[President Hamid Karzai condemned the attacks, calling them in a statement an “inhuman and intentional act” and demanding justice. Both President Obama and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta called Mr. Karzai, expressing condolences and promising thorough investigations. “This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan,” Mr. Obama said in a statement.]
By
Taimoor Shah And Graham Bowley
 |
Allauddin
Khan/Associated Press
The
bodies of several men and a child who witnesses said were
killed
by a United States Army sergeant in southern Afghanistan.
|
PANJWAI, Afghanistan — Stalking from home to home, a United States Army sergeant
methodically killed at least 16 civilians, 9 of them children, in a rural
stretch of southern Afghanistan on Sunday, igniting fears of a new wave of
anti-American hostility, Afghan and American officials said.
Following the attacks, the Taliban threatened
vengeance, as the insurgents often do after Western actions they depict as
atrocities. And, on its Web site on Monday, a Taliban statement denounced the
killings, saying they were the latest in a series of humiliations against the
Afghan people.
Coming after a period of deepening public
outrage, spurred by the Koran burning by
American personnel last month and an earlier video showing American Marines
urinating on dead militants, the possibility of a violent reaction to the
killings added to a sense of siege here among Western personnel. Officials
described growing concern over a cascade of missteps and offenses that has cast
doubt on the ability of NATO personnel to carry out their mission and has left
troops and trainers increasingly vulnerable to violence by Afghans seeking
revenge.
But early on Monday, with the attacker in the
custody of American forces, the public mood in Kandahar and Kabul seemed
subdued with no immediate sign of protests. Most of the dead were buried
Sunday, with the final funeral scheduled for Monday.
Residents of three villages in the Panjwai
district of Kandahar Province described a terrifying string of attacks in which
the soldier, who had walked more than a mile from his base, tried door after
door, eventually breaking in to kill within three separate houses. The man
gathered 11 bodies, including those of 4 girls younger than 6, and set fire to
them, villagers said.
President Hamid Karzai condemned the attacks,
calling them in a statement an “inhuman and intentional act” and demanding
justice. Both President Obama and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta called Mr.
Karzai, expressing condolences and promising thorough investigations. “This
incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional
character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the
people of Afghanistan,” Mr. Obama said in a statement.
American officials in Kabul were scrambling to
understand what had happened, and appealed for calm, at a moment when the
United States and Afghanistan are in tense negotiations on the terms of the
long-term American presence in the country.
The officials said the suspect was an Army staff sergeant
who acted alone and then surrendered. “The initial reporting that we have at
this time indicates there was one shooter, and we have one man in custody,”
said Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings, a NATO spokesman.
A senior American military official said Sunday
evening that the sergeant was attached to a unit based at Joint Base
Lewis-McChord, a major Army and Air Force installation near Tacoma, Wash., and
that he had been part of what is called a village stabilization operation in
Afghanistan. In those operations, teams of Green Berets, supported by other
soldiers, try to develop close ties with village elders, organize local police
units and track down Taliban leaders. The official said the sergeant was not a
Green Beret himself.
Another senior military official said the
sergeant was 38 and married with two children. He had served three tours of
duty in Iraq, this official said, and had been deployed to Afghanistan for the
first time in December. Yet another military official said he has served in the
Army for 11 years.
In Panjwai, a reporter for The New York Times who
inspected bodies that had been taken to the nearby American military base
counted 16 dead, including five children with single gunshot wounds to the
head, and saw burns on some of the children’s legs and heads. “All the family
members were killed, the dead put in a room, and blankets were put over the
corpses and they were burned,” said Anar Gula, an elderly neighbor who rushed
to the house after the soldier had left. “We put out the fire.”
The villagers also brought some of the burned
blankets on motorbikes to display at the base, Camp Belambay, in Kandahar, and
show that the bodies had been set alight. Soon, more than 300 people had
gathered outside to protest.
At least five Afghans were wounded in the
attacks, officials said, some of them seriously, indicating the death toll
could rise. NATO said several casualties were being treated at a military
hospital.
One of the survivors from the attacks, Abdul
Hadi, 40, said he was at home when a soldier broke down the door.
“My father went out to find out what was
happening, and he was killed,” he said. “I was trying to go out and find out
about the shooting, but someone told me not to move, and I was covered by the
women in my family in my room, so that is why I survived.”
Mr. Hadi said there was more than one soldier
involved in the attacks, and at least five other villagers described seeing a
number of soldiers, and also a helicopter and flares at the scene. But that
claim was unconfirmed — other Afghan residents described seeing only one gunman
— and it was unclear whether extra troops had been sent out to the village
after the attack to catch the gunman.
In a measure of the mounting mistrust between
Afghans and the coalition, however, many Afghans, including lawmakers and other
officials, said they believed the attacks had been planned, and were
incredulous that one American soldier could have carried out such attacks
without help. In his statement, Mr. Karzai said “American forces” had entered
the houses in Panjwai, but at another point he said the killings were the act
of an individual soldier.
United States officials and diplomats insisted
that there had been only one attacker. A senior American diplomat told a
meeting on Monday morning with diplomats from allied countries that the gunman
acted alone after walking off the base, first to a village and then to a
cluster of houses some 500 yards away. He kept shooting before returning to the
base. He is to face charges under the military justice system, the officials
said.
Some Afghans called for calm. Abdul Hadi
Arghandihwal, the minister of economy and the leader of Hezb-e-Islami, a major
Afghan political party with Islamist leanings, said there would probably be new
protests. But he said the killings should be seen as the act of an individual
and not of the United States.
“It is not the decision of the Army officer to
order somebody to do something like this,” he said. “Probably there are going
to be many demonstrations, but it will not change the decisions of our
government about our relationship with the United States.”
Elsewhere, news of the killings was spreading
only slowly. Other than the protest at the base in Kandahar, there were no
immediate signs of the fury that fueled rioting across the country after the
burning of Korans by American military personnel in February.
Both the United States Embassy in Kabul, which
immediately urged caution among Americans traveling or living in Afghanistan,
and the military coalition rushed to head off any further outrage, deploring
the attacks, offering condolences for the families and promising the soldier
would be brought to justice. Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson, the NATO spokesman,
expressed his “deep sadness” and said that while the motive was not yet clear,
it looked like an isolated episode.
“I am not linking this to the recent incidents
over the recent days and weeks,” he said. “It looks very much like an
individual act. We have to look into the background behind it.”
Adding to the sense of concern, the killings
occurred two days after an episode in Kapisa Province, in eastern Afghanistan,
in which NATO helicopters apparently hunting Taliban insurgents instead fired
on civilians, killing four and wounding three others, Afghan officials said.
About 1,200 demonstrators marched in protest in Kapisa on Saturday.
The rapid arrest on Sunday could help prevent a
repeat of last month’s unrest. The reaction to the Koran-burning case revealed
a huge cultural gap between the Americans, who saw it as an unfortunate
mistake, and the Afghans, who viewed it as a crime and wanted to see those
responsible tried as criminals.
The Afghans and Americans agreed on the severity
of the killings on Sunday, though, and General Jacobson said the case would be
aggressively pursued by American legal authorities.
It was less clear how the attacks would affect
the talks between Kabul and Washington, known as strategic partnership talks,
which will define the American presence and role in the country after the
withdrawal of combat troops. The upheaval prompted by the Koran burnings led to
a near-breakdown in those talks, but they appeared tentatively back on track
after a deal struck Friday for the Afghans to assume control of the main
coalition prison in six months.
The strategic partnership talks must still
address differences over the American campaign of night raids on Afghan houses.
The attack on Sunday may complicate that issue, because it bore some
similarities to the night raids carried out by coalition forces in Afghanistan.
The shootings also carried some echoes of an
attack in March 2007 in eastern Afghanistan, when several Marines opened fire
with automatic weapons, killing as many as 19 civilians after a suicide car
bomb struck the Marines’ convoy, wounding one Marine.
Panjwai, a rural district near the city of
Kandahar, was traditionally a Taliban stronghold. It was a focus of the United
States military offensive in 2010 and was the scene of heavy fighting.
Two American soldiers were killed by small-arms
fire in Panjwai on March 1, and three died in a roadside bomb attack in
February.
Taimoor Shah reported from Panjwai, Afghanistan, and Graham Bowley
from Kabul. Reporting was contributed by Sharifullah Sahak, Rod Nordland and
Matthew Rosenberg from Kabul; Eric Schmitt from Washington; William Yardley
from Tacoma, Wash.; James Dao from New York; and Isolde Raftery from Seattle.
