Afghanistan : Civilians Caught In The Crossfire

By Media Partner – The Bureau of Investigative Journalism: Hamid Gul just wanted his family to be safe. The 18-year old shopkeeper lived in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Afghanistan’s much fought over Helmand province. After his father was killed by an improvised explosive device (IED) in 2013, Hamid and his older brother, Mirwais, had to take care of his mother and younger siblings.

 

A focus of Taliban violence for many years, Lashkar Gah became much more dangerous after the US handed over primary responsibility for the security of Afghanistan to the Kabul government at the end of 2014. Not long after, districts in northern Helmand began to fall and Lashkar Gah looked in a perilous situation.

In 2016, Hamid sent his mother and siblings back to their family home in the district of Sangin. The insurgents had swept through most of the district earlier that year; this meant Hamid’s family home, now behind Taliban lines, would no longer be caught in the crossfire. Hamid stayed in Lashkar Gah to earn enough money to provide for the family, while Mirwais continued his studies at the city’s university.

By the start of 2017 the Taliban was pushing hard to take Sangin city’s district centre, a fortified compound which housed the local security and administrative officials, just a few miles from Hamid Gul’s family home. The compound was the only thing stopping the Taliban from claiming the whole district as their own. The US, which had lost at least 70 of its own troops keeping Sangin out of insurgent hands over the years, scrambled to respond with scores of airstrikes.

Hamid was convinced that his family were still safer behind Taliban lines than in Laskhar Gah, one of the Taliban’s prime targets. But on the morning of February 10 2017, he got an unexpected phone call from a neighbour in Sangin: the family’s house had been flattened.

In that one night Hamid Gul lost his 50 year-old mother, Bibi Bakhtawara, six brothers and a sister. All seven children were under 16 years of age. Bibi Rahmania, his niece, also died. She was just two years old.

 

Hamid was not the only person given devastating news on that day. On the same night, a few hours later, a second civilian house, just a few miles away from his own, was also hit. The following night a third one was struck.

To this day, there is no consensus about what happened to those three houses and why. What is clear, however, is that by the end of those three days in early February five women and 19 children were dead, among a full toll of 26 civilians, a Bureau investigation has established.

Three local officials interviewed by Bureau reporters on the ground claimed US airstrikes had destroyed the houses and killed their inhabitants. The United Nations (UN) said the same, in its biannual accounting of Afghan civilians killed in the war, released in July 2017, adding that there appeared to have been no fighting in the area at the time, meaning the attacks may have been pre-planned.

A spokesperson for Resolute Support, the US-led Nato mission in Afghanistan, told the Bureau that after four investigations the organisation could not confirm or deny responsibility for killing the civilians, though he pushed back strongly against the UN’s claims that there was no fighting in the villages at the time. Resolute Support has officially concluded the case as “disputed”, one of four categories for recording allegations of civilian casualties. It was used in this case because Resolute Support cannot decide if insurgents or the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) were responsible for the casualties, the spokesperson told the Bureau.

The fact that no-one has taken responsibility for the deaths of 24 women and children offers an insight into the lack of accountability of America’s longest-running conflict, which it now fights largely from the air under opaque rules of engagement against 20-odd armed groups.

 

US Policy in Flux

The US troop presence in Afghanistan – which reached 100,000 at the height of the occupation in 2011 – was slashed to a light footprint of around 9,800 by March 2015, along with around 6,300 soldiers from Nato and non-Nato allies. By this point the US and its partners had stopped fighting the Taliban. The Afghan forces were meant to have assumed primary responsibility for that effort, with Resolute Support troops training and advising them in a non-combat role.

Collateral Damage

Even if the source of the high explosives that flattened their houses was unclear, for Gul and other residents of Sangin there was nothing ambiguous about their effects.

Shopkeeper Fida Mohammad lived in a village just a few miles away from Gul. His village was the second place to be hit during those three days in early February.

His son, Habib Rahman, 21, told the Bureau that February 9 2017 had been an ordinary day. The family ate dinner together and went to bed. Fida Mohammad’s house was an extended building, stretched around a compound. Rahman and two of his brothers lived on one side of the house with their families, Fida and his wives lived on the other side, along with more of his children.

A blast, at about one o’clock in the morning, woke Rahman and the rest of the family on his side of the house. They dashed outside to find their father’s side of the home flattened. They scrabbled through the rubble. Each time they turned up a body they hoped in vain for a sign of life. All in all they lost 13 family members that night, including Habib Rahman’s mother and step-mother, as well as his four sisters Amina, 17, Habiba, 15, Najiba, aged eight and Fatima, aged just four. Rahman also lost a niece, Nooria, who was one year old.

The next night, in the small hours of February 11 2017, Haji Mullah Ghafar was going to early morning prayers in the village of Shakar Sheela, just outside of Taliban territory. A local imam, or prayer leader, he was in the mosque when a blast flattened his house.

His 55-year old wife Bibi Sara was killed, along with his nine year-old son, Zia and Freshta, his eight year-old daughter. His grandson, Rohullah, aged just nine, also died.

 

Investigating the attacks

It is not clear what the target could have been in any of these strikes. The UN said nine Taliban fighters were killed when the house next door to Gul’s was hit, though Gul denies there were any Taliban combatants in his village.

Rahman, too, said that there were no Taliban in his village, insisting the closest were about 15 minutes walk away. But Hayatullah Hayat, the governor of Helmand, told the Bureau that the house next door to Fida Mohammad’s had been struck because the Taliban were using it as a base for attacks on the district centre. Sardar Mohammad, an Afghan policeman, also said there were Taliban nearby. According to Mohammad, the strike killed five Taliban fighters who were sheltering in Fida’s compound after incoming fire had hit their previous position.

Ghafar also said there was no Taliban near his house, just a nearby army checkpoint. But Sardar Agha Ibrahimkhel, an Afghan army captain, said that unbeknownst to Ghafar Taliban fighters had been trying to dig a tunnel under one of the checkpoints. Scores of Afghan soldiers in Sangin had been killed by the Taliban tunnelling under checkpoints, packing the shafts with explosives and then detonating the charges.

Ibrahimkhel said the US struck Ghafar’s house by accident as they tried to repel the Taliban advance. He said that the problem was that the US “see the people in the area but can’t tell whether they are civilians or others”.

 

Finding out who is responsible for causing civilian harm is important not just from the point of view of justice. It is vital for forces which want to avoid civilian harm to learn lessons from actions that cause it. Knowing how civilians came to be killed informs policies and rules of operations.

Afghanistan has been a textbook example of how policies at the top can affect the civilian death rate on the ground. In 2008, a quarter of all civilian deaths in Afghanistan were attributed to either Afghan government or Nato airstrikes. Six months after the UN report came out, General Stanley McChrystal, the Nato commander in Afghanistan, vowed to reverse the trend and banned the use of airstrikes on domestic homes in all but the most extreme circumstances for this express purpose. His successor the next year, General David Petraeus, elaborated on this. He told commanders they had to be certain there were no civilians present before allowing strikes to go ahead, except on two conditions that were redacted from the published version of his order.

Policies such as these slashed the civilian casualty rate. In 2009 a civilian died in every sixth strike, on average. In 2010 this was down to one dead in every fifteenth strike.

At some point the near-blanket ban on targeting domestic buildings seems to have been changed. After a series of high profile strikes with high civilian casualty counts, culminating in the bombardment of houses in the northern city of Kunduz that killed 33 civilians, a new rule was introduced requiring commanders to get permission from headquarters in Kabul before striking a building.

 

If there was decisive evidence the US did carry out the Sangin strikes, it could trigger further tightening of restrictions on targeting buildings. If it was ANSF mortars or rockets then its own civilian casualty mitigation team could use it to develop better policies and further reduce civilian casualties.

The problem is, it is harder to investigate civilian casualties allegations from airstrikes with only a small force and limited or zero access to the scene of strikes, a senior US military official told the Bureau.

The official’s most recent work has focussed on Iraq and Syria, but his analysis also applies to Afghanistan, he said. “Not only do we not have access, as the military”, but that even aid agencies don’t “have access they once had…so it’s much harder to really dig into an allegation.”

Now, “when I do my post strike analysis we may pick up signals intelligence that an ambulance got launched out to that particular location or that there’s a news report that there were civilian casualties that happened there.” US troops cannot go to the scene and see the impact and talk to people and “that is incredibly challenging to try and figure out what exactly happened,” the official added.

“The challenge now is the access and the lack of access. Before we had 150,000 troops there”. He added that then it might not find out exactly what happened, the “ground truth”. However, he added, you did at least get “another perspective or an allegation, whereas now we don’t have that luxury any more.”

In the case of Sangin, Resolute Support said it had “accounted for every munition down to precise latitude and longitude” and “could not find a link between our strikes and the alleged civilian casualties”. But it was short of an outright denial.

Helmand’s governor told the Bureau in July an Afghan government investigation was still going on. “I hope we will reach a conclusion that whether these were done by the RS [Resolute Support], or by the rockets of the enemies,” he said.

 

 

 

 

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