KABUL, 15 July 2004 — NATO-led forces in Afghanistan were tricked into helping a group of US vigilantes hunting for militants and who were arrested for illegally detaining Afghans, a spokesman said yesterday.
Three US nationals were arrested last week after a brief shootout in Kabul. They and some Afghan accomplices had been illegally detaining and interrogating people they believed to be terrorists, Afghan officials said.
The group had asked for, and received, help from members of Afghanistan’s NATO-led peacekeeping force, who believed they were members of a genuine military task force, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said.
ISAF explosive disposal teams had inspected a compound occupied by the group three times in June and had found traces of explosives and some suspicious electronic components, said a spokesman for the NATO-led force, Chris Henderson.
“The ISAF personnel believed that he was what he purported to be, that he represented a special operations agency,” Henderson said, referring to the group leader Jonathan, or Jack, K. Idema, whom the US military says had passed himself off as a US government or military official.
The group members wore US-style military uniforms with US flags on their shoulders and the ISAF personnel believed them to be genuine, Henderson said. “They believed they were providing legitimate support to a legitimate security agency. We made a mistake,” he said.
The arrests have been a headache for foreign forces in Afghanistan when the US military has been under scrutiny for its treatment of suspected militant prisoners. The US military has been accused by US-based Human Rights Watch of “systematic” abuse of detainees.
US military spokesmen have said the group was not acting on behalf of, or in conjunction with, US-led forces and international forces and did not condone their activities. They had been illegally holding eight people, including several with beards of the type favored by militant Muslims, police said.
Afghan authorities are holding Idema and the other members of his group. They have yet to release details of their investigation into the group or the men who had been illegally detained.
Henderson said peacekeeping troops had been hoodwinked by the fact that Idema and his team were wearing US-style military uniforms with US flags on their shoulders. He said they realized something was amiss after three visits when they discovered Idema was not coordinating with the US-led coalition headquarters in running his operations.
“There was no indication of abuse by anyone,” Henderson said, adding he was confident abuses would have been reported. Idema was apparently running an unlicensed jail in his own “war on terror” according to the US-led coalition and Afghan authorities. He is scheduled to be tried by Afghan authorities.
Meanwhile, US-led forces have launched an operation in Afghanistan to quell a wave of violence aimed at derailing the country’s first post-Taleban elections, a US military official said here yesterday. Dubbed “Lightning Resolve”, the operation comes just days after the government set an Oct. 9 date for presidential elections but delayed the parliamentary polls until 2005 because of the security situation outside Kabul.
“Lightning Resolve is focused specifically on setting conditions toward continuing voter registration in elections both at the presidential and parliamentary level,” coalition military spokesman, Maj. Jon Siepmann told a news briefing in Kabul. Siepmann said the operation was in response to a rise of attacks on “innocent people and civilians, in some cases even women and children.”
“Although these attacks are absolutely deplorable they are not entirely unexpected — we see a disintegrating organization of terrorists and militants desperate to try and affect the elections process,” he added.
Siepmann said the operation would stretch from the country’s troubled regions through the north and west, but gave no further details. Two days after Afghanistan set the poll date, a bomb ripped through the prosperous western city of Herat, killing six people and injuring more than 30 others.
