The dead are not hard to find. Turn left into the desert after the town of Shiberghan and they lie all around — some in shallow graves, others protruding from the sand.
The clothes they wore are still there: decaying black turbans, charred shoes, a prayer cap. In the nine months since they were buried the sun has bleached their bones white. But the jaws, femurs and ribs scattered across the desert are unmistakably human.
Nobody knows how many Taliban prisoners were secretly interred in this mass grave. But there is now substantial evidence that the worst atrocity of last year’s war in Afghanistan took place here; most controversially, during an operation masterminded by United States special forces.
A 10-minute drive away is Shiberghan prison, where about 800 Taliban fighters who surrendered late last November at the town of Kunduz are held. Afghan warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum controls the prison; his mansion is nearby.
It was his commanders who transported the Taliban captives to Shiberghan. ”It was awful. They crammed us into sealed shipping containers,” a 24-year-old survivor, Irfan Azgar Ali said. ”We had no water for 20 hours. There was no air and it was very hot. There were 300 of us in my container. By the time we arrived in Shiberghan, only 10 of us were still alive.”
The prisoners still in Shiberghan estimate that about 400 people suffocated to death during the journey. Other sources say the figure is between 900 and 1 000. The Physicians for Human Rights group from Boston, which identified the mass grave earlier this year, suggests that 2 000 to 3 000 of the 8 000 prisoners taken to Shiberghan died on the way.
But The Guardian has obtained harrowing details that suggest their death was not a tragic accident but a deliberate act of revenge.
Some of the first Taliban fighters to surrender made the initial part of the journey in open lorries. When they reached Mazar-i-Sharif, 144km from Kunduz, they were taken to Qala Zaini, a mud-walled fortified compound on the outskirts of the city. There Dostum’s soldiers crammed them into shipping containers. When they said that they could not breathe, the soldiers told them to duck down, then fired several rounds into the containers.
A driver who made four trips to Dasht-i-Leili said not all the prisoners in his lorry were dead when they arrived: some were merely unconscious or gravely injured. The guards laid the dead and the still living out on the desert. ”They raked them all with bullets to make sure they were dead,” the driver said. ”Then they buried them.”
Last week Dostum, now Deputy Defence Minister in the Afghan government, denied accusations of human rights abuses, and pointed out that the Taliban had used shipping containers on numerous occasions to murder their enemies. He admitted that 200 prisoners had died, but said that most of the deaths were ”due to wounds suffered in the fighting, but also due to disease, suffocation, suicide and a general weakness after weeks of intense fighting and bombardment”.
What makes this massacre different from atrocities carried out by the Taliban regime is the presence of US special forces in the area. The question human rights groups want answered is: how much did the US soldiers know?
The Pentagon said last week that the US troops had reported that they were unaware what had happened to the prisoners. But evidence suggests that they were so close to Dostum’s soldiers they may have been informed.
The general has been on the US payroll for nearly a year. According to Newsweek magazine, an elite team from the Fifth Special Forces Group first met up with Dostum last October. They coordinated the Northern Alliance’s dramatic assault on Mazar-i-Sharif, which fell on November 6, and then pursued the Taliban’s northern army to Kunduz, where it remained trapped for more than two weeks. During this bloody period the US special forces unit, the 595 A-team, paid repeated visits to Shiberghan prison.
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has called for an inquiry into the massacre and has sent a team to investigate. But given Karzai’s tenuous grip on power, the team is unlikely to come to any definite conclusions. Some senior figures have hinted that the prisoners had it coming.
A confidential United Nations memo obtained by Newsweek concluded that there was enough evidence to justify a ”fully-fledged criminal investigation”. But Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special envoy, said the government was too fragile to investigate further.
The Pentagon has so far declined to answer several tricky questions, among them, were US soldiers present when the containers were first opened at Shiberghan prison?
US intelligence officers spent weeks interrogating suspects at the jail, and in time removed 114 prisoners from their cramped, lice-ridden cells to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they remain without charge. But the same soldiers appear to have no knowledge of the mass grave just down the road. — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002