Massacre in Afghanistan: US soldier kills 16 villagers, including 9 children

Massacre in Afghanistan: US soldier kills 16 villagers, including 9 children
By Patrick Martin – 12 March 2012 – WSWS

In a massacre that expresses the brutality and horror of the entire American war in Afghanistan, an Army staff sergeant walked into a village in rural Kandahar province early Sunday morning and murdered 16 people, nine of them children.

Eleven members of a single family were gunned down in their home, their bodies then piled in a heap and set on fire. The victims included four girls six years old or younger. Only the father, Samid Khan, and one child survived, because they were away from the village at the time.

The gunman then went on to shoot the inhabitants of two more dwellings before he returned to his base and turned himself in. At least five villagers were wounded, some of them critically, and the death toll could rise.

Samid Khan, a poor farmer, returned to the village to find his entire family shot to death and their bodies burned inside his home. “This is an anti-human and anti-Islamic act,” he told the press. “Nobody is allowed in any religion in the world to kill children and women.” He and his neighbors demanded that the killer be handed over to the Afghan government for punishment.

According to one local Afghan official, villagers loaded the bodies of the victims into cars and drove to the entrance of the nearby American base to demand justice. “They were very angry,” he said. “They wanted to do something to take revenge.”

The identity of the mass murderer was being kept secret by US and Afghan authorities and by the American media late Sunday night, but the British Broadcasting Corporation reported that he was a staff sergeant and a member of the US special operations forces engaged in training the Afghan police.

There are conflicting reports about many details of the massacre. Some survivors contend that more than one American soldier was involved, and Taliban spokesmen claimed that the attack was one of the notorious night raids conducted by US special forces that have become a focal point for popular hostility to the US occupation. …more