DebatingChambers

Mamoon Durrani

Perhaps if the international media, and particularly the U.S. media, would turn its lofty, self-righteous talk, about the rights of females in Afghanistan, into its walk – by, for example, seeking to obtain and report the eyewitness accounts of the many women (not to mention the many young girls) who survived the Panjwai Massacre – we might have a better idea by now of the answer to the question posed in the post’s title (among many other still-unanswered questions about the Panjwai Massacre).

Instead, the U.S. media basically delegated the actual gathering of facts in the dangerous environs of Camp Belamby, aka Combat Outpost (COP) Belamby (aerial photo added 12/11/12), to the intrepid Afghan reporters and photographers who were first (and mostly only) on the scene, and then busied itself with its official-source-quoting method of “journalism” (frequently accompanied by accountability-free anonymity) – the results of which practically drown out the actual, essential fact reporting about what happened in the Panjwai Massacre, even in the earliest March 11th coverage.

Thus, today, almost four months after the attack, of at least five adult females (and likely at least three more women in Alkozai) who are now known to have witnessed the Panjwai attack(s) on March 11, only one – Massouma, who watched her husband Mohammad Dawood be shot in the head and killed – has been (briefly) interviewed (twice) by English-language media for publication (almost certainly in large part due to dogged efforts by her brother-in-law Baran Akhon to get her story told): once over the telephone by Bette Dam for a March 23rd GlobalPost.com internet press report [page “no longer available” 10/8; replacement link], and once on-camera, under an assumed name, by Yalda Hakim for a March 27th Australian television broadcast.

Likewise, to the best of my knowledge, to date Yalda Hakim has conducted, for the same March 27 television broadcast, the only interview of a girl who witnessed the Panjwai attack(s): 8-year-old Noorbinak of Alkozai (it appears or close by specifically, from Alkozai’s Ibrahim Khan Houses neighborhood), who watched her father Nazar Mohammad, and 2-year-old sister Khatima (aka Toraki), shot and killed in front of her, before she herself was shot in the leg. (I learned the identity of Noorbinak’s father, and her village, only this week from Mamoon Durrani’s information. Further confirmation of Noorbinak’s parentage seems advisable.) We didn’t learn until mid-May, when Jon Stephenson of McClatchy wrote an important, chilling, and detailed account [link broken in their 9/24 website move; alternative link] of the four murders in Alkozai, that Noorbinak (who, notably, isn’t mentioned in the Stephenson account) apparently has two other, younger sisters (or half-sisters) who survived the night’s terror in Alkozai: 6-year-old Rubbinah (who was wounded), and 5-year-old Naseema, who both fled for their lives through the darkness, Naseema first to one home, then another, and finally away from the 3-4 adjacent homes that were targeted in Alkozai, to another location in the village. [Those 3-4 adjacent Alkozai homes are, per McClatchy, Nazar Mohammad’s, Mohammad Naim’s, and Sayed Jan’s, including a Sayed Jan guesthouse (or guestroom) where one man named Khudaydad was killed. Stephenson reports that some children of Nazar Mohammad (Rubbinah and Naseema) were staying in the Sayed Jan home (Jan was away at his farm), with Nazar Mohammad’s first wife Shah Babo. See my casualty list below for more, and my original post (which I will soon be editing/updating have edited and updated to match the new facts I’ve learned from Mamoon). Also see the important later account of the attack on Alkozai’s Ibrahim Khan Houses neighborhood that was provided in October, 2012, by an eyewitness teenage boy (one of the survivors interviewed by Stephenson), which I added to the caption of the first photograph below on January 5, 2013 (in key respects, Rafiullah’s October account differs significantly from Stephenson’s May McClatchy reporting).]

In addition to the three young daughters of Nazar Mohammad (two of them wounded) who survived, a young daughter of neighbor Mohammad Naim was shot and wounded in Alkozai: Parmina (age unknown 15–16), sister of Sediqullah (11-14), who was also shot and wounded in his father’s home (Sediqullah is the young boy interviewed on-camera by Yalda Hakim for DatelineSBS). Jon Stephenson (a McClatchy special correspondent from New Zealand) reported in May that “around a dozen” half-asleep Naim family members watched 5 children be shot, and a grandmother – Khalida, aka Nikmarghah, wife of Sayed Jan, who’d fled from next door – killed in the Naim home, and that a total of 19 people resided there, including 3 women and 8 girls – none of whom have been heard from in the English-language media about what they saw that night, as far as I know.

Besides the 11 girls who may have witnessed the attacks in Alkozai, there are apparently 7 6 children in the Dawood family, including at least a couple of young girls – and, importantly, as explained further below, these Dawood children witnessed an attack that did not take place in Najiban village proper, but instead at a home located about 1/2 KM away from Najiban. However, only brief comments from two of Dawood’s (unidentified) young sons have been aired by the English-language media, and in Najiban village proper, of course, no one survived the slaughter in the Mohammad Wazir home (as confirmed this week by Mohammad Wazir, via Durrani – i.e., the rumor/report of an adult sister surviving the Wazir home attack is false).

In stark contrast to that “Western” media track record, on March 11 itself, in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter, Mamoon Durrani personally interviewed three of those five adult female eyewitnesses, about the attacks they witnessed that night in two different locations near Camp Belamby. And yet it appears that, almost four months after the attack, no more than a sentence or two of the interviews Durrani conducted with those 3 women have ever been made public, in English – though those interviews (and videos and photographs) are freely available from him. (And I very much doubt that Durrani is the only Afghan reporter/photographer with an unseen wealth of raw Panjwai footage and information.) Here’s one of the sentences Durrani recorded that made it into the English-language media’s reporting about Panjwai, via AFP on March 11:

“May God kill the only son of Karzai, so he feels what we feel.”

– The Aunt and mother-in-law of Mohammad Dawood, a previously-unknown eyewitness to his murder, who gave a short recorded interview to Mamoon Durrani at her home on March 11, 2012
(see translated excerpts added below as of 11/30/2012)

Mamoon Durrani also interviewed at length on March 11 a rare, and previously-unmentioned, eyewitness (or at least ‘earwitness’) to the attack on the Mohammad Wazir home in Najiban (as did at least one other Afghan reporter or photographer on the scene) – a woman (see photo below) who remains unnamed (or, at least, as the following confusing Update paragraph indicates, has been given multiple names and identities, all unconfirmed and unverified), though a known neighbor of the affected Wazir household in that village, because of Afghan traditions respecting women (among other things..).

[August 8 Update/Addition: In a vivid illustration of the deplorable lack of visibility and coverage of the accounts of the many affected female eyewitnesses and survivors of the Panjwai Massacre, I learned by happenstance on August 7th that – unless she’s the eyewitness neighbor named “Palwasha” who I belatedly found described by Mohammad Wazir in BusinessWeek on March 23rd – the aforesaid “unnamed” female eyewitness to the attack on the Mohammad Wazir home in Najiban is in fact may be the surviving grandmother of the children of Mohammad Wazir and his wife Bibi Zahra; Bibi was, I assume, this woman’s daughter (since Mohammad Wazir’s mother, the grandmother on the father’s side of the family, was killed that night). That, at least, is according to this lone photo caption – that I happened upon online almost five months after the attacks while looking for something else – which I believe was provided courtesy of Afghan Associated Press photographer Allauddin Khan, who not only took this woman’s photograph, and evidently recorded her story on March 11, but wrote down her name as well: Anar Gul. ((((Edited August 11 to add: Searches on “Anar Gul” reveal that a number of media outlets indeed ran that caption with the same AP photograph, and also with another AP photograph of the same woman in the same minivan – a photo that shows the burned leg of one of the Wazir family victims – while she was holding a microphone during an interview. Notably, however, I’ve so far found only one article that actually quotes an “Anar Gul,” and that article says that her brother-in-law is “Samad Khan” (Abdul Samad, Wazir’s uncle) of “Balandi village” – which, if true, would likely mean that “Anar Gul” is not the grandmother of the Wazir children. That Xinhua article also indicates that Anar Gul heard, apparently, her door being pounded on in the “nearby Zangabad village” – though Zangabad village (see map captions below), as opposed to the Zangabad area, is evidently more than five miles to the southwest quite near [see December 11, 2012 Note at top of post] the [corrected] location of Camp Belamby – and also quotes 57-year-old “Zangabad villager” Allah Gul, and a woman named Rahila who lost her brother. There is, in addition, a New York Times article from March 11, excerpted in my April 10th post, that quotes an “Anar Gula,” who’s described as “an elderly neighbor who rushed to the [Mohammad Wazir] house…”, and who said, among other things, “we put out the fire.”)))) Yet unlike Mohammad Wazir’s uncle Abdul Samad, who was away the night of the attack but has been prominently quoted by the media about his losses, Anar Gul – possibly present that night in at least some capacity [unless even if Anar Gul actually does live in Zangabad village proper], and [possibly] the sole surviving grandmother of the murdered children and surviving Wazir child – has apparently so far been publicly quoted to a very limited extent only as an anonymous villager making a few general remarks about the Najiban attack – through the BBC and AFP reporting of Mamoon Durrani – apart from that one photo caption by an Afghan AP photographer (and the March 18 Xinhua article by Abdul Haleem and Yangtze Yan).]

[[Updated September 14 to add: The following quote is a translated excerpt from an invaluable 6-minute Pashto-language video by Pajhwok Afghan News Video Services {I later substituted a YouTube link for the original link}, that’s been posted online since March 12 (with portions apparently made available to other media outlets since March 11). I belatedly discovered this rare public video footage through a helpful GlobalPost.com “live blog” page compiled by Priyanka Boghani, which linked to a March 12 Robert Mackey New York Times blog post. The Pajhwok video contains short interviews about the Panjwai Massacre with two different women, both apparently witnesses – the first is the woman possibly named “Anar Gul” (photo; Pajhwok screen capture); the second is an unidentified woman (Pajhwok screen capture) I’ve seen in no other photo or footage, who gestures while describing what happened, including apparently showing her hair being pulled…(screen capture; also see the shorter video clips I found in late November, as linked and transcribed below, and the 12/3 Update below identifying this witness as a grandmother of the Mohammad Dawood family, from south of Camp Belamby). [The video also includes March 11 footage of Asadullah Khalid – who was nominated and approved in September to head Afghanistan’s CIA-funded National Directorate of Security – speaking to the Afghan media at Camp Belamby while standing next to Haji Abdul Samad of Najiban (screen capture; another capture from a higher-quality video I found in late November), and brief footage of a grief-stricken Haji Sayed Jan of Alkozai at Camp Belamby March 11 (similar screen captures from other videos: 1, 2).] Robert Mackey found the following translation of a 10-second portion of the minute-plus (Pashto-language) Pajhwok interview of Anar Gul, in a shorter English-language-narrated March 12 Al Jazeera video – that includes about two minutes of the 6 minutes of Pajhwok footage – and helpfully included that translation in his New York Times blog post; an Al Jazeera subtitle in their video (narrated by Bernard Smith in Kabul) identifies Anar Gul as “Gul Bashra, Mother:”

“They killed a child who was 2 years old. Was this child Taliban? There is no Taliban here. Americans are always threatening us with dogs and helicopters during night raids.” – Gul Bashra, Mother, speaking in a Pajhwok Afghan News Video Services clip – from a minivan carrying two Najiban village, Wazir/Samad family Panjwai Massacre victims – at COP Belamby, Panjwai district, Kandahar province, March 11, 2012

This YouTube video that I found November 18th contains more of the same interview of “Gul Bashra” in Pashto (here she speaks, with a boy who seems to be her son and is seen in the vehicle with her in this 6:07 footage, for a total of three minutes, and someone has added a few Pashto subtitles to the footage).

[According to a March 12 New Yorker blog post, “Gul Bashra” also said (to a BBC reporter; no link – but see the BBC video link and further translation I added 11/30, just below): “I told my son not to speak because the Americans are here. They went next door and the first thing they did was shoot the dog. And then there was a muffled bang inside the room – but who could go and see?” The same blog post reports that another, unnamed, woman (possibly confirmed [see below] to be the second woman interviewed in the Pajhwok video above) told the BBC (no link – but see the AFP-TV video link and further translation I added 11/30, just below): “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.”]

On March 11, without naming her, U.S. commercial television network ABC-TV played four seconds of the same footage of Anar Gul/Gul Bashra seen in the Pajhwok video (as part of a 2:38 ABC News video clip also hosted on the GlobalPost.com live blog page, under the heading “UPDATE: 3/12/12 12:15 PM ET Eyewitness account”), during which Martha Raddatz – Senior National Security Correspondent for ABC News, reporting from Washington, D.C. – tellingly informed her audience that Gul said (only): “‘He killed a child,’ says this mother. ‘Was this child part of the Taliban?'” That account seems to have aired on Sunday morning, U.S. time. On ABC’s World News Tonight, Sunday evening, the same brief footage of Anar Gul/Gul Bashra is played, and this time the narrator (Muhammad Lila in Islamabad, Pakistan) quotes Gul as saying: “‘They killed a child,’ says this grieving mother. ‘Was this child part of the Taliban?'”]]

[[In post-November-18 searches of YouTube I found four more clips of the same or similar Gul Bashra/Anar Gul interview footage, this time with English translations of more of what the Afghan reporter(s) were told March 11 by “Gool Booshra“ (phonetically, according to this BBC-News video’s narration) – which I’ve transcribed below (added to the post on November 30th; bracketed inserts mine).]]

BBC video translation: “It was 2:00 in the morning [she holds up two fingers, apparently to represent the time]. 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] 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.”
(70 seconds in a 1:12 video uploaded March 12)
[Compare stated timing to the Article 32 testimony of a U.S. Army witness concerning the whereabouts of SSG Bales at 2:00-2:15 AM that night. And to the Bales Article 32 hearing testimony of Afghan National Army guard Tosh Ali (the soldier on the right in this screen capture), who said he saw an American soldier leave Camp Belamby (1+ KM north of the Wazir home), on foot, at 2:30 AM. Gul Bashra’s stated timing is corroborated by the account of Wazir neighborhood resident Agha Lala in Reuters (“he was awoken by gunfire at about 2 a.m.“). At the Mohammad Dawood home, .5 KM east of the Wazir home, Dawood nephew Toor Jan/Ali Ahmad is quoted by CNN, as a witness, saying: “It was around 3 at night that they entered the room.” And non-witness Dawood brother Haji Baran Akhon told President Karzai, based on the accounts of surviving witnesses, that “it was two or three in the morning” when the attack happened at the isolated Dawood home.]

AFP-TV video translation: “Four were girls and four others were boys. Now there are only two. They assassinated children, including those who were just two years old. For God’s sake, is it supposed to be done to Muslims? Is this two-year-old child a Taliban fighter? I swear by God, I haven’t seen any Taliban fighters for the last five months. They search our homes with dogs and helicopters. At the beginning they allowed us to live in this area. They said we have nothing to do with you people. This is your own village and your country.”
(70 seconds in a 1:26 video uploaded March 12)

CNN video narration by Sara Sidner: “This base told us to come back to our villages. They said we won’t bother you. This is your land and this is your own village. Then those dogs come and grab us.”
(12 seconds in a 2:16 video uploaded March 13)

BBC-News video narration by Mike Woodridge: “They killed a two-year-old child. Was this child a Taliban? Believe me, I’ve not seen a two-year-old Taliban member yet.”
(15 seconds in a 2:07 video uploaded March 11)

– Gul Bashra of Najiban village, Panjwai district, March 11, 2012

(See also Gul Bashra’s 1-minute and 3-minute Pashto-language interviews.)

Multimedia journalist Lela Ahmadzai, a trilingual Pashto speaker, has very helpfully provided me with the following translation of Gul Bashra’s 1-minute Pashto-language Pajhwok Afghan News video interview (added December 15th):
“Four girls and four boys. Some are two years old. Is the child Taliban? In God’s name, I have seen no Taliban for five months. Their dogs check us and their helicopters are always there and check us. But this is our country and we can say nothing. We are leaving our own country and place because of them. Our doors are broken. That was not one person, there were many. There were many footprints. I could not go outside or I too would have been fired upon. Eleven people are dead. This family is erased.”
(1 minute in a 6:35 video uploaded March 12)

[“Four girls and four boys” may reference all the Wazir family victims except Wazir brother Akhtar Mohammad’s new wife Nadia or Nazia – indications are that her body may not have been transported to Camp Belamby – and Mohammad Wazir’s mother and wife, who may be the victims who were transported to the gate(s) of Compat Outpost Belamby in this vehicle.]

[[Also included on two of the above four YouTube videos I found after 11/18 are the first English translations I’ve seen of snippets of interviews with the previously-unknown, still-unnamed Dawood woman I first saw in the 6:35 Pajhwok video linked above. At least one of these three translations (including a second key AFP video), if accurate [which, as the 12/3 Edit just below explains, it may not be, and, as the alternative translation added below on December 15th indicates, it almost certainly is not] reveals the outlines of a trauma that as far as I can tell to date – November 30, 2012 – is not accounted for by any of the 16 admitted Panjwai Massacre deaths. This Agence France-Presse footage and English translation (if accurate as transcribed below) is seemingly misleadingly appeared to be the first known public video evidence of an eyewitness describing a Panjwai Massacre murder (of an unidentified 7-year-old boy) that is not charged to SSG Bales. If the following translations are accurate, the unknown unnamed woman is a [Dawood family] mother and grandmother.]]

AFP-TV video translation (but see 12/3 edit and 12/15 alternative translation just below): “They brought my dearest 7-year-old grandchild here and killed him in front of me. And he put the Kalashnikov barrel in my daughter-in-law’s mouth. And he was pulling my daughter by her hair outside. I saw one person. He had a Kalashnikov.”
(16 seconds in a 1:00 video uploaded March 12)

CNN video narration by Sara Sidner: “One guy came in and pulled a boy 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.”
(11 seconds in a 2:16 video uploaded March 13)

BBC video translation: “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.”
(10 seconds in a 1:12 video uploaded March 12)

– Unidentified Dawood Grandmother (mother of Mohammad Dawood’s wife Massouma, and Aunt of Mohammad Dawood and Haji Baran Akhon/Mullah Barraan) from an unidentified village who was [mistakenly] translated as saying she saw her unidentified 7-year-old grandson shot to death in front of her during the Panjwai Massacre, March 11, 2012

(See also the grandmother’s 30-second Pashto-language interview.)

Edited December 3, to add: As indicated in the 1-minute AFP-TV video, the non-NATO Panjwai footage in that clip was recorded by Mamoon Durrani for AFP. On December 3rd (after the Afghan government’s 3-month blockage of the YouTube site was finally lifted, at least in part) Mamoon confirmed for me that the footage is indeed from his March 11th reporting, and told me that the unknown woman is in fact the “Aunt” (or possibly and mother-in-law??) of Mohammad Dawood, who is referenced, and briefly quoted, earlier in the post. Futhermore, based on Mamoon’s recollection of his conversation with the Dawood grandmother, she did not tell Mamoon (in Pashto) that a grandson of hers was “killed” (contrary to the AFP-TV video’s English translation of her words transcribed above). Likewise, the Dawood grandmother apparently did not say that a grandson of hers (or a “boy”) was “shot,” either, contrary to the CNN video’s English translation of a different Pashto-language interview. Mamoon instead remembers the Dawood grandmother showing him where her adult nephew (or and son-in-law) Mohammad Dawood was killed, and telling him that the soldier put a gun in the mouth of her grandson. Thus, indications are that one or more of these English translations of the Dawood grandmother may not in fact be accurate…

Edited December 15, to add: Here is an apparently accurate translation – that confirms the interviewer’s own memory of the conversation – of Mamoon Durrani’s excerpted AFP-TV interview footage of Mohammad Dawood’s mother-in-law and Aunt (the full original interview lasts less than 60 seconds), which has been very kindly provided to me by multimedia journalist Lela Ahmadzai, a trilingual Pashto speaker (bracketed inserts are mine):

“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)

[Before I learned the identity of this Dawood family grandmother and corrected the name of the .jpg file accordingly, this or a similar uploaded screen capture of her briefly had the file name of: “Unidentified grandmother who lost her favorite grandson in Panjwai Massacre, AFP-TV screen capture, March 11, 2012.”]

To be fair to any members of the media who tried to get into Panjwai a day or two after the attacks to report the story, both the Taliban – who immediately made access to the Mohammad Wazir home in Najiban an IED-laden hazard, according to Wazir via Durrani – and the U.S. military/ISAF/NATO were doing their best to prevent such visits. [A village elder told Durrani March 11 that the Taliban have a mosque only about 2 kilometers from the Camp Belamby area, and soldiers at the Camp warned him that the fort-like Grape Hut structures (“kishmish khana” in Pashto), which are used to dry the grape crop into raisins, are a common launching post of the Taliban for attacks or sniper fire, including on Camp Belamby. See this photo of a Najiban Grape Hut or “Raisins Home” that Durrani took in July (see also this aerial photo of a similar structure elsewhere), and this photo of the interior of a Kandahar Grape Hut. (One screen capture of DatelineSBS footage of Alkozai included in my April 10 post appears to show an Alkozai Grape Hut in the distance on the right, beside the lane and bordering vineyards.) This U.S. Army photo, taken July 30, 2012 in the Panjwai district, includes a good view of the entranceway on one end of a traditional Afghan kishmishkhana/grape-drying hut.]

Mamoon Durrani told the BBC in an informative (and highly-recommended) 8-minute radio interview March 17 that the U.S. military even tried to prevent the Afghan reporters and photographers who quickly made it to Camp Belamby on the day of the massacre from leaving the base to visit the affected villages. Durrani succeeded in quickly overcoming that hurdle because he was recognized by someone in the crowd of (as many as 300) demonstrators outside the Camp, who hugged him and offered to take him to a village (apparently Alkozai, to begin with). Thus Durrani apparently saw all of the victims in Alkozai (collected together into the Sayed Jan home from the three homes in which they had been killed – a circumstance that has led to widespread misreporting that the four Alkozai deaths all occurred in one home), and at the Dawood home (I believe), and in Najiban at the Wazir home, before they had been transported in vehicles by the villagers to (but apparently not inside) Camp Belamby. Durrani photographed the 16 bodies he saw on March 11 (which, as indicated by this March 11 AFP report, included the body of Mohammad Wazir’s mother lying near the doorway of the main gate to her Najiban home), and video-recorded the 6 wounded he saw on March 12 at the Kandahar Airfield military hospital.

Something else that’s apparently never been made public in the English-language media about the attacks in Panjwai is that the home of Mohammad Dawood – who was killed that night – is not in Balandi/Najiban village proper (a settlement located 1.25 KM, or about one mile, southwest of Camp Belamby). Instead, as a portion of a map [see July-posted black-circled version below] from an Afghan government source reveals (and as Durrani himself can attest after visiting the Dawood home on March 11), the Dawood home sits alone about one-half kilometer east/northeast of the small Najiban/Balandi neighborhood where the Mohammad Wazir family was killed – across a vineyard, or “Grapes garden” as Durrani calls it, probably a wheat field, and multiple farm fields. The first map, and aerial photos below – which I updated/added on December 11th, as noted at the top of the post – clearly show that the isolated Dawood home is almost as far from the Wazir home (both south of COP Belamby), as Alkozai is from COP Belamby (.5 KM or about one-third mile north of the US/Afghan special operators base at Belambai). [To place the following “Horn of Panjwai” map and photos into context relative to the locations of Panjwai center/town (Bazaar-e Panjwai) and Kandahar city, see this map and this aerial photo.]

As noted above, on December 11, 2012, I added this map to the post, along with the following aerial photographs, to show the accurate location of the Panjwai Massacre in the Horn of Panjwai, or Zangabad area, of Kandahar province, Afghanistan. Camp Belamby and the attacked villages and homes are not where the black “bullseye” circle cropped from the right side of this map placed them (see full circle in original, July-posted map below), but are instead more than five miles to the west, in the approximate location indicated by the two red arrows I’ve added to the map above. The massacre took place very near the village(s) of Zangabad, in the wider area that’s also known as Zangabad (or Zangall Abad) among local residents. The Registan Desert begins on the south bank of the Dowry River, which is the southern of the two rivers visible on this map (the Arghandab River is to the north) shortly before their confluence about 15 miles west of the massacre scene.

A 2009 GoogleEarth aerial photo, added to the post on December 11, 2012, showing the accurate locale of the Panjwai Massacre in the Horn of Panjwai, or Zangabad area, of Panjwai district, Kandahar province, Afghanistan. North is straight up. The red circle I’ve added to the photo surrounds the villages of Alkozai on the north, Najiban/Balandi on the south, the Mohammad Dawood home in the bulldozed area east of Najiban, and joint U.S./Afghan base Combat Outpost Belamby close to the center of the circle, as pinpointed in the aerial photo below (North is straight up here; East is straight up in the photo below).

A 2004 GoogleEarth aerial photo of the area where the Panjwai Massacre took place on March 11, 2012 in the Horn of Panjwai, Kandahar province, Afghanistan, about midway between the Arghandab and Dowry Rivers. (Added to the post December 11, 2012. Click photo for larger version. North is to the left.) Afghan reporter Mamoon Durrani personally visited each labeled site – all located to the east/northeast of lower Zangabad village as marked on the preceding 2009 aerial photograph (lower Zangabad village is just off this photo to the lower right) – and then precisely pinpointed them on this photo. Thanks to Mamoon’s careful mapping of the places he visited, I’ve now been able to locate and link close-ups of the individual sites on 2009 GoogleEarth photos (where North is again straight up, in alignment with the wider area photo just above this one), as follows: The Haji Sayed Jan home and, just to its east, the smaller attached homes (and guest quarters) of Haji Mohammad Naim and Haji Nazar Mohammad (Haji Sayed Jan’s murdered brother) – which together make up Alkozai’s Ibrahim Khan Houses; Camp Belamby, east of the road and an orchard; Haji Mohammad Dawood home amid bulldozed/barren vineyards and orchards; Haji Mohammad Wazir home in Najiban, center-bottom right, just west of a wheat field. Also see the photograph, taken at the graveyard marked above, that I’ve added to the foot of the post.

This is a map being used by Afghan authorities investigating the March 11, 2012 Panjwai Massacre. [On December 11, 2012, I discovered, with the help of Mamoon Durrani, that the circled “bullseye” location on this map is in fact WRONG – though the layout of the four specified locations linked with red within the circle is now confirmed by Durrani’s careful mapping (see preceding photo). The circled location is wrong because it, like the McClatchy graphic just below (and the BBC map graphic in my April post), uses an “Alkozi” village as a reference point that is not the Alkozai where Panjwai Massacre victims lived. The victims lived in another, smaller “Alkozai” settlement some miles further west in the Horn of Panjwai, just northeast of lower Zangabad village – as shown by the map and aerial photographs now inserted above.] Note that the locations for Camp Belamby (“Bilambi Camp”), Najiban (“Najeban”), and the home of Mohammad Dawood (“Dawood’s home”), plus the English words “East” and “South,” the black circle, and three red pen marks connecting three locations to Camp (or COP) Belamby, have all apparently been inserted or overlaid on the original map. The “bad (1)” label visible on the lower left of the map is part of “Zangabad (1)” – which marks the location of the closer of two small Zangabad villages north of the Dowry River, as distinct from the wider Zangabad area, which covers most or all of this map.

For purposes of comparison, the following map graphic, produced by MCT Photo Service for an April 11 McClatchy story, provides a scale, and finer detail, including the location of the village of Mokhoyan (scene of the March 8 threats detailed here) and of some roads in the area immediately surrounding Camp Belamby (“Belambai”) – which is located in the center of the Zangabad area or region of the Panjwai district in Kandahar province, southeastern Afghanistan [note that the orientation of this graphic appears to be Northeast in the direction of its top side, not North as in the map above; and as noted at the top of the post December 11th, the McClatchy graphic mistakenly places the scene of the massacre, and uses an aerial photo location, southeast of Bazaar-e Panjwai, instead of 5-10 miles to its southwest]: Read the rest of this entry »

During the hours between midnight and dawn on Sunday, March 11, 2012, local time (March 10, U.S. time), American troop(s) – one, according to non-eyewitnesses, more than one, according to most eyewitnesses – who’d been deployed, pursuant to the September, 2001 Congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), at a small Forward Operating Base (FOB) [or Combat Outpost (COP; aerial photo, added 12/12/12)] named Camp Belamby – reportedly a “U.S. special-operations forces base” – in Panjwai district, Kandahar province, southern Afghanistan, barbarically shot and killed at least 16 unarmed civilians – 9 8-10 children (six of them under Age 10), 4 4-5 women, and 3 4-7 men – in their homes and beds in two (or three) two-three, or more, nearby settlements, and wounded at least 7 others, including 5 more children.

With most families in that rural farming region of Panjwai apparently too poor even to afford guns, the only defenses those Afghan citizens had against the overwhelming force of their attacker(s) were their barking dogs; those dogs – according to two different accounts apparently originating in separate villages (one to BBC News from an unnamed woman in “Najeeban,” and one to Australian SBS-TV reporter Yalda Hakim from a wounded girl [Noorbinak, reportedly of Alkozai] who lost her father) – were the first creatures shot and killed by the heavily-armed attacker(s) that night. Attacker(s) who apparently didn’t face returning fire from even a single gun fired in self-defense by the terrorized villagers – who’ve been repeatedly subjected over the years to General Warrant-style entry-at-will into their homes by armed foreigners – targeted in either 2-3, or more, rural settlements clustered along narrow dirt lanes bordering wheat fields and vineyards. [“‘As we understand it, the special forces have the power to do whatever they want, such as conducting operations and arresting people,’ (Haji Mohammad) Noor (head of the Panjwayi district council) said.”]

Since then, as Senior Al Jazeera Producer Qais Azimy put it in a blog post on Monday, March 19:

Many mainstream media outlets channelled a significant amount of energy into uncovering the slightest detail about the accused soldier – now identified as [non-special-forces Army] Staff Sergeant Robert Bales. We even know where his wife wanted to go for vacation, or what she said on her personal blog.

But the victims became a footnote, an anonymous footnote. Just the number 16. No one bothered to ask their ages, their hobbies, their aspirations. Worst of all, no one bothered to ask their names.

In honoring their memory, I write their names below, and the little we know about them: that nine of them were children, three [or four, or five] were women.

Or, as an Everett, Washington commenter named “Filbert” put it 3/25 on the website of the Seattle Times, in response to the paper’s publication of an important March 24 Associated Press article about the victims: “Seattle Times, why do stories of Bales get plastered all over page 1 for 2 weeks, and when you finally get around to it, the story of this man [Mohammad Wazir of Balandi/Najiban, who lost 11 members of his family] is relegated to page A14?”

Azimy’s list – replicated at the foot of this post – does indeed seem to be the most comprehensive English-language account to date of the names of the killed and wounded in these small, close-knit farming communities. The U.S. government’s March 23, 2012 military Charge Sheet for Staff Sergeant Bales lists no ages for those killed, redacts all the names of the victims, and lists no name for the unknown 17th victim, evidently a female; yet the victims were apparently well-enough known to the U.S. military by Saturday, March 24 for surviving family members to receive some monetary compensation (“The families of the dead, who received the money Saturday at the governor’s office, were told that the money came from U.S. President Barack Obama, said Kandahar provincial council member Agha Lalai”). The hurried early reporting does include scattered accounts of names and ages of some of the victims, but often confuses or omits their names and/or villages; their villages are likewise not specified by Azimy, nor included in the U.S. Charge Sheet. Only after Azimy’s 3/19 post was published did some more detailed and valuable English-language reporting about the victims begin to fill in some of the obvious gaps in coverage (joining an early, laudable New York Times report from March 12) – in the Wall Street Journal on March 22, at GlobalPost.com late March 22/early March 23, [in BusinessWeek March 22/23 {the BusinessWeek URL was later changed to BloombergBusiness}, including important information about a Najiban eyewitness, which I belatedly found and excerpted at the end of my follow-up July 7th post,] in the Associated Press on March 24, and in a humane opinion piece – “Are all innocent victims equal?” – by India/Kabul-based CNN International correspondent Sara Sidner, who took the time to include the names of all 16 killed (her source was Afghan officials, and her list matches the Qais Azimy list below, aside from regional differences in spelling and address).

Sara Sidner’s March 24 opinion piece compassionately echoes and reinforces Azimy’s:

These are the names of the men, women and children allegedly murdered by a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan’s Panjwai District in Kandahar Province on March 11, according to Afghan officials. The U.S. military has now added one more name to that list but no one has revealed that victim’s name so far.

In this case, the how was quickly explained by witnesses, village elders, Afghan and NATO officials: They were shot dead. But looking across local, regional and international media for days after the massacre the full list of names and ages was nowhere to be found.

Even when some of the family members of the victims and village elders came to Kabul to the presidential palace to speak with President Karzai [on Friday, March 16], few started by announcing their names but instead launched into accounts of what happened that night. And even they were at a loss to name every single victim at the time.

[…]

Also there is no real “digital footprint” in villages where electricity and running water are luxuries, making communication extremely difficult.

Ages were often hard to ascertain, because, like many places in the world with poverty and high illiteracy rates, people do not know their birth dates.

[…]

Life is not cheap. It never was and never will be — no matter where you live. I have witnessed the suffering of a mother in Oakland, California, whose child was killed by a bullet and the grieving of a mother in Sukur, Pakistan, whose child was swept away by a flood. There is no difference in the amount of pain they endure, or the tears they shed.

So in the interest of innocent victims everywhere, we as journalists need to work harder to find out who they were, to paint a picture of the lives they had and the people who grieve for them.

May they all rest in peace — and be counted.

To its great credit, in late March the Australian public television network SBS added to those valuable print reports (and to the invaluable early photographs and video footage obtained by Afghan reporters) some extremely helpful, difficult-to-obtain television footage – of interviews with some of the surviving relatives of those killed that night, and of one of the homes in one of the villages where people were killed – taken during a trip to Panjwai by Australian SBS-TV reporter Yalda Hakim and cameraman Ryan Sheridan for this March 27, 2012 SBS Dateline program (the main source of the multiple screen-captured images in this post):

Because of its sensationalism, among other, higher motives we can hope, many non-Afghan media outlets paired with local Afghan reporters to have at least one go at this story – a real “Saturday Night Massacre” committed by someone(s) serving in the Executive Branch of our government. The resulting coverage, as hasty and heavily Pentagon-tilted as it is, remains a valuable record, even though it primarily consists – once the many press-release pronouncements from nominally-responsible authorities are removed – of a muddled and unnecessarily confusing scattershot of information, which has been given little follow-up. To date, no non-Afghan account that I’ve seen has tried to systematically list, by location, name, relationship, and age, the 4-5 6 (or more) households primarily affected by the killer(s) that night, or to put faces to the foreign names for English-speaking audiences.

Nevertheless – in spite of the attempt by at least one American media outlet [print page “no longer available” 10/8; replacement link] to place blame for the confused reporting on the traumatized and grieving victims themselves, and the efforts of many in the media to imply that the real story is now shrouded in mystery or unobtainable, in the face of heavy Pentagon/NATO/ISAF pressure to toe the U.S. military’s “lone gunman” line on the attacks – when the scattered (and, obviously, translated, however imperfectly) snippets in media reports quoting Afghan witnesses and survivors are organized and examined, the accounts by the Afghan villagers seem to be remarkably consistent and coherent.

Notably, those accounts by Afghan villagers – in non-Afghan media outlets, though apparently mostly obtained by local, on-the-ground Afghan reporters – who witnessed the attacks, and/or their aftermath, provide very little corroboration from named Afghans describing a lone U.S. soldier as responsible. This is true even though more than one named survivor (three of them children) describes being shot at by a single (unidentified American, or “NATO,” in one case) soldier – because that single soldier is also generally described by the same survivor, or by their family, as being accompanied by other soldiers, often carrying lights, elsewhere in the home, or in the yard between the house itself and the courtyard wall that fronts the public street – a common layout in these small settlements, as seen in this screen capture from the SBS-TV Dateline footage of Alkozai filmed on March 23, 2012: Read the rest of this entry »