What do you think the children of these men are doing today 8 years later?

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.newsweek.com/id/65473

The Death Convoy Of Afghanistan

Witness Reports And The Probing Of A Mass Grave Point To War Crimes. Does The United States Have Any Responsibility For The Atrocities Of Its Allies? A Newsweek Investigation.

By BY BABAK DEHGHANPISHEH, JOHN BARRY AND ROY GUTMAN | NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Aug 26, 2002

Trudging over the moonscape of Dasht-e Leili, a desolate expanse of low rolling hills in northern Afghanistan, Bill Haglund spotted clues half-buried in the gray-beige sand. Strings of prayer beads. A woolen skullcap. A few shoes. Those remnants, along with track marks and blade scrapes left by a bulldozer, suggested that Haglund had found what he was looking for. Then he came across a human tibia, three sets of pelvic bones and some ribs.

Mass graves are not always easy to spot, though trained investigators know the signs. "You look for disturbance of the earth, differences in the vegetation, areas that have been machined over," says Haglund, a forensic anthropologist and pioneer in the field of "human-rights archeology." At Dasht-e Leili, a 15-minute drive from the Northern Alliance prison at Sheber-ghan, scavenging animals had brought the evidence to the surface. Some of the gnawed bones were old and bleached, but some were from bodies so recently buried the bones still carried tissue. The area of bulldozer activity--roughly an acre--suggested burials on a large scale. A stray surgical glove also caught Haglund's eye. Such gloves are often used by people handling corpses, and could be evidence, Haglund thought, of "a modicum of planning."

Haglund was in Dasht-e Leili on more than a hunch. In January, two investigators from the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights had argued their way into the nearby Sheberghan prison. What they saw shocked them. More than 3,000 Taliban prisoners--who had surrendered to the victorious Northern Alliance forces at the fall of Konduz in late November--were crammed, sick and starving, into a facility with room for only 800. The Northern Alliance commander of the prison acknowledged the charnel-house conditions, but pleaded that he had no money. He begged the PHR to send food and supplies, and to ask the United Nations to dig a well so the prisoners could drink unpolluted water.

But stories of a deeper horror came from the prisoners themselves. However awful their conditions, they were the lucky ones. They were alive. Many hundreds of their comrades, they said, had been killed on the journey to Sheberghan from Konduz by being stuffed into sealed cargo containers and left to asphyxiate. Local aid workers and Afghan officials quietly confirmed that they had heard the same stories. They confirmed, too, persistent reports about the disposal of many of the dead in mass graves at Dasht-e Leili. snip

How many are buried at Dasht-e Leili? Haglund won't speculate. "The only thing we know is that it's a very large site," says a U.N. official privy to the investigation, and there was "a high density of bodies in the trial trench." Other sources who have investigated the killings aren't surprised. "I can say with confidence that more than a thousand people died in the containers," says Aziz ur Rahman Razekh, director of the Afghan Organization of Human Rights. NEWSWEEK's extensive inquiries of prisoners, truckdrivers, Afghan militiamen and local villagers--including interviews with survivors who licked and chewed each other's skin to stay alive--suggest also that many hundreds of people died.

[midnight]

1. Let's end these stupid wars....