Three years ago, under the psuedonym “Jim Rissman,” I wrote a piece for Antiwar that was then used by Freedomfiles.org to anchor its “Atrocities against the Afghan People” section. The Northern Alliance, a U.S. client, took prisoners “in a U.S.-orchestrated military operation,” as the Washington Post put it. Another source, Julian Strauss, picks up the story:
The prisoners were crammed at gunpoint into large, oblong freight containers. When no more could be squeezed in, the metal doors were shut tight. Slowly they began to suffocate.
By the time the containers were opened two days later – at the end of the journey from Kunduz to Sheberghan – many were dead.
“There was no oxygen,” said Maqsood Khan, a 26-year-old Pakistani from Rawalpindi. “We drank the sweat off our own bodies and off the dead men. Some drank their urine. Of 400, half were dead by the time we arrived.”…
Sajjid Mehmood, an 18-year-old from Karachi, said: “There were about 250 men in the container I was in. We were praying, shouting and begging for mercy. It was very difficult to breathe.
“Zubair, a man who was crushed up against me, died after two or three hours. We were praying to God. When the soldiers heard our cries for help they opened the rear doors and began shooting.
“Many of us died, maybe 20 or 30. When the container arrived after 18 hours, 150 out of 250 people were dead.” Today Sheberghan prison, originally built for 500 to 1,000 inmates, houses more than 3,000. The commandant said 807 of them are Pakistanis. The rest are Afghans.
My piece closes with Strauss’ warning that “stories such as these have only served to harden the resolve of Islamic militants.” And sure enough, from the Wall Street Journal we learn that the four London bombers, “of Pakistani descent,” according to friends “had been
influenced by claims of atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq.” (“From Heart of U.K., Four Friends Emerge As Terror Suspects,” 7/14/05)
Unbelievably, in Iraq fours days after the London bombings, “Ten Sunni Muslim tribesmen died after American-trained Iraqi police commandos kept them in an airtight container for more than six hours in 115-degree heat.” Because they belonged to the same tribe as the leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars, “they were locked in what was described as a cargo-type container” and suffocated.
Strauss’ piece was titled Slow death on the jail convoy of misery. I called mine Slow death on the jail convoys of misery to emphasize that the sides in the Afghan civil war took turns suffocating each other. The Iraq occurrence is to say the least a horrific development, for Iraqis, for the Western orchestrators, for the world. One can only hope that freight containers don’t “line the roads” of Iraq as they do in Afghanistan.