http://www.counterpunch.org/
Quote:As for Sergeant Bales, now the official story of the U.S. military is that Bales walked back to the base after his first round of killing, then went out again to kill some more, while his fellow soldiers slumbered on, presumably undisturbed by Bales’ fusillades from the nearby villages of Alkozai and Najiban , 20 kilometers south west of Kandahar. Alkozai is less a kilometer from The Special Forces Base of Camp Belambai and Najiban only a little further off.</blockquote>
Here are some extracts from a report by a journalist who actually interviewed Afghan survivors of the slaughter the night of March 11. Yalda Yakim is an Afghan woman who works for Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service. She cameraman Ryan Sheridan reached the village where the killings occurred. They were the first reporters to do so. This ran on SBS’s Dateline program.<blockquote>YAKIM: Suspicion that there was more than one killer is now a view widely held in Afghanistan, spurred by comments from the President himself.
HAMID KARZAI: In four rooms, people were killed – children and women were killed – and than they were all brought together in one room, and then put on fire. That, one man cannot do.
YAKIM: Hamid Karzai’s personally appointed chief investigator, General Karimi, tells me that village elders claim several soldiers took part and they’ve told him there’s evidence to prove it.
GENERAL KARIMI: What the claim is that there were boot prints in the area. In some area, they say a kneeling position of three or four individuals. And also they claim that the helicopters were there to support the operations. Of course, I told them that helicopters – when the guy was started missing, to search [for] him. They said, “No. The noise of the helicopters were there from the very beginning, when the shooting started.†That means there were many Americans that were supporting this issue, that were doing this deliberately – it’s not one individual. That’s the claim of the people.
YAKIM: I wanted to ask survivors of the attack what they had seen, but I was blocked by the US military. The survivors were children, I was told, and the Americans now treating them said they didn’t want them traumatized by my questions. It was only after personal intervention by President Karzai himself that I was finally granted permission to see the survivors, and to hear the chilling accounts of what they’d been through.
SEDIQULLAH (Translation): The bullet hit my ear like this and went through here scraped here and came out here. When my father came out, he shot my father and then he entered our room. We ran from that room to the other room – he came and shot us in that room and then he left.
NOORBINAK (Translation): He was shooting, he shot my father’s dog first, and then he shot my father in the foot, then he dragged my mother by the hair. My mother was screaming and he held a gun to her and my father said “Leave her alone†and then he shot him right there.
YAKIM: As 8-year-old Noorbinak watched her parents desperately trying to fend off the intruder, he turned his gun on her and shot her in the leg.
NOORBINAK (Translation): One entered the room and the others were standing in the yard, holding lights.
YAKIM: I’m struck by her reference to more than one soldier being involved – a claim repeated by the brother of one of the victims…. Staff Sergeant Bales left the scene of the killings in Alkozai village and walked in the darkness back to the base… At 2:30am, he left Camp Belambai a second time. He headed to the village of Najiban to the south, about 1.5km from the base. He was spotted by another Afghan guard as he walked into the night. The soldier entered the house of this farmer, Mohammed Wazir – 11 family members were asleep inside.
MOHAMMAD WAZIR (Translation): They attacked during the night. They knocked on the door. When they knocked on the door my elderly mother, who opened the door, and was shot and killed right there and then they entered the inside – they went in to my room and killed my family in that room. And then they brought all the bodies and put them into one room and then they took all the linen and the blankets from the cupboard and covered them and set them on fire.