"U.S. Special Forces Slaughter Family In Afghanistan, Attempt Cover-Up 

Political Theatrics
May 10, 2010

On Feb. 12, a family in Khataba, Afghanistan, held a party to celebrate the birth of a baby boy. Just hours after they went to sleep, U.S. Army Special Forces assaulted the house. They kicked down the door, rushed to the roof and began shooting at everybody below.
The site that had so recently been a scene of dancing and celebration was now a pile of bodies and a river of blood.

Two of the dead were women who were both seven-months pregnant, and already mothers with several children. Another was a teenage girl. Two of the men who were killed were highly respected members of the community. Two young grandchildren also lay critically wounded in the slaughter.

Two of the casualties survived for over two hours. Their families begged the Special Forces soldiers to give them medical attention, but were refused. As if the initial bloodbath was not enough, the besieged family had to watch two of their relatives slowly bleed to death, denied medical care, as U.S. troops stood guard. (Huffington Post, April 29)

One of the family members in the house, Sayid Mohammad Mal, an assistant dean at the local university, corroborated all other eyewitness accounts, which assert that there was no fighting or insurgents in or around the area, and that the troops fired indiscriminately at the fleeing women and children. U.S. Special Forces raided the home expecting to find an insurgent hideout from a tip they received, but instead found a family. That did not stop the soldiers from shooting most of them.

The Special Forces raid was conducted with no regard for human life. Not surprisingly, their behavior was the same after the raid. The attack did not culminate with dead insurgents with AK-47s, but dead women, their stomachs extended with pregnancy. They knew that this all-too-familiar aftermath would be another headline exposing the brutal nature of the occupation as the war enters the bloodiest year yet for Afghan civilians, while Washington is struggling to hold on to dwindling public support. Because their brutality was on full display, they stayed true to their colonial logic, and decided to try to solve the problem with more brutality.

They knew the two men could be labeled “insurgents”—just as every military-age male in Afghanistan is “fair game”—but the three women posed a problem. So they pulled out their knives, plunged them into the women’s bodies and dug out the bullets. Mohammed Tahir was forced to watch as a Special Forces soldier repeatedly drove a knife into the lifeless body of his 18-year-old daughter."

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