Vol. 71/No. 19      May 14, 2007

In response to what U.S. troops said was a nearby car bomb explosion that day, the 30 Marines on patrol unleashed random machine-gun fire upon bystanders and vehicles in the area, killing 12 civilians and wounding 35, the commission reported.

Among those gunned down was a 16-year-old woman named Yadwaro who was walking to her family's farmhouse several hundred yards away from the Marine caravan. She was shot in the back while carrying a bundle of grass to feed her family's animals.

"They committed a great cruelty; they should be punished," Ghor Ghashta told the New York Times. Yadwaro, her daughter-in-law, died at the door of their farmhouse compound.

Upon hearing a bomb blast and seeing U.S. troops in the area, a driver stopped his car, the human rights commission report said. The Marines responded by opening fire upon it for 10 minutes. The vehicle was hit by 250 bullets, killing three unarmed passengers—two elderly men and a 16-year-old.

The report "also criticized ongoing house raids by American forces," reported the Times, "including one on the house of one of the human rights commission's staff members, who the report said was hooded and handcuffed to a detonator and told not to move in case it exploded."

Army Maj. Gen. Frank Kearney, the commander of U.S. Special Operations forces in the region, ordered the 120-member Marine Special Operations unit, except those involved in the shootings, to leave Afghanistan by the beginning of April. He asked the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to review the incident.

There are 27,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, 15,000 of them under NATO command. The rest of the U.S. forces operate separately from the 35,000-strong NATO force occupying the country.
 
 
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