AZIZABAD MASSCRE; 60 CHILDREN KILLED: AMERICA'S 'OPERATION COMMANDO RIOT' IN AFGHANISTAN

"They (foreign forces) are not the enemy of the Taliban, they are the enemy of the Afghan people. The U.S. army calls us al Qaeda and kills us but we don't know what al-Qaeda is."

A draft U.N. Security Council press statement said of the August 22, 2008 bombing of the village of Azizabad by American forces that member nations “strongly deplore the fact that this is not the first incident of this kind” and that “the killing and maiming of civilians is a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.” BUT, this was NOT decried as a “massacre” by our own U.S. foreign office or our press which found it very easy to denounce indiscriminate attacks that kill civilians when one of our 'enemies du jour' stands accused.

Witness the way the U.S. dealt with Syria, even when investigations showed it was NOT Syria who used poison gas against civilians there.

No, Azizbad was PLANNED, FOR MONTHS.  
And our military didn't give  a damn if those bombs and shells killed women and children.
Villagers say 60 children died in Azizabad and they are willing to dig up their bodies to prove it and to force America to admit to what was done.

ABOVE: An excerpt of sworn testimony taken from the fire control officer aboard the AC-130 gunship.
The officer was in charge of selecting the munitions and coordinating with the ground team to shoot at targets in Azizabad.   
(Source: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, VIA CENTRAL COMMAND)

IT WAS THE SAME SCENARIO AS THE DAY IN 2006 THAT 69 INNOCENT CHILDREN AND 11 OTHERS DIED FROM A DRONE STRIKE LAUNCHED AT THE REQUEST OF PAKISTAN, TO KILL ONE MAN...THE CHILDREN'S TEACHER.

August 22, 2008: The SO-CALLED Azizabad airstrike killed between 78 and 92 civilians,  mostly in Herat province, during an US-led attack on the village of Azizabad. 

IT HAS TAKEN 11 YEARS FOR THE TRUTH TO BE REVEALED. 

23 Aug 2008, The Telegraph (UK) wrote:
Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai has risked a fresh rift with his Western supporters and condemned American forces for an air attack in which his government says 76 civilians were killed.Ignoring denials by coalition forces that any civilians had died in the bombing of Azizabad village in northwest Afghanistan, he rebuked the foreign forces for their carelessness. 

Western reporters who visited the village, where angry locals protested against the air raid, saw the remains of houses and freshly laid graves.


A local security official said shots had to be fired to disperse the enraged crowd, which had torched a police car and blocked the highway to Herat for several hours.

AMERICAN DENIAL  
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, officials told mainstream media (MSM). .

ALL OF THAT WAS A LIE. 
DECEMBER 30, 2019, USA TODAY: 

"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 tried to make sense of why their remote village was demolished by an American airstrike in the middle of the night.

They 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.



Maida was 2 years old. Zia, 1. Taza was 3.

The records and interviews, gathered for over a year by investigative journalists and others for USA TODAY, tell the story of a disaster that was months in the making as military and company officials ignored warnings about the Afghani men they had hired to provide intelligence and security, much as such warnings were later ignored in Benghazi, Libya when the CIA/State Department hired lcals to 'guard the consulate there.


The records also reveal that the Defense Department has, for 12 long years now, downplayed or completely denied their fatal mistakes surrounding the avoidable tragedy.

The problems began in 2007 when 'ArmorGroup', a private security company working on a Pentagon subcontract, hired two local warlords who were already 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 is still no 'official' definitive death toll.

The U.S. military officials originally said only five to seven civilians were killed.

But they did not look beneath the rubble.  

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 still denied any wrongdoing.
Defense Department officials declined to comment to USA TODAY.

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.


HOW IT ALL HAPPENED AND THE IMMEDIATE COVER-UP

G4S, the largest private security company in the world, had purchased ArmorGroup in 2008.

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.

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 two would staff the guard positions from their own extended families. The men were cousins, lifelong friends and business partners in the district. 

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.
Shah's and Kahn's illicit backgrounds weren’t necessarily a problem anyway; both were 'intelligence assets'.

The company assigned them code names: Mr. White for Shah and Mr. Pink for Khan.

Lal Mohammad Umarzai, the Shindand governor at the time, told USA TODAY 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.
“They were the two most corrupt families in Afghanistan,” Umarzai said.

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 one day.

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.

'PINK' EVENTUALLY MURDERED 'WHITE' ON DEC. 12, 2007.
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.

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.

Pink, however, lost his job as an informant. ArmorGroup also fired him from the air base.
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.

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.
The company left ArmorGroup operationally independent with the same Afghanistan managers in place.

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.

In July, Tony Thompson (mentioned above) wrote a warning letter to company executives in Afghanstan that local police and the Afghan National Army had confiscated  stockpiles of unlicensed weapons and land mines at White II’s Azizabad home. 

Guards had left the base with company weapons to moonlight as White II’s personal escorts.

Company officials would later express 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.

That was like asking a hungry fox to promise not to eat chickens from the hen-house.

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.”

Night raids and 'air campaigns' by American forces in the area were often followed by reports of civilian casualties, an almost inevitable outcome when insurgents live and fight among their civilian neighbors.

American troops were killed by the Taliban, followed by retribution attacks by Americans.
The vicious cycle dragged on.

The Taliban used 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.

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.

What was created was a "perfect storm", sure to lead to tragedy. 

DON'T ASK, JUST FIRE

In August, two other intel assets – code-named Romeo and Juliet – told their intelligence handler at the air base the 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.

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.

A lead intelligence officer and a Marine commander were aware that a funeral ceremony for families of the murdered "Mr. White I" was planned for the day after Sadeq was set to arrive, according to their testimony with military investigators.

Hundreds of villagers around the Zerkoh Valley and Farah Province had received invitations to commemorate the death of Timor Shah and entire families were traveling to Azizabbad to attend.

However, almost everybody else involved with the planning and execution of operation Commando Riot testified that they were not told about a civilian gathering.

After most had settled in for the night in the small village,
the call from the contact inside the compound came just before 1:30 a.m.:
Sadeq is here.


After the raid, the Azizabad villagers picked through the rubble and compiled a list of the dead: 91 total, including 60 children.

The troops cordoned off the neighborhood for three hours while a team of Army Special Forces operators went door to door with the Afghan commandos to clear the buildings and collect weapons, explosives and documents.
They blew up a cache of land mines in one of the buildings.

There was no sign of Sadeq.



Then the villagers rioted.

Confused and furious, about 200 villagers marched on the Ring Road hurling rocks at reporters and police officers. They set fire to an Afghan National Army vehicle and shot at soldiers.

In front of local television cameras, some of the villagers held up their ArmorGroup badges, evidence of their loyalty to the U.S. forces.

They showed the invitations to the funeral commemoration, evidence of a civilian gathering, not a Taliban meeting.


This version of events was diametrically opposite to what the Pentagon and North’s Fox News segment had presented.

Among skeptical Afghan and even some ArmorGroup officials, it seemed plausible that Mr. Pink had duped U.S. forces into taking down his bitter rival.

“You got to hand it to Pink,” an ArmorGroup manager wrote in an email collected by the Senate investigators, “pretty shrewd.”

NO RECORDS OF AFGHAN GUARDS 

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.”

By 2014, G4S had increased its staff worldwide from 136,000 to 620,000, about the size of South Korea’s active military. Revenue had doubled to almost $10 billion a year, according to the company's financial reports.

TODAY, G4S HAS MORE ACTIVE (AND ARMED) EMPLOYEES THAN MOST NATIONS HAVE IN THEIR MILITARY.
IF IT WAS CLASSIFIED AS AN ARMY, IT WOULD RANK AS THE SEVENTH LARGEST IN THE WORLD.

IT IS 40% AMERICAN-FINANCED, MOSTLY BY AMERICAN TAXPAYER'S MONEY.
THAT THERE IS A VERY REAL 'MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL-CONGRESSIONAL COMPLEX' FULLY OPERATIONAL IN AMERICA CAN NO LONGER BE DENIED. 
In the U.S., G4S has field offices in 41 states and employs about 48,000 people nationwide. The company’s presence in America has been essential to its growth, even beyond the contracts it has secured.
Investment disclosures show more than 40% of its backing comes from U.S. investment firms, including BlackRock, Harris Associates and Invesco.

The company has collected more than $6 billion from taxpayers through federal contracts since 2005, according to government data, and G4S has worked for the Army, Navy, Air Force, State Department, Drug Enforcement Administration and Internal Revenue Service. Immigration and Customs Enforcement currently pays G4S about $20 million annually to transport detainees in California.   

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]n 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.”

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. 


International media outlets published more accounts from witnesses and the geopolitical firestorm it had created between Washington and Kabul. New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall reported new evidence from the ground – including another child’s body she discovered – which raised more questions about the American narrative.

But the Pentagon continued to publicly claim Sadeq had been killed, and officials denied to the media that there had been mass civilian casualties. At the same time, military officials worked behind the scenes to steer the narrative back in a more favorable light.

Abdul Salam Qazizad, a local politician who was part of the Afghan government’s delegation to Azizabad, was called to the Shindand air base two weeks after the raid, he said in an interview.
He said two military officers presented the U.S. forces’ point of view and asked him to walk back statements he had made on television about mass civilian casualties.
“But I told them, ‘I am not doing that,’” Qazizad recalled. “‘Humans make mistakes. You made a mistake. Come and tell the people that you made it.’”

The United Nations, Red Cross, Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and Afghan government investigations had differing views of how many Taliban were in the village, if there were any at all.
Villagers said there were none.

What was clear to each group was the count of the dead was far greater than what the Pentagon had claimed.

The confidential U.N. report concerning the Azizabad raid, which has never been made public before, is the most exhaustive and methodical. The organization’s accounting of the casualties included the name of each victim, age, home village and father’s name.

The report includes several pictures of babies wrapped in the white linens.
The investigators, who made four trips to the village, noted the number could never be considered final or certain without exhuming the bodies.


U.N. investigators also tried to determine whether U.S. officials had visited the village after the raid to gather facts in the immediate aftermath.

“The answer from numerous witnesses is no,” the U.N. report states. “No forces have returned to the village since the incident.”

Brigadier Gen. Michael Callan, by 'secret assignment', was charged with investigating the attack on Azizabad for Central Command (CENTCOM).

The Pentagon could no longer maintain its public position and was forced to open a new, full-scale investigation. Callan was picked to lead it.

Emails show the U.N. officials were wary of trusting the Bush administration “to admit culpability for wrong-doing.” But they decided it was best to provide their inquiry and some supporting evidence with the understanding that Callan’s team would coordinate the final U.S. report with them before anything went public.

Two weeks later, U.S. Central Command, led at the time by Lt. General Martin Dempsey, published a summary of Callan’s findings.

CENTCOM exonerated the military of any war crimes, violations of the rules of engagement and most other allegations raised by the villagers.

Callan’s team never briefed the U.N.
CENTCOM’s full 15-6 investigation, which includes more than 1,500 pages of sworn testimony, photographs, videos and other evidence, was never released.

The Pentagon denied journalists and activists who requested it, citing national security considerations.

USA TODAY received most of the records, but not the videos, after suing the Defense Department in 2018.


CENTCOM did not acknowledge the intelligence breakdowns that left most of the force unaware of the funeral ceremony. It also did not explain why regional commanders approved the use of close air support for multiple hours despite information that women and children were in the village.

Lt. Colonel VanLandingham, the law professor and former chief of international law at CENTCOM, said those leaders seemed to fail to take all precautions to avoid civilian harm and then skirted accountability during the investigation.

“Heads should have rolled for that,” she said. “There should have been consequences for that failure.”

Perhaps most notably, the Callan summary did not admit that Sadeq had survived the raid. Intelligence officials told the military investigators he had most likely escaped through an underground cavern just north of the compound.

Sadeq "according to our (human intelligence) sources, is alive and well in his traditional operating area,” one of the officials testified.

Villagers, including 'Mr. White 3', have stated Sadeq was never even in the village. 
Today, the Taliban controls the Shindand District.
Azizabad is in quiet ruins.
Fewer than two dozen families live there.
The houses leveled in the raid were never repaired.

The neighborhood is a pile of mud bricks and walls scarred with bullet holes. 
Mohammad Omar Daudzai, Karzai’s former chief of staff, said he didn’t know the government had failed to deliver on its promises to rebuild Azizabad.

“We should have done it,” he said in an interview. “We are also equally guilty.”

U.N. officials decided against publicly criticizing the Pentagon’s shortfalls to avoid “generating a lot of hostility,” according to an internal U.N. memo.

“It is not advisable to reopen the issue again,” they wrote.

Days after the raid, ArmorGroup hired someone else to take over the staffing: White II’s brother, Gul Ahmed. They called him Mr. White III.


The Afghan federal government sentenced Mr. Pink to death in 2009 after he was convicted of espionage and for giving false information to U.S. forces.
He appealed and is now in Bagram prison.

HAVE YOU EVER KNOWN OF A TIME IN HISTORY WHEN CHILDREN STARTED A WAR?
AND YET, THEY ARE ALWAYS THE MOST INNOCENT VICTIMS OF WAR.

HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED THAT THE "LEADERS" OF NATIONS WHO DO START WARS VERY RARELY ATTEND THE "EVENTS" THEMSELVES?
THEY HAVE ARMIES TO DO THAT, ARMIES MADE UP OF OTHERS' OWN FAMILY MEMBERS AND/OR FRIENDS...LOW-PAID ARMIES WHO GO TO WAR AND KILL AND DIE AND LEAVE US GRIEVING ON BOTH SIDES OF THE "WAR".

WE HAVE ARMIES BECAUSE WE'RE ALL AFRAID OF ONE ANOTHER.
WE HAVE ARMIES BECAUSE WE BELIEVE WE NEED TO HAVE THEM FOR PROTECTION.

HISTORY SHOWS US THAT WE HAVE ALL BEEN 'AGGRESSORS' AT ONE TIME OR ANOTHER.

HUMANS MAKE WAR. ADULT HUMANS TARGET OTHER ADULT HUMANS. .

OFTEN A NATION'S POPULATION DOES NOT WANT WAR, BUT ITS LEADERS CHOOSE WAR FOR THEM.

SOMETIMES THE REASONS THEY CHOOSE FOR WAR ARE INVALID, UNFOUNDED, SELF-SERVING, OR SIMPLY
*WRONG.

I WANT US ALL TO LOOK AT WHAT HAPPENS TO INNOCENT CHILDREN IN WAR.

I WANT US ALL TO THINK LONG AND HARD ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT WE WANT CHILDREN TO KEEP DYING IN WARS.

CAN'T ALL OF US UNDERSTAND THAT WE WOULD HATE ANYONE WHO KILLED OR MAIMED OUR CHILDREN, DESPITE WHAT OUR CHOSEN RELIGIOUS BELIEF MIGHT BE, OR LACK OF ONE? 

DON'T WE ALL REALIZE THAT THERE WOULD NEVER, NEVER BE FORGIVENESS IN THE HEART OF ANY PERSON WHO SAW THEIR CHILD'S LIFE TAKEN

AS A PARENT, I'LL BE HONEST AND ADMIT THAT I WOULD NOT REST UNTIL I HAD KILLED ANY HUMAN, OR ANY LIVING BEING THAT KILLED MY CHILD.

THIS IS THE PRICE OF WARS...MOORE HATE, MORE DEATH, AND SO WARS NEVER CEASE.

REVENGE, RETRIBUTION, 'AN EYE FOR AN EYE', WON'T BRING A CHILD BACK TO LIFE, BUT IT'S SIMPLY THE ONLY THING ANY PARENT WOULD WANT WHO SAW A CHILD MURDERED IN WAR.









_________________________




HERE ARE THEIR NAMES. 

This is an accounting of those who died during the August 22, 2008 night raid in Azizabad, according to a list collected by the United Nations. Several other groups, including the Red Cross and Afghan government, compiled almost identical lists. The U.S. military disputes this accounting because investigators could not independently verify about one third of the casualties with physical evidence.

This list does not include two children. One died in the hospital days after this list was compiled. And the other was discovered in the rubble days later.

THE CHILDREN:  
Sayed Bibi Bari Gui, 6 months, female | Shafiy Abdul Hakim, 4 months, male | Ghulam Siddiq Dawood, 1, male | Zia Gul Noor Mohammad, 1, female | Nagina JanAqa, 2, female | Maida Gui Noor Mohammad, 2, female | Shafiqa Sardar, 2, female | Shakila Dawood, 3, female | Omid Saholat, 3, male | Taza Gul Nooor Mohammad, 3, male | Sher Ahmad Bari Gul, 3, male | Pesar Abdul Rashid, 3, male | Rahima Abdul Hakim, 3, female | Khodai Rahim Mohammad Lal, 3, male | Bibi Gul Mohammad Alam, 4, female | Pesar Saido Khan, 4, male | Roya Timorshah, 5, female | Mohd. Asif Momin, 5, male | Fariba JanAqa, 5, female | Sakinaa Dawood, 5, female | Gulalai Saholat, 5, female | Dokhtar Abdul Rashid, 5, female | Dokhtar Sebghat, 5, female | Zahra Gul, 5, female | Kobra, 5, female | Said Ah. Khan Reza, 6, female | Akhtar Mohammad Mohammad Lal, 6, male | Mohd. Aref Momin, 7, male | Aqila Dawood, 7, female | Dorani Saholat, 7, male | Bashar Abdul Rashid, 7, male | Dokhtar Saido Khan, 7, female | Ghani Jan Abdul Hakim, 7, male | Samira Raza Khan, 8, female | Kubra Timorshah, 8, female | Aman Timorshah, 8, male | Saleem Mohd. Taher, 8, male | Nasima Gui Ahmad, 8, female | Pesar Abdul Rashid, 8, male | Pesar Sebghat, 8, male | Wakel Ahmad Amanullah, 8, male | Nazanin Khan Mohammad, 8, female | Khudadad Habib, 9, male | Dokhtar Saido Khan, 9, female | Rahim Gul Yak khan, 9, male | Roma Timorshah, 10, female | Nabi Jan Noor Mohd., 10, male | Pesar Abdul Rashid, 10, male | Gul Ghotai Sebghat, 10, female | Qamar Gul, 10, female | Aruz TimorShah, 12, female | Dokhtar Abdul Rashid, 12, female | Ibrahim Yak khan, 12, male | Esmatullah Faroq, 13, male | Seyamoh Reza Khan, 14, female | Mir Agha, 14, male | Maldar GulAhmad, 15, female | Mohd. Agha Dawood, 15, male | Jan Shir Shah Alam, 16, male | Pekai Borjan, 17, female | Abdul Aleem Mohd. Khan, 18, male | Sakina GulAhmad, 18, female.

THEIR RELATIVES: 
 Bari Gul Noor Mohd., 22, female | Samira Gul Agha, 25, female | Walida Mohd. Amin Abdullah, 25, female | Khanum Saido Khan, 27, female | Mohammad SaidoKhan, 30, male | Khanam Raza Mohd. Ali, 30, female | Gulrukh Borjan, 30, female | Khanum Taher Mullah Ghani, 31, female | Khanum Timorshah Babuddin, 32, female | Suraya Glukhan, 32, female | Shir Ahmad Mobin, 35, male | Zalaikha Noor Mohd., 35, female | Taher Shahnawaz Khan, 38, male | Abdul Rashid Mohadmmd, 40, male | Abdul Zaher , 40, male | Mohd Lal Mohd. Ali, 40, male | Abdul Raza Lal Mohd Khan, 45, male | Sobhat Khudal-Rahim, 50, male | Mohd. Khan Mohd. Ali, 50, male | Khanum Babuddin, 50, female | Bahaul-Haq Abdul Karim, 60, male | Shireen Mullah Manan, 60, female | Khanum Sauat Musa khan, 60, female | Khanum Borjan, 73, female | Habib Mohd. Ghaus, 76, male | Borjan Shahnawaz Khan, 82, male | Noor Mohd. Dost Mohd., 82, male | Mohd Ali Mir Afghan, 90, male


-- SEE ALSO: Visual story: A year of violence at G4S, in charts


-- MAY 31, 2012   
Outraged Over Atrocities (Unless They’re Ours)



-- AND IT GOES ON AND ON AND ON.  
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — March 12, 2012
The Taliban vowed revenge Monday for an "inhumane attack" in which an American soldier allegedly shot to death 16 civilians in southern Afghanistan and torched their bodies — an assault that has fueled anger still simmering after U.S. troops burned Qurans last month.

U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan have stepped up security following the shootings Sunday in Kandahar province out of concern about retaliatory attacks. The U.S. Embassy has also warned American citizens in Afghanistan about the possibility of reprisals.

-- Afghanistan: US confirms drone attack that killed 30 farmers.     
SEPT. 20, 2019   
U.S. military forces in Afghanistan confirmed Thursday a drone strike on militant targets in the Nangarhar province that killed 30 pine nut farmers.

The attack early Thursday happened in the Wazir Tangi area in the Khagyani district where U.S. officials said the strike was intended to destroy a location used by Islamic State fighters.//WW