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by Nick Davies
Previously hidden
details of U.S.-led unit sent to kill top insurgent targets are revealed
for the first time
guardian.co.uk.
Sunday 25 July 2010
US soldiers
pursue militants in Helmand province. The shadowy Task Force 373
meanwhile focuses its efforts on more than 2,000 senior Taliban figures
on a target list. Photograph: Adrees Latif/Reuters
The Nato coalition
in Afghanistan has been using an undisclosed "black" unit of special
forces, Task Force 373, to hunt down targets for death or detention
without trial. Details of more than 2,000 senior figures from the
Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a "kill or capture" list, known as Jpel,
the joint prioritised effects list.
In many cases, the
unit has set out to seize a target for internment, but in others it has
simply killed them without attempting to capture. The logs reveal that
TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan
police officers who have strayed into its path.
The United Nations'
special rapporteur for human rights, Professor Philip Alston, went to
Afghanistan in May 2008 to investigate rumours of extrajudicial
killings. He warned that international forces were neither transparent
nor accountable and that Afghans who attempted to find out who had
killed their loved ones "often come away empty-handed, frustrated and
bitter".
Now, for the first
time, the leaked war logs reveal details of deadly missions by TF 373
and other units hunting down Jpel targets that were previously hidden
behind a screen of misinformation. They raise fundamental questions
about the legality of the killings and of the long-term imprisonment
without trial, and also pragmatically about the impact of a tactic which
is inherently likely to kill, injure and alienate the innocent
bystanders whose support the coalition craves.
On the night of
Monday 11 June 2007, the leaked logs reveal, the taskforce set out with
Afghan special forces to capture or kill a Taliban commander named Qarl
Ur-Rahman in a valley near Jalalabad. As they approached the target in
the darkness, somebody shone a torch on them. A firefight developed, and
the taskforce called in an AC-130 gunship, which strafed the area with
cannon fire: "The original mission was aborted and TF 373 broke contact
and returned to base. Follow-up Report: 7 x ANP KIA, 4 x WIA." In plain
language: they discovered that the people they had been shooting in the
dark were Afghan police officers, seven of whom were now dead and four
wounded.
The coalition put
out a press release which referred to the firefight and the air support
and then failed entirely to record that they had just killed or wounded
11 police officers. But, evidently fearing that the truth might leak, it
added: "There was nothing during the firefight to indicate the opposing
force was friendly. The individuals who fired on coalition forces were
not in uniform." The involvement of TF 373 was not mentioned, and the
story didn't get out.
However, the
incident immediately rebounded into the fragile links which other
elements of the coalition had been trying to build with local
communities. An internal report shows that the next day Lieutenant
Colonel Gordon Phillips, commander of the Provincial Reconstruction
Team, took senior officers to meet the provincial governor, Gul Agha
Sherzai, who accepted that this was "an unfortunate incident that
occurred among friends". They agreed to pay compensation to the bereaved
families, and Phillips "reiterated our support to prevent these types of
events from occurring again".
Yet, later that
week, on Sunday 17 June, as Sherzai hosted a "shura" council at which he
attempted to reassure tribal leaders about the safety of coalition
operations, TF 373 launched another mission, hundreds of miles south in
Paktika province. The target was a notorious Libyan fighter, Abu Laith
al-Libi. The unit was armed with a new weapon, known as Himars – High
Mobility Artillery Rocket System – a pod of six missiles on the back of
a small truck.
The plan was to
launch five rockets at targets in the village of Nangar Khel where TF
373 believed Libi was hiding and then to send in ground troops. The
result was that they failed to find Libi but killed six Taliban fighters
and then, when they approached the rubble of a madrasa, they found
"initial assessment of 7 x NC KIA" which translates as seven
non-combatants killed in action. All of them were children. One of them
was still alive in the rubble: "The Med TM immediately cleared debris
from the mouth and performed CPR." After 20 minutes, the child died.
Children
The coalition made a
press statement which owned up to the death of the children and claimed
that troops "had surveillance on the compound all day and saw no
indications there were children inside the building". That claim is
consistent with the leaked log. A press release also claimed that
Taliban fighters, who undoubtedly were in the compound, had used the
children as a shield.
The log refers to an
unnamed "elder" who is said to have "stated that the children were held
against their will" but, against that, there is no suggestion that there
were any Taliban in the madrasa where the children died.
The rest of the
press release was certainly misleading. It suggested that coalition
forces had attacked the compound because of "nefarious activity" there,
when the reality was that they had gone there to kill or capture Libi.
It made no mention
at all of Libi, nor of the failure of the mission (although that was
revealed later by NBC News in the United States). Crucially, it failed
to record that TF 373 had fired five rockets, destroying the madrasa and
other buildings and killing seven children, before anybody had fired on
them – that this looked like a mission to kill and not to capture.
Indeed, this was clearly deliberately suppressed.
The internal report
was marked not only "secret" but also "Noforn", ie not to be shared with
the foreign elements of the coalition. And the source of this anxiety is
explicit: "The knowledge that TF 373 conducted a HIMARS strike must be
protected." And it was. This crucial fact remained secret, as did TF
373's involvement.
Again, the lethal
attack caused political problems. The provincial governor arranged
compensation and held a shura with local leaders when, according to an
internal US report, "he pressed the Talking Points given to him and
added a few of his own that followed in line with our current story".
Libi remained targeted for death and was killed in Pakistan seven months
later by a missile from an unmanned CIA Predator.
In spite of this
tension between political and military operations, TF 373 continued to
engage in highly destructive attacks. Four months later, on 4 October,
they confronted Taliban fighters in a village called Laswanday, only 6
miles from the village where they had killed the seven children. The
Taliban appear to have retreated by the time TF 373 called in air
support to drop 500lb bombs on the house from which the fighters had
been firing.
The final outcome,
listed tersely at the end of the leaked log: 12 US wounded, two teenage
girls and a 10-year-old boy wounded, one girl killed, one woman killed,
four civilian men killed, one donkey killed, one dog killed, several
chickens killed, no enemy killed, no enemy wounded, no enemy detained.
The coalition put
out a statement claiming falsely to have killed several militants and
making no mention of any dead civilians; and later added that "several
non-combatants were found dead and several others wounded" without
giving any numbers or details.
This time, the
political teams tried a far less conciliatory approach with local
people. In spite of discovering that the dead civilians came from one
family, one of whom had been found with his hands tied behind his back,
suggesting that the Taliban were unwelcome intruders in their home,
senior officials travelled to the stricken village where they "stressed
that the fault of the deaths of the innocent lies on the villagers who
did not resist the insurgents and their anti-government activities …
[and] chastised a villager who condemned the compound shooting".
Nevertheless, an internal report concluded that there was "little or no
protest" over the incident.
Concealment
The concealment of
TF 373's role is a constant theme. There was global publicity in October
2009 when US helicopters were involved in two separate crashes in one
day, but even then it was concealed that the four soldiers who died in
one of the incidents were from TF 373.
The pursuit of these
"high value targets" is evidently embedded deep in coalition tactics.
The Jpel list assigns an individual serial number to each of those
targeted for kill or capture and by October 2009 this had reached 2,058.
The process of
choosing targets reaches high into the military command. According to
their published US Field Manual on Counter Insurgency, No FM3-24, it is
policy to choose targets "to engage as potential counter-insurgency
supporters, targets to isolate from the population and targets to
eliminate".
A joint targeting
working group meets each week to consider Target Nomination Packets and
has direct input from the Combined Forces Command and its divisional HQ,
as well as from lawyers, operational command and intelligence units
including the CIA.
Among those who are
listed as being located and killed by TF 373 are Shah Agha, described as
an intelligence officer for an IED cell, who was killed with four other
men on 1 June 2009; Amir Jan Mutaki, described as a Taliban
sub-commander who had organised ambushes on coalition forces, who was
shot dead from the air in a TF 373 mission on 24 June 2009; and a target
codenamed Ballentine, who was killed on 16 November 2009 during an
attack in the village of Lewani, in which a local woman also died.
The logs include
references to the tracing and killing of other targets on the Jpel list,
which do not identify TF 373 as the unit responsible. It is possible
that some of the other taskforce names and numbers which show up in this
context are cover names for 373, or for British special forces, 500 of
whom are based in southern Afghanistan and are reported to have been
involved in kill/capture missions, including the shooting in July 2008
of Mullah Bismullah.
Some of these "non
373" operations involve the use of unmanned drones to fire missiles to
kill the target: one codenamed Beethoven, on 20 October 2008; one named
Janan on 6 November 2008; and an unnamed Jpel target who was hit with a
hellfire missile near Khan Neshin on 21 August 2009 while travelling in
a car with other passengers (the log records "no squirters [bodies
moving about] recorded").
Other Jpel targets
were traced and then bombed from the air. One, codenamed Newcastle, was
located with four other men on 26 November 2007. The house they were in
was then hit with 500lb bombs. "No identifiable features recovered," the
log records.
Two other Jpel
targets, identified only by serial numbers, were killed on 16 February
2009 when two F-15 bombers dropped four 500lb bombs on a Jpel target:
"There are various and conflicting reports from multiple sources
alleging civilian casualties … A large number of local nationals were on
site during the investigation displaying a hostile attitude so the
investigation team did not continue sorting through the site."
One of the leaked
logs contains a summary of a conference call on 8 March 2008 when the
then head of the Afghan National Directorate of Security, Amrullah Saleh,
tells senior American officers that three named Taliban commanders in
Kapisa province are "not reconcilable and must be taken out". The senior
coalition officer "noted that there would be a meeting with the Kapisa
NDS to determine how to approach this issue."
It is not clear
whether "taken out" meant "killed" and the logs do not record any of
their deaths. But one of them, Qari Baryal, who was ranked seventh in
the Jpel list, had already been targeted for killing two months earlier.
On 12 January 2008,
after tracking his movements for 24 hours, the coalition established
that he was holding a large meeting with other men in a compound in
Pashkari and sent planes which dropped six 500lb bombs and followed up
with five strafing runs to shoot those fleeing the scene.
The report records
that some 70 people ran to the compound and started digging into the
rubble, on which there were "pools of blood", but subsequent reports
suggest that Baryal survived and continued to plan rocket attacks and
suicide bombings.
Numerous logs show
Jpel targets being captured and transferred to a special prison, known
as Btif, the Bagram Theatre Internment Facility. There is no indication
of prisoners being charged or tried, and previous press reports have
suggested that men have been detained there for years without any legal
process in communal cages inside vast old air hangars. As each target is
captured, he is assigned a serial number. By December 2009, this showed
that a total of 4,288 prisoners, some aged as young as 16, had been held
at Btif, with 757 still in custody.
Who are TF373?
The leaked war logs
show that Task Force 373 uses at least three bases in Afghanistan, in
Kabul, Kandahar and Khost. Although it works alongside special forces
from Afghanistan and other coalition nations, it appears to be drawing
its own troops from the 7th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North
Carolina and to travel on missions in Chinook and Cobra helicopters
flown by 160th special operations aviation regiment, based at Hunter
Army Airfield, Georgia.
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