THE CIA’S AFGHAN DEATH SQUADS: A U.S.-Backed Militia That Kills Children May Be America’s Exit Strategy From Its Longest War

This is such a vitally important article that has not been covered, of course, by the mainstream corporate funded American media. We need to know the horrifying and brutal truth about the insidious, pervasive, and powerful shadow side of the American government. The impact of these endless wars ― the massacres and sheer horror, the destruction and dislocations, the unfathomable suffering and losses, and the utter inhuman madness ― will continue as long as we turn a blind eye, are oblivious and apathetic, and remain in the fog of our indoctrination, ignorance, and illusions. Our inaction makes us complicit with murder, horror, and unbearable suffering. And because of this, we must be brave enough to know what is happening. Only then will we rise up together and stop the insanity of the Military Industrial Complex and its greed, violence, and cruelty that has long been destroying other nations, our nation, and the planet. ― Molly 

12-year-old Bilal survived a December 2018 night raid on his madrassa in Afghanistan’s Wardak Province, during which 12 other boys were massacred. “There were Americans in the corridor,” Bilal told The Intercept. “We could hear them speaking.” Photo: Andrew Quilty/Agence Vu

By Andrew Quilty

THE BUZZ OF a drone at night was the first sign of trouble.

Next came the roar of a larger, low-flying aircraft, which alerted residents of the Afghan village of Omar Khail that soldiers were nearby. Men in camouflage moved through the streets speaking Pashto and English. It was December 2018, and the air was frigid. They made their way to the madrassa, or religious school, where more than two dozen boys between the ages of 9 and 18 slept on the floors of several dormitory rooms.

A neighbor watching from a window across the street saw a flash and heard a loud explosion as the front gate of the madrassa was blown open. Inside, the noise awakened 12-year-old Bilal, who was huddled in a room with nine other boys when an Afghan soldier burst through the door.

“Wake up!” the man yelled in Pashto, pointing at the boys one by one with the barrel of his rifle, which was mounted with a flashlight. A second soldier entered, chose the two tallest boys, and led them out the door. The first soldier turned to leave, but before he did, he issued a warning to the rest of the boys cowering before him: “If I find you in this madrassa again, we won’t leave a single child alive.”

Bilal and the others squeezed together as far from the door as they could, with their backs to a large window facing a central courtyard. Many were in tears; others couldn’t speak. From the hallway, Bilal heard words he recognized as English.

“They’re not going to let us live,” a student murmured.

In preparation for death, some of the boys recited the Muslim declaration of faith, known as the Shahada: “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.”

Just then, the sound of automatic gunfire tore along the corridor. “For a very short time,” Bilal said, it sounded like “there were many guns.” Boys’ screams came next, followed by two loud explosions. “One shook the whole building,” said Bilal. “We didn’t hear anything after this. Everyone was silent.”

When the sun rose hours later, Bilal and about a dozen other students remained crouching in silence, some still trembling with fear. Nearby, in two of the school’s other rooms and in the basement, 12 more boys, their bodies mauled by bullets, lay crumpled on the floor.

The main road through Wardak’s Chak District, where night raids by the CIA-led 01 strike force unit and accompanying U.S. airstrikes killed more than a dozen civilians in 2018 and 2019.

 

Photo: Andrew Quilty/Agence Vu

THE 12 BOYS KILLED in the madrassa at Omar Khail that winter night were among scores of civilians massacred during at least 10 previously undocumented night raids in the central Afghan province of Wardak. Beginning in December 2018 and continuing for at least a year, Afghan operatives believed to belong to an elite CIA-trained paramilitary unit known as 01, in partnership with U.S. special operations forces and air power, unleashed a campaign of terror against civilians. This story is based on interviews with more than 50 Wardak residents, including 20 survivors and firsthand witnesses and 29 victims’ relatives and local residents who witnessed the aftermath of the killings within hours of when they occurred. Some of those accounts were corroborated by local officials, analysts, and community representatives.    

The 10 raids resulted in the deaths of at least 51 civilians, according to The Intercept’s reporting. In most cases, men and boys as young as 8, few of whom appear to have had any formal relationship with the Taliban, were summarily executed. Some died alone, others alongside friends and family. Several raids were accompanied by airstrikes or, in at least one instance, the detonation of hand-laid explosives targeting structures known to be occupied by civilians.

The Intercept has changed the names of those killed in the raids and of the survivors, witnesses, and victims’ relatives we spoke with to shield them from further harm. Some requested anonymity because they feared retribution from pro-government forces, while others worried the Taliban would punish them for speaking candidly to a journalist.

Residents from four districts in Wardak — Nerkh, Chak, Sayedabad, and Daymirdad — spoke of a string of massacres, executions, mutilation, forced disappearances, attacks on medical facilities, and airstrikes targeting structures known to house civilians. The victims, according to these residents, were rarely Taliban. Yet the Afghan unit and its American masters have never been publicly held accountable by either the Afghan or U.S. governments.

A map shows the locations of at least 10 previously undocumented night raids by Afghan operatives believed to belong to an elite CIA-trained paramilitary unit known as 01.

 

Map: The Intercept

The Americans “step on all the rules of war, human rights, all the things they said they’d bring to Afghanistan,” said Wardak provincial council head Akhtar Mohammad Tahiri. They are “conducting themselves as terrorists. They show terror and violence and think they’ll bring control this way.”

Known collectively as strike force units because of their targeted, aggressive methods, the shadowy CIA-backed militias nominally fall under the purview of the National Directorate of Security, or NDS, Afghanistan’s intelligence service. They are comprised of 01, which operates primarily in central Afghan provinces including Wardak and Logar; 02, which is based in Jalalabad and works in the eastern part of the country; 03, also known as the Kandahar Strike Force, which operates in the south; and 04, which conducts raids in Kunar and adjacent provinces in the northeast. Two units in the southeast, the Khost Protection Force and the Shaheen Forces, the latter of which emerged in the eastern Afghan province of Paktika in 2019, are believed to function under similar authority.

The units’ American CIA advisers go by pseudonyms or call signs rather than names. They not only train Afghan unit members, but also choose their targets, which the Americans call “jackpots”; issue detailed pre-mission briefings; and accompany Afghan paramilitaries on the ground during raids. The Afghans and Americans are ferried to remote villages at night by American helicopters, and American assault aircraft hover overhead while they conduct their raids, providing lethal firepower that is sometimes directed at health clinics, madrassa dormitories, or civilian homes.

“I don’t know whether they’re special forces or a task force or CIA,” said an NDS counterterrorism officer from Wardak who accompanied 01 on missions until late 2018, but “Americans are always with them.”

The CIA has a long history of training, arming, and funding indigenous militia networks. Since its birth in 1947, the agency has supported anti-communist outfits in Greece, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and Central America, as well as the Afghan mujahedeen in the 1980s. Since the September 11 attacks, the CIA has repurposed and supercharged those methods, dispensing training and weapons to supposed allies from Somalia to Syria with dubious results.

But the level of CIA involvement in Afghanistan since the war on terror began has few precedents. In 2013, more than $2.5 billion — nearly 5 percent of the entire U.S. intelligence budget — was allocated for covert action, the category under which the agency’s Afghan strike force unit program falls, according to documents leaked by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. From establishing the strike force units to selecting their targets, overseeing their missions, and using special operations forces borrowed from the Pentagon to coordinate air support, the network of CIA-run militias in Afghanistan is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation, apart from America’s well-documented drone program, of the secret war the U.S. intelligence agency is waging around the globe.

The CIA “has long seen [Afghanistan] as their war,” said Patricia Gossman, an associate director for the Asia division at Human Rights Watch who has worked in Afghanistan since the 1990s.

As the U.S. withdraws, the unaccountable militias it has nurtured are beginning to look like a valuable proxy for regular military forces under the leadership of Joe Biden, who as vice president advocated a lighter military footprint and greater focus on counterterrorism in Afghanistan. Biden was credited in 2010 with convincing President Barack Obama to adopt a more aggressive approach in Afghanistan, doubling down on drones, intelligence operatives, and small teams of door-kicking special forces in place of the “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency approach implemented by General Stanley McChrystal and continued under his successor General David Petraeus.

Please continue this article here: https://theintercept.com/2020/12/18/afghanistan-cia-militia-01-strike-force/