maximuswarrior
BANNED
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2016
- Messages
- 13,771
- Reaction score
- -2
- Country
- Location
BRETT MURPHY | USA TODAY | 4 hours ago
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 an entire 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 inside.
The local 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 the private security company at the American-controlled airfield up the road.
Why had a team of U.S. soldiers and Marines battled its own paid security detail?
After more than a decade, those who buried their families still don’t know.
U.S. military officials publicly touted the August 22, 2008, Azizabad raid – Operation Commando Riot – as a victory. A high-value Taliban target had been 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 local population rioted.
It remains one of the deadliest civilian casualty events of the Afghan campaign. But the story of how the operation turned tragic has been largely hidden from the public.
USA TODAY spent more than a year investigating the Azizabad raid and sued the Department of Defense to obtain almost 1,000 pages of investigative files previously kept secret because it had been deemed “classified national security information.” The records included photographs of the destruction in Azizabad and sworn testimony from the U.S. forces who planned and executed the operation.
USA TODAY also obtained Afghan government records, evidence collected by humanitarian groups, including the Red Cross, and a confidential United Nations investigation into the incident.
In addition, a reporter traveled to western Afghanistan to interview government officials, investigators, first responders, witnesses and the 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 had hired to provide intelligence and security. The records also reveal that the Defense Department has for years downplayed or denied the fatal mistakes surrounding the tragedy.
The problems began in 2007 when ArmorGroup, a private security company working on a Pentagon subcontract, hired two local warlords on the U.S. 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 was giving out. The tangle of espionage and tribal infighting eventually drew in the very same military units that had 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. Ground troops directed an American gunship to demolish house after house where at least one insurgent took cover, without knowing who else was inside.
“If they fled into the building, we were asking him to basically drop the building,” a Marine who was coordinating with the gunship testified. Most of the names were redacted from the military investigation.
Much about the mission in Azizabad remains in dispute, but this much is clear: The architects behind this corner of the war – and those profiting from the security contract – did not understand the difference between who they were supposed to be fighting, employing and protecting.
There still is no definitive death toll. After initially insisting that only five to seven civilians died, Pentagon officials were forced to adjust that figure to 33 after photos and videos of the carnage proved the official account wrong. Separate reviews by the Afghan government, Red Cross, United Nations and Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission put the civilian deaths over 70.
After two Pentagon investigations, the U.S. military denied any wrongdoing. Defense Department officials declined to comment for this story.
A 2010 Senate Armed Services Committee inquiry laid blame with both ArmorGroup and the Defense Department for doing business with the warlords. In response to the Senate report, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued a letter recognizing problems with contract oversight, which he pledged to fix.
Yet in the aftermath of the Azizabad raid, records show, military leaders sought to present an image of success and mask evidence of a civilian casualty disaster. The false version of events was amplified by Oliver North – a former Marine commander and a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980s – who was embedded as a Fox News contributor with the forces conducting the raid. North’s segment, which presents the mission as a success and the Taliban commander “confirmed dead,” is still available on the Fox News website.
North did not respond to multiple interview requests. In an email, Fox News spokeswoman Caley Cronin did not address North’s segment and directed questions to North, “who is no longer a contributor with the network,” she wrote.
Lt. Colonel 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 operation or the military’s response until contacted by USA TODAY.
“The CENTCOM investigation seemed more worried about looking good than being good,” VanLandingham, now a law professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, said in an interview. “Everyone who deploys in Afghanistan should know this incident.”
G4S, the largest private security company in the world, purchased ArmorGroup in 2008 – after the company had signed its contract with the Pentagon to provide security at the airfield but before the Azizabad raid. The company’s role has remained virtually unknown other than a literal footnote in the Senate inquiry.
Executives at ArmorGroup, which G4S dissolved into another subsidiary it later sold in 2014, considered their decisions at the time to be the best option to keep those inside the base safe under difficult circumstances, according to emails collected by Senate investigators.
"Without the leadership and management” of company staff, the "worst could have caused the project to fail long before the August tragedy,” one said.
G4S declined to comment for this story, except to state that ArmorGroup is a former G4S subsidiary that wasn’t under the direct control of the parent company.
But some of the employees who were operating the air base contracts near Azizabad agreed to speak out publicly for the first time.
“It was wholesale slaughter,” David McDonnell, a former ArmorGroup director who oversaw mine clearing projects in Afghanistan, said in a recent 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 kept secret all this time.
“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.”
I. The Airfield
The Shindand District air base, on the southern border of Afghanistan's Herat Province, was first built by the Soviets in the 1960s. A graveyard of abandoned Russian aircraft and land mines spread across open fields on both sides of the perimeter fence. The base is a 9-square-mile campus in a remote but strategic location between Iran’s eastern border and the Ring Road, which circles all of Afghanistan.
In a district that has long been controlled or contested by the Taliban, the airbase sits amid a major drug and arms trafficking route. The Taliban funds much of its national operation with the opium-poppy fields in the district’s Zerkoh Valley.
In April 2007, ArmorGroup – a private security company based in London – won a $5.1 million Air Force subcontract to guard construction workers building an expansion of the airfield for the Afghan National Army. (The company’s American subsidiary, ArmorGroup North America, based in Virginia, technically managed the contract). ArmorGroup had worked in more than 160 countries around the world and was known mostly for protecting oil and gas sites.
ArmorGroup agreed to a Pentagon requirement that it fill the guard positions by hiring nearby villagers. It was part of the Pentagon’s economic stimulus plan for Afghanistan, but it also was less expensive than bringing in guards from outside the country.
"We are a commercial company, of course, we are looking to do the business as cheap as possible,” a company official later told U.S. military investigators.
Shindand’s 450 villages are some of the most impoverished in the Herat Province. Many rural areas do not have running water or paved roads. Day laborers find work wherever they can, including across the border in Iran. A low-ranking Afghan National Police officer could earn roughly $70 a month.
At $275 a month, the guard jobs at the air base represented the best opportunity some would see in a lifetime.
II. Mr. Pink and Mr. White
ArmorGroup officials had no say in whom they would hire to pick the villagers. According to interviews and testimony, U.S. military personnel instructed ArmorGroup managers to let two local men – Timor Shah and Nadir Khan – select who could become guards.
The company assigned them code names: Mr. White for Shah and Mr. Pink for Khan. The names were an homage to Reservoir Dogs, the Quentin Tarantino classic film in which thieves betray and murder one another after an armed robbery.
Mr. White and Mr. Pink, two local patriarchs and sons of Shindand, would staff the guard positions from their extended families. The men were cousins, lifelong friends and business partners in the district. Their legitimate operations included car rentals and electronic stores in the northern city of Herat.
But U.S. intelligence and company officials believed that both men were burgeoning warlords with possible criminal and Taliban affiliations, according to interviews with local officials, testimony in the Pentagon investigation and memos from the Senate inquiry.
In rural Afghanistan, the line between village elder, warlord and legitimate Taliban is often blurred, which can confound outsiders trying to track allegiances on the ground.
Allegations of Pink and White's illicit backgrounds weren’t necessarily a problem anyway. Military intelligence officers inside the airfield had been building a vast network of paid informants across the region, enticing them with money in exchange for information about Taliban meetings and the location of high-value targets.
White and Pink were both intelligence assets.
Lal Mohammad Umarzai, the Shindand governor at the time, told USA TODAY in an interview that he was never consulted about the wisdom of giving two warlords hundreds of thousands of dollars, access to an armory of automatic weapons and virtual control over Shindand. The district is one of the most diverse in Afghanistan, with complex tribal dynamics and a history of power struggles.
Had somebody reached out to him for advice, Umarzai said, he would have warned U.S. officials that White and Pink would bring trouble.
“They were the two most corrupt families in Afghanistan,” Umarzai said.
III. Parley in the bazaar
White and Pink initially split the work down the middle. They showed up in June 2007 outside the fence of the airfield with about 20 men each.
According to the Senate inquiry, ArmorGroup could not demonstrate that it had sent armed guard rosters or training records to the U.S. government, a violation of Department of Defense regulations.
“Normally in a country, if we were going to employ local people, they would be interviewed, qualification checks, names go to the government for security backgrounds,” McDonnell said in an interview. “None of that happened in Shindand. All of the normal procedures we would carry out didn’t happen because we were directed who to work with by the American forces.”
USA TODAY filed a public records request with the Air Force for documents about the armed employees – records the agency was required to collect and maintain, according to the contract. An Air Force official said those documents could not be located because they “might not have been processed or archived ... due to the sensitive nature.”
Within weeks of starting the contract, Pink and White made the same calculation: Controlling half of the money and jobs was good. But having everything would make one of them untouchable.
They grew paranoid of each other. The resentment turned violent, and there were a series of shootings and bombings around Shindand that officials would blame on the feud between the two men.
Pink made at least one attempt on White’s life as he was leaving the air base. ArmorGroup officials grew increasingly worried that its guards would try to kill one another or leave their posts, according to internal memos and emails compiled in the Senate inquiry.
In December 2007, tribal elders brokered a cease-fire and called for White and Pink to settle their differences. A meeting was arranged for Dec. 12 in the Azizabad bazaar, a short strip of open-air shops on either side of the Ring Road.
White and Pink approached each other in the market, where villagers sold bread, fruit and home appliances.
Just before they reached each other, Pink pulled out a gun and shot White three times. A gunfight broke out in the market between ArmorGroup guards loyal to each man. Several civilians were wounded.
When the chaos ended, White was dead.
IV. The bombmaker
The Air Force project manager in Kabul reported the assassination to U.S. military officials, according to the Senate inquiry. But little changed.
“The incident did not give rise to a broader discussion at (the Air Force) about the wisdom of relying on two warlords to provide security,” the investigators wrote.
Pink, however, lost his job as an informant. ArmorGroup also fired him from the air base.
Fearing retribution from White’s family, Pink went into hiding in a nearby village with local Taliban militia. He was later involved in a series of kidnappings and other violent crimes, according to intelligence reports cited in the military investigation and internal company memos collected by the Senate investigators.
Military officials at the base went as far as nominating Pink as a high-priority target because "he was a force protection problem for the area,” one Marine testified during the Pentagon investigation. But U.S. commanders denied the request and decided instead to closely monitor him.
The airfield construction project continued, and ArmorGroup needed someone else to handle staffing guards at the air base.
So the company hired Reza Khan, White’s brother. They called him Mr. White II.
White II was another intelligence asset for the military personnel inside the air base. In one conversation with his handler, he disclosed that his nephew was Mullah Sadeq, a notorious Taliban commander operating in the Farah Province, just south of Shindand. Sadeq built and supplied improvised explosive devices around the region.
The Italian military had placed Sadeq on the high-priority-target list. U.S. special operation forces inside the air base had been tracking Sadeq for months in hopes of pinning down his exact location.
“It was really no surprise to us that (White II) had bigger connections with the Taliban than previously suspected,” White II’s Marine intelligence handler testified during the Pentagon investigation. “He had been playing both sides and ultimately we were actually looking to cut his ties that he had with us.”
Instead, military intelligence officers saw him as the key to taking down Sadeq.
V. 'Meat in the sandwich'
In May 2008, London-based private security giant G4S bought ArmorGroup for $85.4 million. The acquisition came as the company expanded to more than 100 countries and took on dangerous business some of its competitors avoided, including mine clearing and base security in the Middle East.
The Shindand contract was already underway when G4S became the corporate parent. The company left ArmorGroup operationally independent with the same Afghanistan managers in place.
In July, Thompson, who worked for the company’s mine clearing division on a U.N. contract at the base, reported to executives in Afghanistan the threat White II posed. Thompson wrote that local police and the Afghan National Army had confiscated at White II’s Azizabad home stockpiles of unlicensed weapons and land mines. Guards had left the base with company weapons to moonlight as White II’s personal escorts.
Company officials expressed in interviews with investigators “permanent concern” about a full-scale war between militias loyal to Pink and White II.
"I would hate to see our people as the meat in the sandwich,” McDonnell, the company director, wrote in an email responding to the report.
Records show that ArmorGroup officials dealt with their concerns about White II by asking him to give a verbal assurance every week that the conflict wouldn’t escalate.
Around the same time, an Army Sergeant told White II’s intelligence handler that the warlord was funneling money from the air base contract – wages meant for the guards – straight to Taliban commanders. He was rebuffed.
“They know about it,” the sergeant told Senate investigators. “But they didn’t want to talk about it, for whatever reason.”
VI. Rudderless
Through the spring and summer of 2008, special operation forces lost at least three of their own in the area.
On May 29, Sergeant First Class David Nunez, 27, of Los Angeles was on his third deployment with the Army Special Forces when his unit came under fire in the Farah Province desert plains. He was posthumously awarded the Silver Star for saving others from their vehicle as it became engulfed in flames. He had two sons.
A month later, five Marine special operators with the Second Battalion were gravely wounded while looking for a Taliban commander. Marine Staff Sgt. Edgar Heredia died. Heredia, 28, was a native of Houston and the son of two Mexican immigrants.
On a separate mission in the Zerkoh Valley, Marine Captain Garrett “Tubes” Lawton, 31, died when an IED detonated by his vehicle.
The leaders commanding these units were facing intense scrutiny. Night raids and air campaigns were often followed by reports of civilian casualties, an almost inevitable outcome when insurgents live and fight among their civilian neighbors.
Frank Rosenblatt, a retired Lt. Colonel and JAG who has written several books and studies about the military justice system, called 2008 “a time of strategic rudderlessness” for the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan.
He said military leaders rushed into operations that could be touted to the American public, often at the cost of the local population they were supposed to be protecting.
“Commanders wanted to be seen getting after it,” Rosenblatt said.
The Taliban used the civilian deaths to recruit new militia members, and Afghan citizens grew increasingly wary of the tactics of American forces.
“The Taliban are always telling people, ‘Look at the Americans, they came to kill you and your kids,’” said Mir Abdul Kalik, the former deputy governor in Shindand. “A huge gap has been created between the Afghans and the Americans.”
The sentiment had reached Kabul, where then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai repeatedly condemned the use of American gunships in urban areas.
“We can no longer accept the civilian casualties the way they are occurring,” Karzai said.
But the airstrikes continued. On July 6, an airstrike in Nangarhar province inadvertently killed 47 Afghan civilians, misidentified as insurgents, during a wedding. Two weeks later, another airstrike accidentally killed nine Afghan National Police officers in Farah province.
CHAPTER VII. Romeo and Juliet
In August, two assets – code-named Romeo and Juliet – told their intelligence handler at the air base news he had been waiting on for months: Mullah Sadeq was coming to meet his uncle, White II, at his home compound in Azizabad.
For the first time since the Americans had been tracking him, Sadeq would be within 20 miles of the base.
The information was met with skepticism. Romeo and Juliet were known associates of Mr. Pink, so intelligence officers considered the possibility that Pink could have orchestrated the leak as a way to have U.S. forces attack White II. Was this a setup?
"I've thought about that before,” one of the intelligence officials later testified in the military investigation. “But these guys, they give me pretty reliable information on who, what, when, and where."
Romeo and Juliet had provided good intelligence for missions into the Zerkoh Valley that summer. Plus, the intelligence office reckoned, White II himself had corroborated his relationship to Sadeq.
It was too good of an opportunity to pass up. As a bonus, Oliver North and a Fox cameraman would tag along for the mission for their ongoing “War Stories” dispatches.
The regional commanders green-lighted an operation to capture or kill Sadeq and approved an AC-130 gunship, often dubbed “hell in the sky,” for close air support. Operation Commando Riot was a go.
In the days before Sadeq was scheduled to arrive, the U.S. forces at the base worked with Afghan commandos to draw up a minute-by-minute plan.
Romeo and Juliet said Sadeq would show up with more than two dozen militia sometime before midnight for a meeting inside White II’s compound. The house was surrounded by other homes on three sides and a large courtyard to the southeast. Each structure was built with mud bricks as dense as concrete. A wide alley led directly to the compound.
Romeo and Juliet had a contact attending the meeting who would call as soon as Sadeq arrived.
To maintain the element of surprise, the mission would need to be a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
Driving pickup trucks, a team of 12 from the Second Marine Special Operations Battalion would lead the strike. Army Special Forces and Afghan commandos would follow 10 minutes behind. The total attack force would be roughly 80 men.
Captain Elliot Ackerman would be the assault force commander with the Marines going in first.
Ackerman, 28 at the time, was commissioned as an officer right after college. He had earned numerous medals, including the Silver Star for saving fellow Marines four years earlier during the second battle of Fallujah, the bloodiest engagement of the Iraq War.
Because most of the names were redacted from the testimony in the military investigation, it’s not clear whether Ackerman was the commander who ultimately led the entire Azizabad operation. He declined multiple interview requests for this story.
The laws of war require that all feasible precautions are taken to avoid harming civilians. To reduce collateral damage, experts and activists urge a “pattern of life analysis” – hours of reconnaissance in the target area ahead of a mission so everyone going in, including air support, understands how many civilians are present and where they are located.
But in Shindand, the troops were relying largely on third-hand information and a general understanding of villages in the area, the intelligence officers later told investigators. Even the intelligence assets, Romeo and Juliet, had not recently visited Azizabad themselves for fear of being identified.
A lead intelligence officer and a Marine commander were aware that a funeral ceremony for families was planned for the day after Sadeq was set to arrive, according to their testimony with military investigators. However, almost everybody else involved with the planning and execution of operation Commando Riot testified that they were not told about a civilian gathering.
“Everybody that was going to be at that meeting were Taliban commanders with their security guys,” a communications sergeant testified later. “There wasn't supposed to be any women and children.”
It is unclear why that information was not widely known or whether it had been reported up the chain of command before the mission and the gunship were approved.
VIII. The Rukh family
The morning of August 21, Gul Rukh piled her four kids into her cousin’s car and headed north on the Ring Road to her parents' house in Azizabad. Hundreds of villagers around the Zerkoh Valley and Farah Province had received invitations to commemorate the death of a prominent village elder eight months earlier.
His name was Timor Shah – also known as the original Mr. White.
Rukh, 39, stopped in the city of Shindand to go shopping for the ceremony. She bought new clothes for her kids and a wooden chest to keep tchotchkes. It was the type of splurging Rukh reserved only for special occasions.
When they arrived in Azizabad that evening, families gathered in the courtyard around outdoor fire pits and got to cooking. They slaughtered 16 sheep and cooked rice in steel drums.
Rukh’s sons, Dawa, 10, Ghani, 6, and Nabi, 5, and her daughter, Rahima, 9, spent most of the daylight hours kicking a soccer ball with their cousins. When the sun went down, the kids darted between houses playing hide and seek. They painted henna tattoos on one another’s hands.
Once most of the food was prepared, families peeled off for bed. The houses were too full, so many camped in the courtyard. It was cool enough to sleep outside comfortably, and the lucky ones had mosquito nets.
Rukh stayed up past midnight talking with her parents, mostly listening, while they tried persuading her to stay a couple of extra days after the ceremony. They finally drifted off to sleep.
IX. Commando Riot
The call from the contact inside the compound came just before 1:30 a.m.: Sadeq is here.
While the troops mounted into their trucks, a soldier knocked on the trailers around the garrison to roust North and the Fox cameraman. North emerged in military fatigues and night vision goggles and headed toward the convoy.
“What the hell was Oliver North doing there?” McDonnell, one of the ArmorGroup directors, said in a recent interview. “He wasn’t passing through for a cup of tea. This was set up to put on a show.”
The intelligence officers who helped plan the mission climbed to the top of the garrison barracks and faced Azizabad, 18 miles to the south. They watched the AC-130 pass overhead.
The Marines in the two lead pickup trucks turned off the Ring Road and toward the compound around 2 a.m. They heard a single pop from a rifle. That was the warning shot alerting the compound that enemies were incoming.
They saw a light on in White II’s compound. The trucks rumbled over the dirt, through a narrow passage with walls on each side at least 8 feet high.
A water truck parked at the near end of the alley blocked the route into the compound. The Marines hopped out to proceed on foot.
Gunshots poured in from the west and north. The fire felt as if it was coming from directly above.
Bullets peppered the walls next to the crouching Marines. They returned fire to the rooftops, where they could see flashes from rifle bursts through their night vision goggles. It was the most constant, accurate fire some of them had ever experienced since coming to Afghanistan, they testified later.
Marine Gunnery Sgt. Joseph “Willy” Parent took a round through his foot.
They were pinned down. The commander shot two red flares into the air so the other units trailing behind could find them. He would later testify that he did not consider retreat a viable option.
“For the reputation and just the credibility of coalition,” the commander said, adding that withdrawing from a fight with the Taliban when you are so far committed is “completely inconceivable and unacceptable.”
The 12 Marines who had exited the trucks moved into a building, where a woman and child were huddled in the corner. There, the Marines set up a base of operations.
The commander told the radio controller next to him to call the gunship in the air, circling at 10,000 feet. The enemy was “danger close.”
The controller yelled into the radio for immediate fire on the insurgents approaching them in the alley.
The gunship crew heard panic on the other line and got to work. They used high-powered cameras to scan around the courtyard and the surrounding buildings.
Then, they unleashed 40-millimeter and howitzer rounds into the alley and onto rooftops. Some exploded above the ground and flung 14,000 shrapnel fragments per round into a rainbow pattern.
Some targets appeared to be running, and others were taking up positions. But identifying people from the air alone was impossible, the pilot would later tell investigators.
It was like going “out into a field in the middle of the night on about a quarter moon light, and you see a dark shape moving through the field,” the pilot said.
For two hours, the air crew coordinated with the commander on the ground to blast apart buildings where the enemy fighters took up positions. Troops lay prone on the far side of a domed roof to peek across the courtyard and relay information to the gunship.
“If they fled into the building, we were asking him to basically drop the building,” the controller on the ground later testified.
The gunship blasted room by room, house by house, until there was nobody left shooting.
In total, the gunship fired 82 howitzer rounds and 242 of the 40-millimeter rounds. The barrage ended with a 500-pound bomb dropped onto White II’s compound.
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/n...warlords-mass-civilian-casualties/2675795001/
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 an entire 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 inside.
The local 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 the private security company at the American-controlled airfield up the road.
Why had a team of U.S. soldiers and Marines battled its own paid security detail?
After more than a decade, those who buried their families still don’t know.
U.S. military officials publicly touted the August 22, 2008, Azizabad raid – Operation Commando Riot – as a victory. A high-value Taliban target had been 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 local population rioted.
It remains one of the deadliest civilian casualty events of the Afghan campaign. But the story of how the operation turned tragic has been largely hidden from the public.
USA TODAY spent more than a year investigating the Azizabad raid and sued the Department of Defense to obtain almost 1,000 pages of investigative files previously kept secret because it had been deemed “classified national security information.” The records included photographs of the destruction in Azizabad and sworn testimony from the U.S. forces who planned and executed the operation.
USA TODAY also obtained Afghan government records, evidence collected by humanitarian groups, including the Red Cross, and a confidential United Nations investigation into the incident.
In addition, a reporter traveled to western Afghanistan to interview government officials, investigators, first responders, witnesses and the 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 had hired to provide intelligence and security. The records also reveal that the Defense Department has for years downplayed or denied the fatal mistakes surrounding the tragedy.
The problems began in 2007 when ArmorGroup, a private security company working on a Pentagon subcontract, hired two local warlords on the U.S. 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 was giving out. The tangle of espionage and tribal infighting eventually drew in the very same military units that had 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. Ground troops directed an American gunship to demolish house after house where at least one insurgent took cover, without knowing who else was inside.
“If they fled into the building, we were asking him to basically drop the building,” a Marine who was coordinating with the gunship testified. Most of the names were redacted from the military investigation.
Much about the mission in Azizabad remains in dispute, but this much is clear: The architects behind this corner of the war – and those profiting from the security contract – did not understand the difference between who they were supposed to be fighting, employing and protecting.
There still is no definitive death toll. After initially insisting that only five to seven civilians died, Pentagon officials were forced to adjust that figure to 33 after photos and videos of the carnage proved the official account wrong. Separate reviews by the Afghan government, Red Cross, United Nations and Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission put the civilian deaths over 70.
After two Pentagon investigations, the U.S. military denied any wrongdoing. Defense Department officials declined to comment for this story.
A 2010 Senate Armed Services Committee inquiry laid blame with both ArmorGroup and the Defense Department for doing business with the warlords. In response to the Senate report, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued a letter recognizing problems with contract oversight, which he pledged to fix.
Yet in the aftermath of the Azizabad raid, records show, military leaders sought to present an image of success and mask evidence of a civilian casualty disaster. The false version of events was amplified by Oliver North – a former Marine commander and a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980s – who was embedded as a Fox News contributor with the forces conducting the raid. North’s segment, which presents the mission as a success and the Taliban commander “confirmed dead,” is still available on the Fox News website.
North did not respond to multiple interview requests. In an email, Fox News spokeswoman Caley Cronin did not address North’s segment and directed questions to North, “who is no longer a contributor with the network,” she wrote.
Lt. Colonel 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 operation or the military’s response until contacted by USA TODAY.
“The CENTCOM investigation seemed more worried about looking good than being good,” VanLandingham, now a law professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, said in an interview. “Everyone who deploys in Afghanistan should know this incident.”
G4S, the largest private security company in the world, purchased ArmorGroup in 2008 – after the company had signed its contract with the Pentagon to provide security at the airfield but before the Azizabad raid. The company’s role has remained virtually unknown other than a literal footnote in the Senate inquiry.
Executives at ArmorGroup, which G4S dissolved into another subsidiary it later sold in 2014, considered their decisions at the time to be the best option to keep those inside the base safe under difficult circumstances, according to emails collected by Senate investigators.
"Without the leadership and management” of company staff, the "worst could have caused the project to fail long before the August tragedy,” one said.
G4S declined to comment for this story, except to state that ArmorGroup is a former G4S subsidiary that wasn’t under the direct control of the parent company.
But some of the employees who were operating the air base contracts near Azizabad agreed to speak out publicly for the first time.
“It was wholesale slaughter,” David McDonnell, a former ArmorGroup director who oversaw mine clearing projects in Afghanistan, said in a recent 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 kept secret all this time.
“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.”
I. The Airfield
The Shindand District air base, on the southern border of Afghanistan's Herat Province, was first built by the Soviets in the 1960s. A graveyard of abandoned Russian aircraft and land mines spread across open fields on both sides of the perimeter fence. The base is a 9-square-mile campus in a remote but strategic location between Iran’s eastern border and the Ring Road, which circles all of Afghanistan.
In a district that has long been controlled or contested by the Taliban, the airbase sits amid a major drug and arms trafficking route. The Taliban funds much of its national operation with the opium-poppy fields in the district’s Zerkoh Valley.
In April 2007, ArmorGroup – a private security company based in London – won a $5.1 million Air Force subcontract to guard construction workers building an expansion of the airfield for the Afghan National Army. (The company’s American subsidiary, ArmorGroup North America, based in Virginia, technically managed the contract). ArmorGroup had worked in more than 160 countries around the world and was known mostly for protecting oil and gas sites.
ArmorGroup agreed to a Pentagon requirement that it fill the guard positions by hiring nearby villagers. It was part of the Pentagon’s economic stimulus plan for Afghanistan, but it also was less expensive than bringing in guards from outside the country.
"We are a commercial company, of course, we are looking to do the business as cheap as possible,” a company official later told U.S. military investigators.
Shindand’s 450 villages are some of the most impoverished in the Herat Province. Many rural areas do not have running water or paved roads. Day laborers find work wherever they can, including across the border in Iran. A low-ranking Afghan National Police officer could earn roughly $70 a month.
At $275 a month, the guard jobs at the air base represented the best opportunity some would see in a lifetime.
II. Mr. Pink and Mr. White
ArmorGroup officials had no say in whom they would hire to pick the villagers. According to interviews and testimony, U.S. military personnel instructed ArmorGroup managers to let two local men – Timor Shah and Nadir Khan – select who could become guards.
The company assigned them code names: Mr. White for Shah and Mr. Pink for Khan. The names were an homage to Reservoir Dogs, the Quentin Tarantino classic film in which thieves betray and murder one another after an armed robbery.
Mr. White and Mr. Pink, two local patriarchs and sons of Shindand, would staff the guard positions from their extended families. The men were cousins, lifelong friends and business partners in the district. Their legitimate operations included car rentals and electronic stores in the northern city of Herat.
But U.S. intelligence and company officials believed that both men were burgeoning warlords with possible criminal and Taliban affiliations, according to interviews with local officials, testimony in the Pentagon investigation and memos from the Senate inquiry.
In rural Afghanistan, the line between village elder, warlord and legitimate Taliban is often blurred, which can confound outsiders trying to track allegiances on the ground.
Allegations of Pink and White's illicit backgrounds weren’t necessarily a problem anyway. Military intelligence officers inside the airfield had been building a vast network of paid informants across the region, enticing them with money in exchange for information about Taliban meetings and the location of high-value targets.
White and Pink were both intelligence assets.
Lal Mohammad Umarzai, the Shindand governor at the time, told USA TODAY in an interview that he was never consulted about the wisdom of giving two warlords hundreds of thousands of dollars, access to an armory of automatic weapons and virtual control over Shindand. The district is one of the most diverse in Afghanistan, with complex tribal dynamics and a history of power struggles.
Had somebody reached out to him for advice, Umarzai said, he would have warned U.S. officials that White and Pink would bring trouble.
“They were the two most corrupt families in Afghanistan,” Umarzai said.
III. Parley in the bazaar
White and Pink initially split the work down the middle. They showed up in June 2007 outside the fence of the airfield with about 20 men each.
According to the Senate inquiry, ArmorGroup could not demonstrate that it had sent armed guard rosters or training records to the U.S. government, a violation of Department of Defense regulations.
“Normally in a country, if we were going to employ local people, they would be interviewed, qualification checks, names go to the government for security backgrounds,” McDonnell said in an interview. “None of that happened in Shindand. All of the normal procedures we would carry out didn’t happen because we were directed who to work with by the American forces.”
USA TODAY filed a public records request with the Air Force for documents about the armed employees – records the agency was required to collect and maintain, according to the contract. An Air Force official said those documents could not be located because they “might not have been processed or archived ... due to the sensitive nature.”
Within weeks of starting the contract, Pink and White made the same calculation: Controlling half of the money and jobs was good. But having everything would make one of them untouchable.
They grew paranoid of each other. The resentment turned violent, and there were a series of shootings and bombings around Shindand that officials would blame on the feud between the two men.
Pink made at least one attempt on White’s life as he was leaving the air base. ArmorGroup officials grew increasingly worried that its guards would try to kill one another or leave their posts, according to internal memos and emails compiled in the Senate inquiry.
In December 2007, tribal elders brokered a cease-fire and called for White and Pink to settle their differences. A meeting was arranged for Dec. 12 in the Azizabad bazaar, a short strip of open-air shops on either side of the Ring Road.
White and Pink approached each other in the market, where villagers sold bread, fruit and home appliances.
Just before they reached each other, Pink pulled out a gun and shot White three times. A gunfight broke out in the market between ArmorGroup guards loyal to each man. Several civilians were wounded.
When the chaos ended, White was dead.
IV. The bombmaker
The Air Force project manager in Kabul reported the assassination to U.S. military officials, according to the Senate inquiry. But little changed.
“The incident did not give rise to a broader discussion at (the Air Force) about the wisdom of relying on two warlords to provide security,” the investigators wrote.
Pink, however, lost his job as an informant. ArmorGroup also fired him from the air base.
Fearing retribution from White’s family, Pink went into hiding in a nearby village with local Taliban militia. He was later involved in a series of kidnappings and other violent crimes, according to intelligence reports cited in the military investigation and internal company memos collected by the Senate investigators.
Military officials at the base went as far as nominating Pink as a high-priority target because "he was a force protection problem for the area,” one Marine testified during the Pentagon investigation. But U.S. commanders denied the request and decided instead to closely monitor him.
The airfield construction project continued, and ArmorGroup needed someone else to handle staffing guards at the air base.
So the company hired Reza Khan, White’s brother. They called him Mr. White II.
White II was another intelligence asset for the military personnel inside the air base. In one conversation with his handler, he disclosed that his nephew was Mullah Sadeq, a notorious Taliban commander operating in the Farah Province, just south of Shindand. Sadeq built and supplied improvised explosive devices around the region.
The Italian military had placed Sadeq on the high-priority-target list. U.S. special operation forces inside the air base had been tracking Sadeq for months in hopes of pinning down his exact location.
“It was really no surprise to us that (White II) had bigger connections with the Taliban than previously suspected,” White II’s Marine intelligence handler testified during the Pentagon investigation. “He had been playing both sides and ultimately we were actually looking to cut his ties that he had with us.”
Instead, military intelligence officers saw him as the key to taking down Sadeq.
V. 'Meat in the sandwich'
In May 2008, London-based private security giant G4S bought ArmorGroup for $85.4 million. The acquisition came as the company expanded to more than 100 countries and took on dangerous business some of its competitors avoided, including mine clearing and base security in the Middle East.
The Shindand contract was already underway when G4S became the corporate parent. The company left ArmorGroup operationally independent with the same Afghanistan managers in place.
In July, Thompson, who worked for the company’s mine clearing division on a U.N. contract at the base, reported to executives in Afghanistan the threat White II posed. Thompson wrote that local police and the Afghan National Army had confiscated at White II’s Azizabad home stockpiles of unlicensed weapons and land mines. Guards had left the base with company weapons to moonlight as White II’s personal escorts.
Company officials expressed in interviews with investigators “permanent concern” about a full-scale war between militias loyal to Pink and White II.
"I would hate to see our people as the meat in the sandwich,” McDonnell, the company director, wrote in an email responding to the report.
Records show that ArmorGroup officials dealt with their concerns about White II by asking him to give a verbal assurance every week that the conflict wouldn’t escalate.
Around the same time, an Army Sergeant told White II’s intelligence handler that the warlord was funneling money from the air base contract – wages meant for the guards – straight to Taliban commanders. He was rebuffed.
“They know about it,” the sergeant told Senate investigators. “But they didn’t want to talk about it, for whatever reason.”
VI. Rudderless
Through the spring and summer of 2008, special operation forces lost at least three of their own in the area.
On May 29, Sergeant First Class David Nunez, 27, of Los Angeles was on his third deployment with the Army Special Forces when his unit came under fire in the Farah Province desert plains. He was posthumously awarded the Silver Star for saving others from their vehicle as it became engulfed in flames. He had two sons.
A month later, five Marine special operators with the Second Battalion were gravely wounded while looking for a Taliban commander. Marine Staff Sgt. Edgar Heredia died. Heredia, 28, was a native of Houston and the son of two Mexican immigrants.
On a separate mission in the Zerkoh Valley, Marine Captain Garrett “Tubes” Lawton, 31, died when an IED detonated by his vehicle.
The leaders commanding these units were facing intense scrutiny. Night raids and air campaigns were often followed by reports of civilian casualties, an almost inevitable outcome when insurgents live and fight among their civilian neighbors.
Frank Rosenblatt, a retired Lt. Colonel and JAG who has written several books and studies about the military justice system, called 2008 “a time of strategic rudderlessness” for the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan.
He said military leaders rushed into operations that could be touted to the American public, often at the cost of the local population they were supposed to be protecting.
“Commanders wanted to be seen getting after it,” Rosenblatt said.
The Taliban used the civilian deaths to recruit new militia members, and Afghan citizens grew increasingly wary of the tactics of American forces.
“The Taliban are always telling people, ‘Look at the Americans, they came to kill you and your kids,’” said Mir Abdul Kalik, the former deputy governor in Shindand. “A huge gap has been created between the Afghans and the Americans.”
The sentiment had reached Kabul, where then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai repeatedly condemned the use of American gunships in urban areas.
“We can no longer accept the civilian casualties the way they are occurring,” Karzai said.
But the airstrikes continued. On July 6, an airstrike in Nangarhar province inadvertently killed 47 Afghan civilians, misidentified as insurgents, during a wedding. Two weeks later, another airstrike accidentally killed nine Afghan National Police officers in Farah province.
CHAPTER VII. Romeo and Juliet
In August, two assets – code-named Romeo and Juliet – told their intelligence handler at the air base news he had been waiting on for months: Mullah Sadeq was coming to meet his uncle, White II, at his home compound in Azizabad.
For the first time since the Americans had been tracking him, Sadeq would be within 20 miles of the base.
The information was met with skepticism. Romeo and Juliet were known associates of Mr. Pink, so intelligence officers considered the possibility that Pink could have orchestrated the leak as a way to have U.S. forces attack White II. Was this a setup?
"I've thought about that before,” one of the intelligence officials later testified in the military investigation. “But these guys, they give me pretty reliable information on who, what, when, and where."
Romeo and Juliet had provided good intelligence for missions into the Zerkoh Valley that summer. Plus, the intelligence office reckoned, White II himself had corroborated his relationship to Sadeq.
It was too good of an opportunity to pass up. As a bonus, Oliver North and a Fox cameraman would tag along for the mission for their ongoing “War Stories” dispatches.
The regional commanders green-lighted an operation to capture or kill Sadeq and approved an AC-130 gunship, often dubbed “hell in the sky,” for close air support. Operation Commando Riot was a go.
In the days before Sadeq was scheduled to arrive, the U.S. forces at the base worked with Afghan commandos to draw up a minute-by-minute plan.
Romeo and Juliet said Sadeq would show up with more than two dozen militia sometime before midnight for a meeting inside White II’s compound. The house was surrounded by other homes on three sides and a large courtyard to the southeast. Each structure was built with mud bricks as dense as concrete. A wide alley led directly to the compound.
Romeo and Juliet had a contact attending the meeting who would call as soon as Sadeq arrived.
To maintain the element of surprise, the mission would need to be a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
Driving pickup trucks, a team of 12 from the Second Marine Special Operations Battalion would lead the strike. Army Special Forces and Afghan commandos would follow 10 minutes behind. The total attack force would be roughly 80 men.
Captain Elliot Ackerman would be the assault force commander with the Marines going in first.
Ackerman, 28 at the time, was commissioned as an officer right after college. He had earned numerous medals, including the Silver Star for saving fellow Marines four years earlier during the second battle of Fallujah, the bloodiest engagement of the Iraq War.
Because most of the names were redacted from the testimony in the military investigation, it’s not clear whether Ackerman was the commander who ultimately led the entire Azizabad operation. He declined multiple interview requests for this story.
The laws of war require that all feasible precautions are taken to avoid harming civilians. To reduce collateral damage, experts and activists urge a “pattern of life analysis” – hours of reconnaissance in the target area ahead of a mission so everyone going in, including air support, understands how many civilians are present and where they are located.
But in Shindand, the troops were relying largely on third-hand information and a general understanding of villages in the area, the intelligence officers later told investigators. Even the intelligence assets, Romeo and Juliet, had not recently visited Azizabad themselves for fear of being identified.
A lead intelligence officer and a Marine commander were aware that a funeral ceremony for families was planned for the day after Sadeq was set to arrive, according to their testimony with military investigators. However, almost everybody else involved with the planning and execution of operation Commando Riot testified that they were not told about a civilian gathering.
“Everybody that was going to be at that meeting were Taliban commanders with their security guys,” a communications sergeant testified later. “There wasn't supposed to be any women and children.”
It is unclear why that information was not widely known or whether it had been reported up the chain of command before the mission and the gunship were approved.
VIII. The Rukh family
The morning of August 21, Gul Rukh piled her four kids into her cousin’s car and headed north on the Ring Road to her parents' house in Azizabad. Hundreds of villagers around the Zerkoh Valley and Farah Province had received invitations to commemorate the death of a prominent village elder eight months earlier.
His name was Timor Shah – also known as the original Mr. White.
Rukh, 39, stopped in the city of Shindand to go shopping for the ceremony. She bought new clothes for her kids and a wooden chest to keep tchotchkes. It was the type of splurging Rukh reserved only for special occasions.
When they arrived in Azizabad that evening, families gathered in the courtyard around outdoor fire pits and got to cooking. They slaughtered 16 sheep and cooked rice in steel drums.
Rukh’s sons, Dawa, 10, Ghani, 6, and Nabi, 5, and her daughter, Rahima, 9, spent most of the daylight hours kicking a soccer ball with their cousins. When the sun went down, the kids darted between houses playing hide and seek. They painted henna tattoos on one another’s hands.
Once most of the food was prepared, families peeled off for bed. The houses were too full, so many camped in the courtyard. It was cool enough to sleep outside comfortably, and the lucky ones had mosquito nets.
Rukh stayed up past midnight talking with her parents, mostly listening, while they tried persuading her to stay a couple of extra days after the ceremony. They finally drifted off to sleep.
IX. Commando Riot
The call from the contact inside the compound came just before 1:30 a.m.: Sadeq is here.
While the troops mounted into their trucks, a soldier knocked on the trailers around the garrison to roust North and the Fox cameraman. North emerged in military fatigues and night vision goggles and headed toward the convoy.
“What the hell was Oliver North doing there?” McDonnell, one of the ArmorGroup directors, said in a recent interview. “He wasn’t passing through for a cup of tea. This was set up to put on a show.”
The intelligence officers who helped plan the mission climbed to the top of the garrison barracks and faced Azizabad, 18 miles to the south. They watched the AC-130 pass overhead.
The Marines in the two lead pickup trucks turned off the Ring Road and toward the compound around 2 a.m. They heard a single pop from a rifle. That was the warning shot alerting the compound that enemies were incoming.
They saw a light on in White II’s compound. The trucks rumbled over the dirt, through a narrow passage with walls on each side at least 8 feet high.
A water truck parked at the near end of the alley blocked the route into the compound. The Marines hopped out to proceed on foot.
Gunshots poured in from the west and north. The fire felt as if it was coming from directly above.
Bullets peppered the walls next to the crouching Marines. They returned fire to the rooftops, where they could see flashes from rifle bursts through their night vision goggles. It was the most constant, accurate fire some of them had ever experienced since coming to Afghanistan, they testified later.
Marine Gunnery Sgt. Joseph “Willy” Parent took a round through his foot.
They were pinned down. The commander shot two red flares into the air so the other units trailing behind could find them. He would later testify that he did not consider retreat a viable option.
“For the reputation and just the credibility of coalition,” the commander said, adding that withdrawing from a fight with the Taliban when you are so far committed is “completely inconceivable and unacceptable.”
The 12 Marines who had exited the trucks moved into a building, where a woman and child were huddled in the corner. There, the Marines set up a base of operations.
The commander told the radio controller next to him to call the gunship in the air, circling at 10,000 feet. The enemy was “danger close.”
The controller yelled into the radio for immediate fire on the insurgents approaching them in the alley.
The gunship crew heard panic on the other line and got to work. They used high-powered cameras to scan around the courtyard and the surrounding buildings.
Then, they unleashed 40-millimeter and howitzer rounds into the alley and onto rooftops. Some exploded above the ground and flung 14,000 shrapnel fragments per round into a rainbow pattern.
Some targets appeared to be running, and others were taking up positions. But identifying people from the air alone was impossible, the pilot would later tell investigators.
It was like going “out into a field in the middle of the night on about a quarter moon light, and you see a dark shape moving through the field,” the pilot said.
For two hours, the air crew coordinated with the commander on the ground to blast apart buildings where the enemy fighters took up positions. Troops lay prone on the far side of a domed roof to peek across the courtyard and relay information to the gunship.
“If they fled into the building, we were asking him to basically drop the building,” the controller on the ground later testified.
The gunship blasted room by room, house by house, until there was nobody left shooting.
In total, the gunship fired 82 howitzer rounds and 242 of the 40-millimeter rounds. The barrage ended with a 500-pound bomb dropped onto White II’s compound.
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/n...warlords-mass-civilian-casualties/2675795001/
