KABUL, 7 July 2005 — Numerous officials in Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government are implicated in war crimes that took place at the start of the country’s bloody civil war in the early 1990s, Human Rights Watch said in a report to be released today. While some are dead or in hiding, many of those linked to the carnage that erupted from April 1992 to March 1993 after the collapse of the Soviet-backed Najibullah government are now Defense or Interior Ministry officials, or advisers to Karzai himself, the report said.
Others are running for office in Afghanistan’s landmark parliamentary elections scheduled for September, while warlords control local administrative officials, Human Rights Watch said. “This report isn’t just a history lesson,” said Brad Adams, executive director of the group’s Asia Division. “These atrocities were among some of the gravest in Afghanistan’s history, yet today many of the perpetrators still wield power.”
The 133-page report entitled “Blood-Stained Hands: Past Atrocities in Kabul and Afghanistan’s Legacy of Impunity” is based on two years of research including interviews with witnesses, survivors, officials, and combatants. During the time covered by the report whole sections of Kabul were reduced to rubble, tens of thousands of civilians were killed and wounded, and at least half a million people were displaced during the period, the rights group said.
Various groups were fighting for control of the country in the power vacuum that followed the bloody Soviet occupation and the fall of Najibullah. Among those mentioned in the report are several former chiefs of the Northern Alliance, which later helped the US-led coalition topple the hard-line Taleban regime at the end of 2001, following the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Human Rights Watch cites the example of notorious warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who now holds a senior post in the Ministry of Defense and exercises political control of several provinces in the north of Afghanistan. It also mentions Karim Khalili, a former militia commander and now one of Karzai’s two vice presidents, and Abdul Rabb Al-Rasul Sayyaf, a radical Islamist commander who currently advises Karzai and exercises major political power over the Afghan judiciary.
Meanwhile, US and Afghan troops searched yesterday for the last member of a four-man US commando unit missing for more than week in Afghanistan after rescue attempts in which 17 civilians and more than a dozen US troops died.
Hundreds of troops backed by aircraft have scoured mountains in the eastern province of Kunar since the squad went missing in a clash with insurgents on June 28. A US helicopter sent to their aid was shot down that day, killing all 16 troops aboard.
Two members of the elite Navy SEAL unit were found dead on Monday, the US military said. Another was rescued with injuries the military said were not life threatening. President George W. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, said on Tuesday it was a top priority to find the missing commando and the president had sought a briefing on the effort. The rescue effort has been marked by bloodshed, with 17 civilians killed in a US airstrike on Friday, according to Afghan officials, and the US troops killed on the helicopter — the heaviest American losses in a single combat operation since they overthrew the Taleban in late 2001.
