Eyeless in Gaza, headless in Afghanistan

Ray Rivera, Sharifullah Sahak, and Eric Schmitt have an article in The New York Times about Afghanistan:

As targeted killings have risen sharply across Afghanistan, American and Afghan officials believe that many are the work of counterintelligence units of the Haqqani militant network and al-Qaeda, charged with killing suspected informants and terrorizing the populace on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Military intelligence officials say that the units essentially act as death squads and that one of them, a large group known as the Khurasan that operates primarily in Pakistan’s tribal areas, has been responsible for at least 250 assassinations and public executions.
Another group, whose name is not known, works mainly in Afghanistan and may be responsible for at least twenty killings in Khost Province over the summer alone, including a mass beheading that came to light only after a video was found in the possession of a captured insurgent. The video shows ten headless bodies evenly spaced along a paved road, while their heads sit nearby in a semicircle, their faces clearly visible.
It is another indication that the Haqqanis, a mostly Pakistan-based faction, remain the most dangerous part of an insurgency that makes full use of a porous and often ill-defined border, as the NATO strike that killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers over the weekend showed. Though the circumstances of that strike remain murky, it has now further upset relations between Pakistan and the United States, even as it once again demonstrated how havens inside Pakistan remained a critical part of the insurgent strategy.
The Americans have geared their offensive around bloodying the insurgents as they enter Afghanistan. But the new wave of assassinations shows that, even as NATO portrays the insurgents as a weakening force, the Haqqanis can still assert their influence, not only with headline-grabbing bombings but also through intimidation and by controlling perceptions.
One chilling case attributed to the second death squad came after American forces captured the senior Afghanistan-based leader for the Haqqanis, Hajji Mali Khan, and killed his top deputy this summer. Just days later, the bodies of two men accused of helping the Americans turned up near the village where Khan was captured. Scalding iron rods had been shoved through their legs. One victim had been disemboweled, and both had been shot through the head and crushed by boulders. Fear shot through the entire village. “You could hardly recognize them,” said a witness who viewed the bodies.
Across Afghanistan, assassinations have jumped sixty percent, to 131 reported killings, through the first nine months of this year, compared with the same period in 2010, according to NATO statistics. United Nations officials say they began noticing a sharp increase in 2010, with 462 assassinations according to their records, double the number from the previous year. The figures may not include many killings in remote areas, like the mass beheading, because fearful villagers never reported them.
American intelligence officials say the unnamedAfghanistan-based group and the Khurasan seem to operate in much the same manner. The Khurasan is believed to have formed in early 2009 in the North Waziristan area of Pakistan, the Haqqanis’ headquarters, in response to intensified drone attacks by the United States. The group is said to wear black clothing with green armbands bearing its full name, Itihad al-Mujahedeen Khurasan, and works closely with al-Qaeda in the region. Estimates of its size range from one hundred to two thousand members.
During his interrogation, Khan suggested that other weapons were involved in the battle for influence, as well. According to four officials familiar with the questioning, the Haqqani leader told his interrogators that the Taliban had been approaching Afghan government and military officials throughout the summer, persuading them to sign a five-page document secretly pledging their loyalty to the Taliban leadership. Khan boasted that he had signed up twenty officials himself.
“They tell the officials that the Taliban is going to be back in power within twenty days of NATO leaving, so if they want to live, they’ll sign,” said one of the American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified interrogations. Officials say they have found no confirmation of such oaths, however.
In places like Sabari, a rural district in Khost that sits about a dozen miles from the Pakistani border, the targeted killings are producing their intended effect. After a daylight execution of three men in a bazaar in the village of Maktab about four months ago, shop owners were so traumatized that they never reported the killings to the authorities.
Often, the victims may have had little more than passing encounters with coalition forces, or no involvement at all, according to officials, witnesses, and friends and relatives of victims. American and Afghan officials learned about the killings only later when a video of the episode was found on a captured insurgent’s cellphone. Even then, American officials who showed the video to a New York Times reporter could cite the place where the killings had taken place but believed that they had occurred in October, about three months after witnesses say the actual episode happened.
The video showed a number of gunmen shooting to death two men as shop owners scrambled for cover. The militants then shot a third man as he sat in a white plastic chair in front of his shop. As the man fell backward, one of the gunmen shot him ten more times in the face and chest. “Whoever tries to help the Americans and spies for them will face this,” one of the men shouted after the killings, according to a witness, Ahmadullah, 25, a shop owner who like many Afghans goes by one name. Ahmadullah said no one dared report it, even the men’s families, who carried the bodies away. “We just had to watch and stand quiet and watch what was happening to these poor people,” he said. “I knew those men,” he added. “One was just a shop owner, the other two were laborers. They were innocent.”
An American military official who saw the video said he was not surprised that local villagers failed to report the episode. “People in Sabari are living in abject terror, 24 hours a day,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the death squad. “When we conduct a raid on a Haqqani leader,” he said, a group of about fifteen death-squad members “go in and massacre people”.
Last month, insurgents killed another man in the bazaar, about two days after a night raid in the village by Afghan and American troops. This time the victim was a visiting merchant from Khost City named Nasib, who was pulled out of his car as his five-year-old son watched from the passenger seat. His abductors dragged him to the bazaar and killed him in broad daylight. Yet when asked about the killings, the district governor and the local police chief in Sabari said they knew nothing about them. “I totally deny such reports,” said Dawlat Khan Qayoumi, the district governor. “I can tell you in the last five months we have not seen any such incidents.”
Questions also surround the videotaped beheadings. Muhammad Zarin, the commander of a special undercover police unit that has been investigating the death squads, would say only that the men were from Khost and were killed about three months ago in the Mangal area in the province’s mountainous Musa Khel district, where Khan was active. Neither NATO nor the United Nations, both of which track assassinations, had any record of the mass beheadings, of the Maktab Bazaar killings, or of the two men killed after Khan’s capture, reflecting the intense secrecy with which villagers have guarded the deaths.
After an earlier raid that failed to capture Khan in the Musa Khel area, coalition forces got a report that three village elders had been kidnapped and three teenagers had been beheaded. “When we went up to investigate, we could never get any bodies or any proof,” said Colonel Christopher R. Toner, commander of the First Infantry Division’s Third Brigade Combat Team, based in Khost and Paktia Provinces. “But there was enough going around that I suspect it was true.”
Public health officials likewise say they hear of dozens of such killings but are seldom able to confirm them. “People don’t bring the bodies in to the hospital for fear of the Taliban,” said Dr. Fazal Mohammad Mangal of the Khost provincial hospital.
Zabit Amen Jan, a former Musa Khel resident, has lost four brothers to insurgents, including two students in their twenties whose bullet-ridden bodies were found in June. A hand-scrawled letter found on one of the bodies said the men had ignored repeated warnings to stop working with the coalition forces. “There was no other way except this,” the letter said. Jan said his younger brothers had no connection to the coalition and were killed only because he and another brother had been involved in politics. “People used to come to our district for picnics because our area is full of mountains and covered with pine and walnut trees,” he said. “Now people are fleeing to Khost City or Kabul or Pakistan, because there are so many killings and they know the government can’t protect them.”

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