Shooting in Afghanistan

"Landep News"

Shooting in Afghanistan

Afghan and American authorities on Sunday reported that an U.S. sergeant killed 16 civilians, 9 of them children, as he stalked from home to home, in a village in southern Afghanistan. The incident caused the Taliban to pledge revenge against the Western troops in the embattled country.
Most of the dead are said to have been buried on Sunday, and a last burial of one of them was scheduled for Monday. The eye witnesses in three villages of the Panjwai district in  Kandahar province said that the man had walked a mile away from the base, tried door by door, entered and killed eleven people, four of them being girls under 6. He gathered the bodies and set them on fire.
Then the sergeant surrendered to the NATO troops, which disclosed that he had been alone in the attack and that he was attached to the unit based at the Joint Base Lewis-McChord, an installation at Tacoma, Washington.
According to NATO officials, the man had been part of an operation of village stabilization, which entails the contact between the Green Berets and the village elders, in order to organize local police and track down Taliban leaders.
Another NATO leader said about him that he was 38 and married, with two children, that he had served three tours of duty in Iraq, and had been deployed in Afghanistan last December. According to another source quoted by the New York Times, he had served in the army for 11 years.
At least five people were wounded in the attack, some of them being treated at the NATO hospital. One survivor told the NYTimes that he had survived only because the women in his house hid him.
There were unconfirmed reports that were stating that sooner after the killing spree, other gunmen and a helicopter arrived at the scene to recuperate the sergeant. Although no evidence supports such claim, it left many Afghan with a distinct feeling that such a tragedy was planned and that it could not have been the work of a single trooper.
In fact, while expressing his outrage, president Hamid Karzai said that the “American troops” had entered the villages and committed an intentional act of inhuman savagery. President Barack Obama and U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta expressed condolences to the families and the deepest regret at the tragedy that occurred.
The American Embassy in Kabul immediately urged caution among the American citizens in this country as massive protests are expected to spark all over the Afghan territory as soon as the word gets out.
The military promised to bring the man to justice, and the officials reassured that this was just an isolated incident and was not conducted by the army. There were some politicians in Afghanistan too, which said that no matter how unfortunate the events were, they would not change the commitments between the Afghan and American governments.
The tragedy is part of a stream of incidents that have U.S. troopers as perpetrators. Last week, in Kapisa province, four people were killed by a helicopter as it was hunting for the Taliban. Thousands protested in the streets of Kapisa on that occasion.
A few weeks ago, a sanitation operation ended in a monstrous scandal, with huge protests and suicide attacks, as a military janitor carelessly threw in the garbage pit to be burnt a few copies of the Quran, he had found in the cells of the former Afghan detainees.
When word got out that the Quran was burnt in Bagram base, president Obama had to express his deepest regret to the Afghan people, and to attempt to convince them that it had been a mistake.
Apparently, he had been able to convince at least president Karzai, who told the parliament on that occasion that the incident showed no more than the ignorance of their culture on the part of the American troops, but that it was not with intention that the Quran was burnt.
Now the American military promises that the case would be “aggressively pursued in justice,” in hopes that the governmental negotiations would not have to suffer from it. The Taliban, who had already proclaimed the 16 people “martyrs” made by “American savages” promised to revenge on the “invaders.”
They said on their website that if the American soldier was mentally ill, when he perpetrated this crime, then the U.S. military would have committed yet another moral aggression by arming “lunatics” and sending them to fight in Afghanistan.
The village where the incident occurred is a stronghold of the Taliban, which are expected to come back to power as soon as the American troops are withdrawn from this country.

Thank's for link:

Tweet