dawood; grandmother of their six children
10 seconds in a March 12, 2012 BBC video:
“I saw one man. I can’t lie. I didn’t see another. There was one man and he dragged a woman by her hair, and banged her head repeatedly against the wall. She didn’t say a word.” Name Unknown – Mother of Dawood’s wife Massouma, and Aunt of Dawood; grandmother of their six children
11 seconds in a March 13, 2012 CNN video:
“One guy came in and pulled [Mohammad Dawood] from his sleep and he shot him in this doorway. Then they came back inside the room and put a gun in the mouth of another child and stomped on another boy.” Name Unknown – Mother of Dawood’s wife Massouma, and Aunt of Dawood; grandmother of their six children
Haji Baran’s comments to President Karzai in Kabul, on Friday, March 16, 2012, as partly translated by Afghan journalist Mujib Mashal for a March 18th Al Jazeera article:
Brother of victim Mohamed Dawood [Mullah Baraan/Baran Akhon]: My brother, who the Americans martyred, we had left him behind to take care of our plot of land, irrigate it. For God’s sake, think about it: he has six children.
[…]
He was lying down with his children, it was two or three in the morning. … [The foreigner who speaks English] brings [Mohammad Dawood] to the door, where another holds a gun to [Dawood] and says “Taliban!” Where were Taliban there? This area was near the American base. … When my brother’s wife recounts the story… she says the Americans came and took him by the left hand and said ‘Taliban Taliban’. Another comes and hits him in the head with a gun. I filled a pot with his brains. Another American goes and holds a gun to his six-month-old son, Hazratullah. And she pleads him in God’s name… She asks him in God’s name, and he slaps her away.
[…]
[Mohammad Dawood’s] brother [Mullah Baraan/Baran Akhon]: When he [the US soldier] hits her [Massouma, Dawood’s wife] with a slap and she pleads him in God’s name, half of [Mohammad Dawood’s] body is lying inside, martyred, half of his body outside, martyred. She gets up and she is forced back to her place and she carries out the Islamic ritual for the dead and she lights the lamp and the place is full of Americans, who raised their voices that it was one American – and that, too, he was insane? […]Then my sister-in-law got up and performed the rituals for my martyred brother Mohamed Dawood until the morning. For God’s sake, you think about it for a second: until the morning, the woman is sitting with the martyr lying in front of her. Then I get a call in the morning, and in what condition I make my way there? – Haji Mullah Baran, cousin and brother-in-law of Dawood widow Massouma
From a March 19, 2012 CNN report:
Ali Ahmad, one of the villagers, holds a blood-stained pillow in his home, then goes to his neighbor’s home and shows blood splatter on a wall as he describes what he remembers.
“It was around 3 at night that they entered the room. They took my uncle [Haji Mohammad Dawood -pw] out of the room and shot him after asking him, ‘Where is the Taliban?’
“My uncle replied that he didn’t know,” Ahmad said.
Ahmad used “they” but did not say more than one soldier was in his home. [Adds CNN, inexplicably – confusing rather than clarifying their translation of Ahmad’s words, which seem to belie this statement. -pow wow]
[…]
Most of the villagers say they do not believe the U.S. version of events, but accounts from eyewitnesses conflict.
One of the young [Dawood -pw] boys [Hekmatullah Gul -pw] who were there recounted it this way:
“He said, “Hello, hello Taliban, Taliban. We told him there is no Taliban here, but he broke the cupboards.” He added, “He was an American.”
Another boy [Hekmatullah’s younger brother Nasibullah -pw] chimes in: “It was just one person.”
And although some adults in the village said they have evidence more than one soldier was involved, none has said that more than one soldier was firing a weapon.
“They went through the field of wheat and there were the footprints of no less than 15 people. There were signs of knee prints as well.” Ahmad said. Toor Jan aka Ali Ahmad – Brother of Haji Mohammad Dawood (from south of COP Belamby) & Haji Mullah Baran (of Kandahar city)
March 22, 2012 in the Wall Street Journal:
“The only people who have remained are those who couldn’t afford the expense of moving their families to the city,” says Mullah Baran [Akhon -pw], a 38-year-old whose brother, Mohammad Dawood, was the first [Balandi/Najiban? -pw] victim of the March 11 rampage, according to witnesses to the shooting, and other villagers. “The Americans said they came here to bring peace and security, but the opposite happened. Now, this village is a nest of ghosts.”
Mr. Baran, who says he had to scrape his brother’s brain and pieces of skull from the floor of their home, lost only one relative. His brother’s wife started screaming at the intruder, he says, and the gunman spared her and her six children.
March 23, 2012 in GlobalPost:
[Afghan President Hamid] Karzai also spoke to Mullah Baran [Akhon -pw]. Baran’s brother [Mohammad Dawood -pw] was killed in the shooting spree, but he [Baran Akhon -pw] didn’t see the shooting happen. Baran said he told Karzai what his sister-in-law [Dawood’s widow -pw], who was at the scene, had told him.
When GlobalPost asked Baran to speak directly with his sister-in-law [Dawood’s widow -pw], he initially refused.
“You don’t need to talk her,” Baran said. “I did, and I can tell you the story.”
Eventually Baran relented, allowing GlobalPost to interview her [Dawood’s widow -pw] by phone.
Massouma [widow of Mohammad Dawood -pw], who lives in the neighboring village of Najiban, where 12 people were killed, said she heard helicopters fly overhead as a uniformed soldier entered her home. She said he flashed a “big, white light,” and yelled, “Taliban! Taliban! Taliban!”
Massouma said the soldier shouted “walkie-talkie, walkie-talkie.” The rules of engagement in hostile areas in Afghanistan permit US soldiers to shoot Afghans holding walkie-talkies because they could be Taliban spotters.
“He had a radio antenna on his shoulder. He had a walkie-talkie himself, and he was speaking into it,” she said.
After the soldier with the walkie-talkie killed her husband, she said he lingered in the doorway of her home.
“While he stood there, I secretly looked through the curtains and saw at least 20 Americans, with heavy weapons, searching all the rooms in our compound, as well as my bathroom,” she said.
After they completed their search, the men left, Massouma said. She said that all seven of her children [there are actually six Dawood children, including an infant -pw] saw the attackers, but she refused to let GlobalPost speak with them.
An Afghan journalist who went to Massouma’s home in the days after the shooting and spoke with one of her sons, aged seven, said the boy told him he looked through the curtains and saw a number of soldiers — although he couldn’t say how many.
March 24, 2012 in The Associated Press:
Baran Akhon, whose brother Mohammad Dawood was also killed in Balandi, said he’s not sure how he is going to support his brother’s family. He has brought all of them to live with him in Kandahar city, but he barely makes enough selling cigarettes and other small items from his pushcart to support his own family.
From Haji Baran’s interview with Yalda Hakim for DatelineSBS, aired March 27, 2012:
MULLAH BARRAAN [aka Baran Ahkon, brother of Mohammad Dawood -pw] (Transcript/Translation): The Americans left the room, my brother’s children say they saw in the yard many Americans with lights on their heads and they had lights at the ends of their guns as well. They don’t know whether there were 15 or 20, or however many there were.
Haji Mullah Baran – brother of Haji Mohammad Dawood & cousin of Dawood’s wife Massouma
From the same March 27, 2012 DatelineSBS television interview:
[Yalda Hakim:] I travelled back to the city of Kandahar, where I want to speak to one more survivor – Aminea – not her real name – now lives here [in Dawood’s brother’s home -pw] with her six children in a mud hut with no electricity.
AMINEA [Dawood’s widow -pw] (Translation): As I was dragging him [Mohammad Dawood -pw] to the house, his brain fell into my hand and I put it into a clean handkerchief. There was so much blood – as if three sheep had been slaughtered.
Of all the stories I heard on this trip, hers was the most wrenching account of how the killings have changed this country. And how Afghan people now fear the soldiers who had promised to help them and protect them.
AMINEA [Dawood’s widow -pw] (Translation): I had no feeling other than… if I could lay my hands on them, if I could lay my hands on those infidels, I would rip them apart with my bare hands.
(See also Yalda Hakim’s further description of what “Aminea” told her, here.)
From a July 4, 2012 interview on Press TV (a state-run Iranian outlet) by Fayez Khorshid (the translation has some errors; those errors are excluded from this excerpt):
Mullah Baran is another victim of this attack. It was not one person who did this. Other U.S forces were guarding outside our homes during the shooting, Baran said.
From an October 28-29, 2012 The Daily Beast/Newsweek article posted by Raymond Bonner a week before the Article 32 hearing got underway (Bonner’s article mistakenly states that Dawood’s six children were also murdered, and included in the murder charges against Bales; those errors are excluded from this excerpt):
“Two Americans came into the room, and the kids started screaming,” said Bibi Massoma, whose husband, Mohammed Dawood, [was] murdered. The men entered around 3 a.m. One of the soldiers grabbed her husband and forced him to stand in the doorway, she said; a second soldier shot him. His brains were scattered in the doorway. Massoma later gathered them in a plastic bag. One of the soldiers stuck a pistol into the mouth of six-month-old Hazaratullah, put his finger to his lips and said if the child did not stop crying he would kill all of them [].
On the eve of the Article 32 hearing in November, the Los Angeles Times printed the first English-language media interview of Hekmatullah “Khan” Gul since the brief March 19, 2012 CNN footage quoted above. The interview from which Hekmatullah’s comments were drawn for this article was conducted in Kabul in early October, 2012, and, as Article 32 reporting by the same paper a week later demonstrates (see below), at least one significant October statement made to the Los Angeles Times by Hekmatullah Gul did not make it into this account:
November 04, 2012|By Kim Murphy and Ned Parker, Los Angeles Times
He was muttering “Taliban, Taliban” as he pulled Daoud [Mohammad Dawood -pw] out of his bed, said Daoud’s 10-year-old son, Hikmatullah Gul, who hid under a blanket.
He said his father was calling “Have mercy!” before he was shot. “There was so much blood from my father,” he said. “But the American came again and tore everything apart. Broke windows. Threw a closet to the floor…. The whole house cried.”
Both youths [Mohammad Dawood’s son Hekmatullah Gul, from south of COP Belamby, and Rafiullah, from north of COP Belamby -pw] described seeing bright lights outside the houses during the attacks.
From a CBS News television interview aired the night before Afghan Article 32 testimony began (Cobiella’s account mistakenly states that Dawood’s youngest child Hazratullah – Haji Baran’s 6-month-old nephew – was also murdered; that error is excluded from this excerpt):
November 8, 2012 7:34 PM
Afghans recall massacre horror ahead of soldier’s trial
By Kelly Cobiella
Another villager, Nabaryan [Haji Baran -pw], told us his brother [Mohammad Dawood -pw] had been killed. His brother’s wife survived — and he said she’d seen more than one gunman.
“She told me they had lights on their heads,” he said in [Pashto -pw]. “They were searching the house, and they told her to be quiet or they’d kill her, too.”
From a November 11, 2012 article, by Ali M Latifi and Abdullah Shahood for Al Jazeera, published as Afghans were testifying at the Article 32 hearing:
Kandahar, Afghanistan – Having just completed his dawn prayer, Mullah Baran was rolling up his prayer mat when he received the phone call: “The Americans came last night,” a voice on the other end told him.
“They raided your house and martyred your brother.”
[…]
Initially, “they wouldn’t even admit to us it was their man”, Baran says of the US forces.
When he returned to his 11-room house the following morning, Baran was confronted with the physical and emotional evidence: broken cupboards and doorways, bullet holes from the gunfire that had awoken his youngest nephew asleep in his crib.
The Article 32 testimony about the murder of Mohammad Dawood follows (Army CIC special agent Leona Mansapit was apparently the first witness of the evening on Saturday, November 10, while witness Hekmatullah “Khan” Gul and non-witness Haji Baran were apparently the last of the Afghan family members to testify, late Saturday/early Sunday):
LEONA MANSAPIT – U.S. Army criminal investigator; interviewed M. Dawood widow Massouma
|
HEKMATULLAH “KHAN” GUL – Oldest of six children of Massouma and Mohammad Dawood
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Haji MULLAH BARAN – Brother of Mohammad Dawood, and cousin of Dawood’s widow Massouma
|
On November 11, 2012 (after Haji Baran had unexpectedly contradicted all of his previous accounts about the number of soldiers seen at the Dawood home, with his testimony at the Article 32 hearing), the Los Angeles Times reported that they’d also interviewed Baran [in Kabul in early October] before the Article 32 hearing began:
November 11, 2012|By Kim Murphy
JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. — […]
In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, [Mullah] Baraan said villagers simply find it hard to believe that Bales could have carried out two separate attacks over a five-hour period without anyone at Camp Belambay being aware of it.
“They say it is only one person. We think this is crazy.… They never go around alone. Never, ever a soldier goes by himself, unless they have a helicopter, they don’t go out … because they are scared,” Baraan said.
He said villagers also will be skeptical of any attempt by Bales’ defense to claim he was mentally incapacitated.
“If someone is crazy, he would shoot the people at the gate. But he passes everybody, and goes to shoot these people [in the villages] he maybe met once before, and shoots them one by one? Why didn’t he shoot the soldiers on the way? Why didn’t he shoot his friends if he was so crazy? This is our question,” he said. “We aren’t stupid. We can count. They want to pin it on a crazy guy.”
In April, 2013, five months after the Article 32 hearing at which part of Massouma’s consistent eyewitness account about the murder of her husband was seemingly changed, via the testimony of her non-witness brother-in-law Haji Mullah Baran, the Associated Press conducted a four-hour interview of Massouma, in the presence of Haji Baran, at Baran’s Kandahar city home – the first media interview of Massouma (or Haji Baran) recounting the attack since Baran’s November, 2012 testimony:
By KATHY GANNON — May. 16 [2013] 2:39 PM EDT
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) — […] Hidden from view, [Masooma’s] words burst forth as she told her side of what happened to her family sometime before dawn on March 11, 2012.
According to Masooma, an American soldier wearing a helmet equipped with a flashlight burst into her two-room mud home while everyone slept. […]
“We were asleep. He came in and he was shouting, saying something about Taliban, Taliban, and then he pulled my husband up. I screamed and screamed and said, ‘We are not Taliban, we are not government. We are no one. Please don’t hurt us,'” she said.
The soldier wasn’t listening. He pointed his pistol at Masooma to quiet her and pushed her husband into the living room.
“My husband just looked back at me and said, ‘I will be back.'” Seconds later she heard gunshots, she recalled, her voice cracking as she was momentarily unable to speak. Her husband was dead.
[…]
Masooma said that the soldier returned to the family’s bedroom after killing her husband. She stood in terror. Her children hid under their blankets. The soldier moved slowly and seemed angry. Gesturing to show how he hit her in the arms and shoved her to the ground, Masooma said he then moved toward her son Hikmatullah, then 7.
Her son said he remembers the sight of the attacker in full military uniform. “I was so afraid. I pretended I was asleep,” he said.
[…]
She said the soldier then found her 2-year-old daughter, Shahara. He grabbed her pigtails and violently shook her head back and forth.
He then went to the crying baby Hazratullah and shoved the muzzle of his black pistol into the infant’s mouth, she said.
“He just held it there in his mouth. I screamed and screamed, ‘He is just a baby. Don’t kill him. Don’t kill him.’ But he just kept the gun in his mouth. He didn’t say anything. He just stared at him,” she recalled.
[…]
After some time, she said, the soldier took the gun from the baby’s mouth and walked back into the living room. Masooma dug her bare foot into the dirt to demonstrate how the soldier slipped his foot beneath her husband’s head to lift it from the floor, as if to be sure he was really dead. The soldier looked down at her husband, shrugged his shoulders and returned to searching her home. After he finished rifling through their belongings, he left.
[…]
For example, Masooma gave [a] telephone interview to a reporter [Bette Dam of GlobalPost -pw] days after the attack, with Baraan, her brother-in-law, acting as a translator. According to the resulting story, she described a single attacker in her home, but said she saw many soldiers outside.
Three months later, her family allowed a female Army investigator to question her. The investigator testified at a hearing last fall that Masooma clearly stated two soldiers carried out the attack. The investigator said she had no reason to doubt Masooma’s credibility.
At the same hearing, Baraan testified, insisting Masooma was mistaken when she said there were two soldiers. Lawyers for the soldier accused in the killings suggested Baraan might be influencing Masooma — especially since the defense was not allowed to speak with her.
[…]
In the interview with the AP, Masooma did not waver in her insistence that one soldier attacked her home [south of COP Belamby -pw], and Baraan denied that she ever reported seeing many soldiers outside. Masooma did recall flares lighting the sky until “night seemed like day” — which is consistent with testimony from the hearing, as guards said they fired a flare that illuminated the sky for 20 seconds after hearing gunshots [1-2 hours earlier, during the half-hour attack on Alkozai, north of COP Belamby -pw]. Masooma also said she heard helicopters overhead; there was no corroborating testimony at the hearing.
Masooma is absolutely certain of one thing: what it will take for her to find closure.
“I just want to see him killed,” she said of Bales. “I want to see him dead. Then I can let go.”