TRAGEDY IN THE RUBBLE
Inside the US military’s 2008 raid against its own security guards – Operation Commando Riot – that left dozens of Afghan children dead
Brett Murphy
AZIZABAD, Afghanistan – Once the Americans left, the survivors started digging.
There were too many dead and not enough shovels, so a local politician brought in heavy machinery from a nearby construction site. He dug graves deep enough to fit mothers with children, or children with children. Some were still in their pajamas, their hands inked with henna tattoos from the party preparations the night before.
Villagers picked through the rubble of what had been a neighborhood, looking for remains to wrap in white linens for burial. A boy clutching a torn rug walked in a daze on top of the ruins. A young man collapsed in grief by a pile of mud bricks where his home once stood – where his wife and four children had been sleeping.
A doctor recorded a cellphone video to document the dead faces, freckled with shrapnel and blood, coated with dust and debris. Some were Afghan men of fighting age, but most – dozens of them – were women and children. Taza was 3 years old. Maida was 2. Zia, 1.
The hot summer wind kicked up dust, smoke and the smell of gunpowder as villagers tried to make sense of why their remote village was demolished by an American airstrike in the middle of the night.
A clue was found near several of the dead Afghan fighters: ID badges from a private security company at the American-controlled airfield up the road.
Why had a team of U.S. soldiers and Marines fought its own paid security detail? More than a decade later, those who buried their families still don’t know.
U.S. military officials publicly touted the Azizabad raid on Aug. 22, 2008 – Operation Commando Riot – as a victory. A high-value Taliban target was killed; the collateral damage was minimal; the village was grateful.
None of it was true.
The Taliban commander escaped. Dozens of civilians were dead in the rubble, including as many as 60 children. The population rioted. It remains one of the deadliest civilian casualty events of the Afghan campaign.
USA TODAY spent more than a year investigating the Azizabad raid and sued the Department of Defense to obtain almost 1,000 pages of files kept secret because they had been deemed “classified national security information.” They included photographs of the destruction in Azizabad and sworn testimony from the U.S. forces who planned and executed the operation.
USA TODAY obtained Afghan government records, evidence collected by humanitarian groups, including the Red Cross, and a confidential United Nations investigation. A reporter traveled to Afghanistan to interview government officials, investigators, first responders, witnesses and villagers who survived.
Together, the records and interviews tell the story of a disaster that was months in the making as military and company officials ignored warnings about the men they hired to provide intelligence and security. The records reveal that the Defense Department downplayed or denied the fatal mistakes surrounding the tragedy for years.
It all began in 2007 when ArmorGroup, a private security company working on a Pentagon subcontract, hired two warlords on the intelligence payroll to provide armed guards at an airfield on the western edge of Afghanistan. Those warlords fought each other for control of the weapons and money ArmorGroup gave out. The tangle of espionage and infighting eventually drew in the very same military units that helped empower the warlords in the first place.
The breakdowns in the U.S. military intelligence machine culminated with the raid itself. Some troops were never warned of Azizabad’s civilian population, and the special operation commanders who did know unleashed devastating force from the air anyway.
“If they fled into the building, we were asking him to basically drop the building,” a Marine who was coordinating with the gunship testified.
After initially insisting five to seven civilians died, Pentagon officials adjusted that to 33 after photos and videos proved the official count wrong. Separate reviews by the Afghan government, Red Cross, United Nations and Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission put the deaths at more than 70.
After two Pentagon investigations, the U.S. military denied any wrongdoing. Defense Department officials declined to comment for this story.
A Senate Armed Services Committee inquiry in 2010 laid blame with both ArmorGroup and the Defense Department
for doing business with the warlords. In response, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued a letter recognizing problems with contract oversight, which he pledged to fix.
Lt. Col. Rachel E. VanLandingham, a retired officer with the Judge Advocate General's Corps and the chief of international law at Central Command’s headquarters during the Azizabad raid, said the commanders responsible for investigating the incident seemed to ignore the failures instead of learning from them. She did not know the details of the raid or the military’s response until contacted by USA TODAY. “The CENTCOM investigation seemed more worried about looking good than being good,” VanLandingham, a law professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, said. “Everyone who deploys in Afghanistan should know this incident.”
G4S, the world’s largest private security company, purchased ArmorGroup in 2008 – after the company signed its contract with the Pentagon to provide security at the airfield but before the Azizabad raid. Executives at ArmorGroup, which G4S dissolved into another subsidiary it sold in 2014, considered their decisions at the time to be the best option to keep those inside the base safe, according to emails collected by Senate investigators.
G4S declined to comment for this story, except to say ArmorGroup is a former G4S subsidiary that wasn’t under direct control of the parent company.
Some of the employees who were operating the air base contracts near Azizabad agreed to speak out.
“It was wholesale slaughter,” David McDonnell, a former ArmorGroup director who oversaw mine clearing projects in Afghanistan, said in an interview. “And it didn’t need to be.”
His colleague Tony Thompson worked with some of the villagers killed in the raid. Thompson told USA TODAY he has spent much of the past decade wrestling with the truth.
“Their families died, and they still don’t know why,” he said. “You’ll never bring them back. But you need to know how and why it happened.”