Fw: Profile: The Northern Alliance in Afghanistan

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg at tin.it>]

From: Praxis1871 at aol.com
Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 18:04:36 EST
Subject: Profile: The Northern Alliance in Afghanistan
To: ocsj at ocsj.ca
X-Mailer: AOL 7.0 for Windows CA sub 59

Fwd : MURDER, RAPE, LOOTING  AND ROUTINE TORTURE..ALL IN A DAY'S WORK FOR
GEORGE BUSH'S AFGHAN ALLIES, THE NORTHERN ALLIANCE..
from the VILLAGE VOICE :

Week of November 7 - 13, 2001

U.S. Allies in Afghanistan Left Trail of Atrocities Blood on the Tracks
by Jonathan Adams

They hauled Taliban soldiers by the thousands into the desert and shot them.
Others, they threw into wells, then tossed grenades in after them.   That
1997 massacre represents just one charge from a new Human Rights Watch
report

detailing alleged war crimes by America's ally in Afghanistan, the Northern
Alliance. Along with Amnesty International, the watchdog group is asking the
U.S. to withhold military assistance to alliance forces until its leaders
address past abuses and, ideally, bring to justice the four chiefs
responsible for the worst horrors.

"The senior commanders are really beyond the pale," says Human Rights
Watch's

Joost Hiltermann. "These were commanders who were in charge when atrocities
were committed."

This is hardly the first time the U.S. has gotten into bed with
less-than-savory characters in the name of short-term strategic needs.
During the '80s, the U.S. armed and trained Islamic fundamentalist
guerrillasâ?"

including Osama bin Ladenâ?"to beat back the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Now the U.S. faces a similar loss of control with the Northern Alliance, a
loose group of anti-Taliban fighters more properly known as the United
Front.

Dominated by ethnic Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks, the front has at times
threatened to take the Afghan capital of Kabul before a new regime could be
assembled. That left the Bush administration open to the ire of its other
key

ally, Pakistan, which wants the next government to include the ethnic
Pashtuns who make up some 40 percent of the Afghan population.

The idea of halting the war to root out a few accused commanders seems like
folly to some Central Asia experts. "To just be focusing on past abusesâ?"
especially pretty far in the past, or abuses that are pretty
minimalâ?"that's
not really what we should be doing," says Julie Sirrs, a former Defense
Intelligence Agency analyst. "If allying with the United Front allows us to
get the Taliban out of Afghanistan, I think that does far more in support of
human rights overall."

Indeed, the Taliban is reported to have retaliated for the 1997 slaughter
with a three-day rampage in which thousands of civilians were killed.

As the Human Rights Watch report demonstrates, the civil war compromised
virtually every faction in Afghanistan. Hiltermann says the U.S. should at
least try to pinpoint and isolate the worst offenders, but instead the White
House has thrown in its lot with a rogues' gallery of brutal warlords. Their
ability to govern Afghanistan humanely is, at best, dubious.

FACTION ETHNIC BASE COMMANDERS ALLEGED ATROCITIES
Jamiat-i Islami Tajik Ahmad Shah Massoud*
Burhanuddin Rabbani â?¢ Rape and looting in a Hazara neighborhood of Kabul,
March 1995

â?¢ Killing of between 76 and 180 civilians in a nighttime rocket attack on
a
market, September 1998
Hizb-i Wahdat Hazara
Muhammad Karim Khalili
Haji Muhammad Muaqqiq* â?¢ Routine torture and execution of detainees in
Bamiyan Province, circa 1994
Junbish militias Uzbek Abdul Rashid Dostum*
Abdel Malik Pahlawan* â?¢ Summary execution of 3000 Taliban soldiers in and
around Mazar-e Sharif, May 1997

â?¢ Indiscriminate air raid on residential areas of Kabul killed several
civilians
Ittihad-i Islami Pashtun
Abdul Rasul Sayyaf
Harakat-i Islami-yi Hazara Ayatollah Muhammad
Asif Muhsini
General Anwari
Jamiat-i Islami
and Ittihad-i Islami Tajik and Pashtun   â?¢ Rape and killing of between 70
and

100 Hazara civilians in Kabul, February 1993

Several factions     â?¢ Killing of 25,000 civilians in struggle for Kabul.
Several factions engaged in widespread rape, summary executions, arbitrary
arrest, torture, and ''disappearances'' of civilians, circa 1994.

â?¢ Several factions involved in persecution of ethnic Pashtuns and Tajiks,
including summary executions, looting, and burning of houses in the
Sangcharak district, 1999 and 2000
* Commander named individually by Human Rights Watch