{"id":197210,"date":"2019-11-01T08:07:13","date_gmt":"2019-11-01T08:07:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=197210"},"modified":"2019-11-04T08:00:17","modified_gmt":"2019-11-04T08:00:17","slug":"report-finds-cia-backed-death-squads-in-afghanistan-committing-war-crimes-atrocities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=197210","title":{"rendered":"Report Finds CIA-Backed Death Squads in Afghanistan Committing War Crimes, Atrocities"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 style=\"text-align: center;\">\u201cTerrorizing the Populace\u201d<\/h3>\n<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Eion Higgins \u2013 Activist Post Aug 31, 2019<\/strong><\/h1>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">CIA-backed death squads in Afghanistan have committed a number of human rights violations over the last year, a Human Rights Watch report found Thursday, and the militant groups are likely to be the lasting legacy of the U.S. war in the country.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">\u201cThey do counterinsurgency the old-fashioned way,\u201d <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #ccffff; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/attackerman\/status\/1189859860936101890\">tweeted<\/a><\/strong><\/span> <em>Daily Beast<\/em> national security reporter Spencer Ackerman, \u201cterrorizing the populace.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">The HRW report reviewed cases of abuse from late 2017 to the middle of 2019 in Afghanistan, interviewing 39 Afghans and a number of rights groups in the country. The group found a pattern of extreme violence from the CIA-trained and backed death squads:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">These strike forces have unlawfully killed civilians during night raids, forcibly disappeared detainees, and attacked healthcare facilities for allegedly treating insurgent fighters. Civilian casualties from these raids and air operations have dramatically increased in the last two years.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">In a statement, HRW associate Asia director Patricia Grossman\u2014who was the report\u2019s lead author\u2014<a style=\"color: #ccffff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/newswire\/2019\/10\/31\/afghanistan-cia-backed-forces-commit-atrocities\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>said<\/strong><\/span><\/a> that the CIA, through backing the militant groups, had \u201cconsigned entire communities to the terror of abusive night raids and indiscriminate airstrikes.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">\u201cThese are not isolated cases but illustrative of a larger pattern of serious laws-of-war violations\u2014and even war crimes\u2014by these paramilitary forces,\u201d Grossman added.<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Even after we wrapped up this report, I learned of more incidents.The cases in it represent a fraction of the killings and enforced disappearances that are decimating communities. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/RoH0RjWULs\">https:\/\/t.co\/RoH0RjWULs<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Patricia Gossman (@pagossman) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/pagossman\/status\/1189883004061175809?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">October 31, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">Among the atrocities <a style=\"color: #ccffff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.hrw.org\/report\/2019\/10\/31\/theyve-shot-many\/abusive-night-raids-cia-backed-afghan-strike-forces\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>detailed<\/strong><\/span><\/a> in the report are a number of mass killings. In October 2018, paramilitary forces murdered \u201cfive civilian members of one family, including an elderly woman and child\u201d in Nangharhar province. Just two months later, in December, a group to the south in Paktia province raided a village and killed six civilians.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">CIA press secretary Timothy Barrett<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong> <a style=\"color: #ccffff; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2019\/oct\/31\/human-rights-watch-report-links-cia-backed-units-to-afghanistan-abuses\">told<\/a><\/strong><\/span> <em>The Guardian<\/em> that the organization \u201cconducts its global operations in accordance with law and under a robust system of oversight.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">Survivors of CIA-backed paramilitary violence tell a different story:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">According to witnesses, on 11 August this year troops from one of these CIA-backed units\u2014which, the witnesses said, was accompanied by at least one U.S. soldier and a translator\u2014served as judge, jury and executioner for 11 men in Kulgago village.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">Four were executed in the family compound of Dr. Ulfatullah, a pharmacist who lost two sons and two cousins, and has moved his family to Kabul to campaign for justice. \u201cThe blood of our sons is still in the rooms where they were killed so it\u2019s difficult for us to live there,\u201d he told <em>The Guardian<\/em> in the Afghan capital.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">John Sifton, HRW\u2019s Asia advocacy director,<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong> <a style=\"color: #ccffff; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/cias-afghan-militias-are-death-squads-new-human-rights-watch-investigation-finds\">said<\/a><\/strong><\/span> in an interview with <em>The Daily Beast<\/em>\u2018s Ackerman that things don\u2019t have to be this way.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">\u201cThere isn\u2019t a rule written somewhere at Langley that says the CIA can only train and fund militias that commit atrocities,\u201d said Sifton. \u201cThe CIA could have used its funding and leverage to insist that militias working with it follow the rules of law.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">This article first appeared in <strong><em><a style=\"color: #ccffff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/news\/2019\/10\/31\/terrorizing-populace-report-finds-cia-backed-death-squads-afghanistan-committing-war\">Common Dreams<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After nearly two decades this is the real legacy of Western intervention<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Afghanistan"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=197210"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":197211,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197210\/revisions\/197211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=197210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=197210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=197210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}