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New reports from a human rights organisation and the German press have substantiated charges that US troops, aided by local and international allies, massacred thousands of defenceless Taliban in the course of the war in Afghanistan.
The international press first reported treatment of Taliban prisoners that systematically breached the Geneva Conventions at the end of November. At that time, American aircraft and helicopters quelled an apparent revolt by prisoners at the fortress of Qala-i-Janghi near Mazar-i-Sharif, which was bombed from the air. Several hundred prisoners died as a result of the bombardment, with just 86 surviving the attack.
The victims were members of the Taliban, who had previously surrendered in Konduz to troops led by the Uzbek general, Rashid Dostum, an ally of the Americans. Having surrendered, the Taliban were prisoners of war entitled to full protection under the Geneva Conventions.
From the approximately 8,000 fighters who surrendered in Konduz only 500 to 800 were taken to Qala-i-Janghi. Soon information emerged that other Taliban had been murdered. Reports claimed that approx. 700 of those were came from Pakistan, and students of madarsaas there, sent by their spritual religious leader Qazi Hussain Ahmed. Later international media confirms these reports.
Last January and February, a team from the Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), based in Boston, visited a number of graves in the Mazar-i-Sharif and Sheberghan area. They established that two of the mass graves that they investigated were of recent origin. The team quoted testimony from inhabitants of the region, who claimed to have seen scores of bodies unloaded from container trucks and buried in the desert by bulldozers.
In a May 1 letter to the provisional Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, the PHR wrote: "The forensic team also found evidence of recently disposed human remains in two of the nine gravesites that were visited. While we are not in a position to verify the provenance of the remains in these sites, we heard speculation from well-informed international observers that one of these sites, near the city of Sheberghan, could have been a disposal ground of Taliban prisoners who had surrendered to the Northern Alliance in November and December 2001.
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