[R-G] Who Killed 120 Civilians? The US Says It's Not a Story

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21434

Who Killed 120 Civilians? The US Says It's Not a Story

May 11, 2009 By Patrick Cockburn
Source: Independent/UK

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Herat is cut off from the rest of the planet. This was once one of the  
great cities of the world, an imperial capital drawing its wealth from  
trade along the Silk Road with Iran, the rest of Afghanistan and  
central Asia. Above the 800-year-old mosque in the city centre are  
minarets covered in blue and green mosaics which soar above one of the  
most magnificent monuments of the Islamic world.



But today Herat is cut off even from the rest of Afghanistan. I flew  
there because it was too dangerous to come by road. We turned right  
out of the battered-looking airport because, had we turned left down  
the main road towards Kandahar, we would soon have been in Taliban- 
controlled territory. The road going east to Bamyan and Kabul is risky  
for the same reasons.



Herat itself is peaceful compared to the rest of Afghanistan. There  
are police in their dark grey uniforms and forage hats checking cars,  
but they are relaxed and don't look as if they are expecting trouble.  
There are more new buildings than in Kabul, but on many construction  
sites work seems to have stopped.



I met Obaidullah Sidiqi, a local businessman, at a picnic lunch in a  
well-watered orchard, full of mulberry and apple trees and  
honeysuckle, which he owns not far from the airport road. An  
attractive aspect of Afghanistan never mentioned in war reporting is  
the Afghan love of flowers. Even in front-line positions soldiers dig  
small trenches, fill them with water and plant geraniums.



Mr Sidiqi, after 16 years in construction, part of it for the Save the  
Children Fund and partly on his own account, explained that business  
in Herat faces unique difficulties. For instance, last year he had  
contracts under way which he could only visit in disguise. One was for  
the construction of a school in Shindand district in the south of  
Herat province, a Pashtun area where the Taliban are strong. Mr  
Sidiqi, like most people in Herat, is a Tajik. Overall, the Taliban  
rebellion is confined to the Pashtun, the community to which 42 per  
cent of Afghans belong, while in the past the Tajiks, who make up 27  
per cent of the population, have been the core of the anti-Taliban  
opposition.



"I wanted to see how work was going at the school, but I did not dare  
go as myself," Mr Sidiqi told me. "So I grew my beard longer and  
pretended to be one of my drivers." He also had to go disguised to  
visit a road his company is building in Badghis province to the north- 
east of Herat, again in an area where the Taliban are strong. In fact,  
not all the danger comes from the Taliban - though it is always blamed  
on them - as there are plenty of bandit gangs in the mountains.



Overall, Mr Sidiqi said this year was better than last, though he did  
not sound completely confident that it was going to stay that way. He  
said that 200 local factories had shut, and Iran, where so many  
Afghans used to go to work, was issuing very few visas. Within  
Afghanistan there was pervasive corruption with the award of a  
contract usually determined by the size of the bribe offered to the  
officials in charge.



I was sympathetic to Mr Sidiqi's difficulties in moving around the  
country except by plane, because I faced the same problem. I had gone  
to Herat because last Monday US aircraft had attacked several villages  
in the Bala Baluk district of Farah province, which is immediately to  
the south of Herat. The local governor and surviving villagers said  
that more than 120 civilians had been killed. The US military denied  
that anything like that number had died and, if they had, it was the  
Taliban who had done it by hurling grenades into houses.



The problem was that Bala Baluk is in a Pashtun area where the Taliban  
are reputed to be strong. Back in Kabul Pashtuns told me that it was  
unfair to equate them with the Taliban, but in reality there are few  
Taliban who are not Pashtun. It was too dangerous to go directly to  
Bala Baluk, so the next best thing was to find a survivor or an  
eyewitness. I thought that some of the worst injured might be in Herat  
hospital, as the best in the area. But there turned out to be only 14  
wounded and these were in Farah hospital. This could have meant that  
there were fewer dead than the Afghans were saying, or that the  
bombardment was so intense that all had been killed.



I did not meet survivors but I did talk to a reliable witness, a radio  
reporter called Farooq Faizy, who had gone to Bala Baluk soon after  
the attack happened. He said that police and soldiers nearby were  
frightened of the Taliban and told him it was too dangerous to go on,  
but he spoke to some village elders, telling them: "Talk to us and we  
will tell the world." He says he was none too sure who was in control  
of the three villages - Gerani, Gangabad and Khoujaha - that had been  
hit and he was careful about what he said. But he did take some 70 or  
80 photographs and they bore out the villagers' story: there were  
craters everywhere; the villages had been plastered with bombs; bodies  
had been torn to shreds by the blasts; there were mass graves; there  
were no signs of damage from bullets, rockets or grenades.



I suspected that the US military's claim that the Taliban had run  
through the village hurling grenades, supposedly because they had not  
been paid their cut of profits from the opium poppy crop, was just a  
delaying tactic. Usually the US military delays admission of guilt  
until a story has gone cold and the media is no longer interested.  
"First say 'no story'," runs an old PR adage, "and then say 'old  
story'." By the end of the week the US was admitting that the grenade- 
throwing Taliban story was "thinly sourced".



Another thesis was that fighting had taken place 500 metres from the  
villages, and the Taliban had retreated through them, leading to the  
airstrikes. Farooq Faizy said he had seen signs of fighting in the  
shape of two burned-out Afghan army or police vehicles and a destroyed  
US Humvee, but they were seven or eight kilometres away from the site  
of the bombing. He had taken photographs of them showing the destroyed  
Afghan vehicles - Ford pick-ups with a machine gun mount over the  
bonnet. It seemed likely that this was the fight that had led to the  
Afghan army and their US advisers asking for air support. What the  
Americans never explain in Afghanistan or Iraq is why they are using  
weapons designed for world war three against villages that have not  
left the Middle Ages - which makes heavy civilian casualties inevitable.



Back in Herat, Mr Sidiqi was none too sympathetic about what had  
happened to the people of Bala Baluk. Like many Afghans, he felt that  
it was the weakness of the government, not the strength of the  
Taliban, which was the problem. Furthermore he felt, and this is  
surely true, that "neither Pakistan nor Iran wants a strong  
Afghanistan".



Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent,  
Patrick Cockburn was awarded the 2005 Martha Gellhorn prize for war  
reporting. His book on his years covering the war in Iraq, The  
Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso) was a finalist for the  
National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction.