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AP. 14 March 2002. 'God Knows' Why U.S. Bombed Hamlet Where Scores of Dead Now Subject of Compensation Claim. CHOKER KARAIZ -- The stricken old man could barely walk through the rubble of his village. The vision of the torn bodies of women and children was still too real in his mind's eye. "Every time I walk through here, I see the scene all over again," Mohammad Qasin said Thursday. Villagers say 52 people, mostly women and children, were killed in the bombing and strafing four months ago that obliterated this isolated hamlet, a few houses ringed by irrigated wheat fields among miles of semi-desert emptiness in southern Afghanistan. Now the case of Choker Karaiz is one of dozens of U.S. air attacks for which survivors have filed claims for compensation. "We don't know. God knows," survivor Aziz Ahmed said Thursday when asked why U.S. pilots might have attacked this tiny, mud-walled place one night in late October. The government of Kandahar province alone has filed more than 70 compensation cases involving U.S. air attacks with the central government in Kabul, provincial spokesman Yusuf Pashtun said Wednesday. "Hamid Karzai said send them to the Ministry of the Interior," Pashtun said, referring to Afghanistan's interim national leader. Pashtun said four cases involved multiple deaths in Kandahar villages, with the biggest being Choker Karaiz, 25 miles east of Kandahar city. The rest were cases of single deaths or limited damage here and there in the province, he said. Others, "hard to prove," were not forwarded to Kabul, he said. The provincial spokesman said he had no information on how the compensation process will work. It could not be learned immediately whether the U.S. government would consider such claims, or whether they would be handled exclusively by the Afghan government or by a joint commission. Maj. Brad Lowell, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said Thursday he was unaware of any process for Afghans to make claims against the U.S. military [!]. Last month the Pentagon acknowledged that U.S. Army forces killed 14 or more Afghans who were neither al-Qaida nor Taliban members during a raid in Uruzgan province in January. Provincial Gov. Jan Mohammed delivered [a whopping] $1,000 to $2,000 to each dead man's family, as well as a verbal apology relayed on behalf of high-ranking U.S. officials he declined to identify. The Taliban took a group of foreign reporters to the village in November and claimed 92 people died there. Reporters at the time counted about 15 graves. The Choker Karaiz raid is not among the incidents the U.S. military is investigating as possibly involving the killing of civilians, U.S. Central Command spokesman Lt. Col. Martin Compton said Thursday. Peter Bouckaert, a researcher with the New York-based Human Rights Watch, independently interviewed people in Choker Karaiz in an effort to establish a civilian casualty toll. "We believe that at least 25 and possibly as many as 35 civilians died in this bombing raid. Often times civilians give random numbers that tend to be too high but we try to confirm as many as possible and we were able to confirm at least 25 here." The Afghan Red Crescent Society in Kandahar - the equivalent of the Red Cross - has examined and compiled reports of civilian casualties in the province in the October-to-January U.S. air war, and its list shows 65 dead at Choker Karaiz, said the society's Abdul Latif. "We did investigations after hearing reports from various places," he said. The different estimates of fatalities may result from the fact that some of the Choker Karaiz dead were buried elsewhere, some injured may have died later in distant hospitals, and some killed were Kochis, members of Afghan nomad families who had set their tents down on the fringes of the farmland and who later may not have been counted. "When the Kochis heard the bombing, they started running toward the mountains - without shoes even - and the planes chased them, firing at them, and killed all of them," said Shamsullah, a 26-year-old man who said 19 members of his family, mostly cousins, were killed in the village. Survivors said the planes attacked around midnight on Oct. 28, first dropping a single bomb on the hamlet - a traditional mud-walled compound of eight houses, plus an inner irrigation pond. The Americans followed with strafing runs that villagers said killed most of the victims as they ran panic-stricken for shelter. Finally, a half-dozen more bombs were dropped, survivors said. Today, only two little chicken hutches, made of mud, are left standing. The houses are heaps of broken mud blocks, with shredded metal cans and plates, shoes and shards of shrapnel scattered among the craters and piles of rubble. The villages in this region are spaced miles apart over rock-strewn flatlands with lines of sight extending to distant horizons. Nothing can be seen near Choker Karaiz suggesting any presence of al-Qaida terrorist or Taliban military targets. "This place didn't look like anything belonging to the government," said Saifullah, a neighbor and farmer in his 40s. "The bullets were coming down from the planes like the spring rain - first from one direction, then the other," said the Saifullah's cousin Aziz Ahmed, 36, who survived with slight wounds by jumping into a ditch. "Fourteen or 15 died here," Niaz Mohammad, 40, a farmer from nearby, said of one collapsed house. "I helped dig them out the next morning." The aged Mohammad Qasin, his voice shaking and eyes tearing, told of helping pile the bodies into a tractor wagon that next day, to haul them back to Kandahar city. How many bodies? "I don't know," he said. "We buried 19 here. The rest belonged in the city. I can't do the numbers." He walked away. Neither Afghan nor U.S. authorities have calculated Afghanistan's civilian death toll in the war on terrorism. Estimates have placed the civilian dead in the thousands. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barry Stoller http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ProletarianNews --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: [email protected] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9617B Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
