Karzai: 16 villagers slain by U.S. soldier
BALANDI, Afghanistan — An American soldier opened fire on villagers near his base in southern Afghanistan on Sunday and killed 16 civilians, according to President Hamid Karzai, who called it an “assassination” and furiously demanded an explanation from Washington. Nine children and three women were among the dead.
The rampage deepened a crisis between U.S. forces and their Afghan hosts that was sparked when Americans burned Muslim holy books on a base in Afghanistan last month. The Koran burnings ignited weeks of violent protests and attacks that killed some 30 people. Six U.S. servicemen have been killed by their Afghan colleagues since the burnings came to light, and the violence had just started to calm down.
“This is an assassination, an intentional killing of innocent civilians and cannot be forgiven,” Karzai said in a statement. He has repeatedly demanded the U.S. stop killing Afghan civilians.
President Barack Obama phoned Karzai to express his shock and sadness at the killing and wounding of Afghan civilians. He offered condolences to the grieving families of those killed and to the
people of Afghanistan.
In a statement released by the White House, Obama called the attack “tragic and shocking” and not representative of “the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan.”
He vowed “to get the facts as quickly as possible and to hold accountable anyone responsible.”
The violence over the Koran burnings had already spurred calls in the U.S. for a faster exit strategy from the 10-year-old Afghan war.
Obama said recently that “now is the time for us to transition.” But he also said he had no plan to change the current timetable for Afghans to take control of security countrywide by the end of 2014.
In the wake of the burnings, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, visited troops at a base that was attacked last month and urged them not to give in to the impulse for revenge.
The tensions between the two countries had appeared to be easing as recently as Friday, when the two governments signed a memorandum of understanding about the transfer of Afghan detainees to Afghan control — a key step toward an eventual strategic partnership to govern U.S. forces in the country.
Sunday’s shooting could push that agreement further away.
“This is a fatal hammer blow on the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan. Whatever sliver of trust and credibility we might have had following the burnings of the Koran is now gone,” said David Cortright, the director of policy studies at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and an advocate for a quick withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“This may have been the act of a lone, deranged soldier. But the people of Afghanistan will see it for what it was, a wanton massacre of innocent civilians,” Cortright said.
The attack began around 3 a.m. in two villages in Panjwai district, a rural suburb of Kandahar and a traditional Taliban stronghold where coalition forces have fought for control for years. The villages — Balandi and Alkozai — are a short distance — about a third of a mile — from a U.S. base.
The gunman went into three houses and opened fire, said a resident of Alkozai, Abdul Baqi, who cited accounts from his neighbors.
“When it was happening in the middle of the night, we were inside our houses. I heard gunshots and then silence and then gunshots again,” Baqi said.
After the killings, villagers collected the bodies, and drove them to a nearby U.S. military base to protest.
One villager said 11 of those killed were members of his family, many of them women and children.
An AP photographer saw 15 bodies in the two villages. Some of the bodies had been burned, while others were covered with blankets.
An AP photo showed the bloodstained corner of a house next to a large black area that was charred by fire. The charred area appeared to be remnants of blankets and possibly bodies that had been set on fire.
The governor of Kandahar province, Tooryalai Wesa, condemned the shooting.
A U.S. official in Washington said the American, an Army staff sergeant, was believed to have acted alone and that initial reports indicated he returned to the base after the shooting and turned himself in.
Karzai’s statement, however, left some confusion on the point. He spoke of a single U.S. gunman, but in another part of the statement referred to “American forces” entering the houses.
The statement also said the president spoke by phone to one of the five people wounded in the attack, a 15-year-old named Rafiullah, who was shot in the leg. The statement said the teenager told Karzai that American soldiers entered his house in the middle of the night, woke up his family and began shooting.
NATO officials apologized for the shootings but did not confirm that anyone was killed, referring instead to reports of deaths.
“This deeply appalling incident in no way represents the values of ISAF and coalition troops or the abiding respect we feel for the Afghan people,” Allen said in a statement, using the abbreviation for NATO’S International Security Assistance Force.
He pledged a “rapid and thorough investigation” and vowed to ensure that “anyone who is found to have committed wrongdoing is held fully accountable.”
Caitlin Hayden, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council, said that Obama was briefed on the shooting. “We are deeply concerned by the initial reports of this incident and are monitoring the situation closely,” she said.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta spoke with Karzai to offer his “deepest condolences and profound regret for the tragic incident in Kandahar province.”
Panetta condemned the violence, saying he had assured the Afghan president that those responsible would be brought to justice after a full investigation.
NATO spokesman Justin Brockhoff said a U.S. service member had been detained at a NATO base as the suspected gunman. The civilians wounded in the shooting had been taken to a coalition hospital where they were being treated.
The American soldier suspected in the shooting is from Washington and was assigned to a remote special operations site, a U.S. official said.
The suspect is a conventional soldier from Joint Base Lewis-mcchord, Washington, the official said, and he was assigned to support a special operations unit of either Green Berets or Navy SEALS that is engaged in a village stability operation.
Such operations are among NATO’S best hopes for transitioning out of Afghanistan. They pair special operations troops with local villagers chosen by village elders to become essentially a sanctioned, armed neighborhood watch.
International forces have fought for control of Panjwai for years as they have tried to subdue the Taliban in their rural strongholds. The Taliban movement started just to the north of Panjwai, and many of the militant group’s senior leaders, including chief Mullah Omar, were born, raised, fought or preached in the area. Omar once ran an Islamic school in an area of Panjwai that has since been carved into a new district.
In addition to its symbolic significance, the district is an important base for the Taliban to target the city of Kandahar to the east. Panjwai was seen as key to securing Kandahar when U.S. forces flooded the province as part of Obama’s strategy to surge in the south starting in 2009.
Twelve of the dead were from Balandi, said Samad Khan, a farmer who lost all 11 members of his family, including women and children. Khan was away from the village when the attack occurred and returned to find his family members shot and burned. One of his neighbors was also killed, he said.
“This is an anti-human and anti-islamic act,” said Khan. “Nobody is allowed in any religion in the world to kill children and women.”
Khan and other villagers demanded that Karzai punish the American shooter.
“Otherwise we will make a decision,” said Khan. “He should be handed over to us.”
The four people killed in the village of Alkozai were all from one family, said a female relative who was shouting in anger.
“No Taliban were here. No gunbattle was going on,” said the woman. “We don’t know why this foreign soldier came and killed our innocent family members. Either he was drunk or he was enjoying killing civilians.”
The Taliban called the shootings the latest sign that international forces are working against the Afghan people.
“The so-called American peacekeepers have once again quenched their thirst with the blood of innocent Afghan civilians in Kandahar province,” the Taliban said in a statement posted on a website the insurgent group uses.
Karzai said he is sending a high-level delegation to investigate.
U.S. forces have been implicated in other violence in the same area.
Four soldiers from a Stryker brigade out of Lewis-Mcchord, Washington, have been sent to prison in connection with the 2010 killing of three unarmed men during patrols in Kandahar province’s Maiwand district, which is just northwest of Panjwai. They were accused of forming a “kill team” that murdered Afghan civilians for sport — slaughtering victims with grenades and powerful machine guns during patrols, then dropping weapons near their bodies to make them appear to have been combatants.
In January, a video that purportedly showed U.S. Marines urinating on corpses of men they had killed sparked widespread outrage.
Obama called the burning of the books a mistake and has apologized. The Korans and other Islamic books were taken from a detention facility and dumped in a burn pit last month because they were believed to contain extremist messages or inscriptions. A military official said at the time that it appeared detainees were exchanging messages by making notations in the texts.
The military hasn’t released its findings in the burnings and hasn’t indicated whether any U.S. service members will be disciplined.
On Friday, in a separate incident, four Afghans were killed and three were wounded when coalition helicopters apparently hunting Taliban insurgents fired instead on villagers in Kapisa province in eastern Afghanistan, according to Abdul Hakim Akhondzada, governor of Tagab District in Kapisa. Information for this article was contributed by Mirwais Khan, Heidi Vogt, Sebastian Abbot, Rahim Faiez, Lolita C. Baldor, Allauddin Khan and Kimberly Dozier of The Associated Press; and by Taimoor Shah and Graham Bowley of The
New York Times.