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Amnesty Slams United States Over Civilian Deaths In Afghanistan

Amnesty Slams United States Over Civilian Deaths In Afghanistan

By Ben Sheppard

Kabul (AFP) — The families of thousands of civilians killed by American forces in Afghanistan have been left without justice or compensation, Amnesty International said Monday, in a damning indictment of the U.S. military as it withdraws.

Amnesty said it had gathered evidence of “a deeply flawed U.S. military justice system that cements a culture of impunity” in dealing with Afghan civilian deaths and injuries caused by U.S.-led NATO coalition operations since 2001.

President Hamid Karzai has often castigated U.S. forces for civilian casualties and he welcomed the release of the Amnesty report, though it triggered a firm response from the U.S. and NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

Amnesty researchers interviewed 125 Afghans who had first-hand information on 16 separate attacks that resulted in civilian casualties, as well as collating data from 97 reported incidents in the last seven years.

An Amnesty spokesman said its data that thousands of civilians had been killed by U.S. forces was based on UN reports on civilian casualties, a Science magazine investigation in 2011 and other sources, but it gave no total death toll.

“The U.S. military justice system almost always fails to hold its soldiers accountable for unlawful killings and other abuses,” said Richard Bennett, a director of Amnesty International.

“None of the cases that we looked into -– involving more than 140 civilian deaths -– were prosecuted by the U.S. military. Evidence of possible war crimes and unlawful killings has seemingly been ignored.”

The Amnesty report, entitled “Left in the Dark,” detailed a U.S. bombing in 2012 when women were collecting firewood in the mountains of Laghman province.

Seven women and girls were killed and seven more were injured.

Ghulam Noor, who lost his 16-year-old daughter Bibi Halimi in the attack, brought the bodies to the district centre after hearing NATO forces claimed that only insurgents had been killed.

“We had to show them that it was women,” Noor told Amnesty. “I have no power to ask the international forces why they did this. I can’t bring them to court.”

Amnesty said villagers filed complaints with the provincial governor, but international forces are immune from Afghan legal processes and no one ever contacted family members to investigate the attack.

“I’m very happy that you have focused on something that is the main point of disagreement between Afghanistan and the U.S.,” Karzai told Amnesty representatives invited to the presidential palace on Sunday.

“I believe that civilian casualties should never happen. Together with you, we should stop them.”

– Strained U.S.-Afghan ties –

The U.S. department of defense said U.S. forces “go to extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian casualties” and investigations and prosecutions are launched when incidents may be unlawful.

ISAF underlined that the UN attributes just one percent of all Afghan civilian casualties to international military forces — with insurgents responsible for 90 percent.

Last week Afghan officials said a U.S. air strike had killed four civilians in the western province of Herat, in a misguided revenge attack after rockets were fired at an airbase.

Amnesty said its report concentrated on the United States rather than other members of the NATO coalition since it was the largest national force and was implicated in the majority of civilian casualties.

“Amnesty International is aware of only six cases over the last five years in which members of the military have been criminally prosecuted for unlawfully killing Afghan civilians,” it said.

In the most high-profile killing, U.S. army sergeant Robert Bales was sentenced to life in prison after gunning down 16 villagers in 2012.

U.S.-led foreign troop numbers in Afghanistan have declined from a peak of 150,000 in 2012 to just 44,300 now — of whom 30,700 are American.

All NATO combat soldiers will depart by the end of the year, though a follow-up support mission of about 10,000 troops is planned if the next president signs security deals with the United States and NATO.

The deal with the United States would continue to give so-called “immunity” to American troops, who would be prosecuted under their own legal system.

AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski

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Gaza Death Toll Tops 700 As Cease-Fire Remains Elusive

Gaza Death Toll Tops 700 As Cease-Fire Remains Elusive

By Batsheva Sobelman and Laura King, Los Angeles Times

JERUSALEM — Israel again pounded the Gaza Strip with bombardment on Thursday, driving up the Palestinian death toll to at least 720, while militants fired a flurry of rockets into Israeli territory, with most either falling harmlessly or intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile defense system.

In the 17th day of the confrontation between Israeli forces and the militant group Hamas, diplomatic efforts were moving ahead on a number of fronts, though a cease-fire accord remained elusive. Secretary of State John F. Kerry, back in Cairo after a day of shuttle diplomacy in Israel and the West Bank, was conferring Thursday with Egyptian officials, according to Egyptian media reports.

British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, in Israel for talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, expressed hope for a speedy truce. While acknowledging Israel’s right to defend itself, Hammond said his government was “gravely concerned by the ongoing heavy level” of civilian deaths and injuries in Gaza.

“We want to see a cease-fire quickly agreed (upon),” he said.

Netanyahu said Israel was trying to minimize civilian casualties, but declared that “we cannot give our attackers immunity or impunity.”

Israel said it had detained dozens of suspected militants overnight in Gaza, and Israeli media carried images of the captured men in their underwear being marched toward or across the frontier, bound for a military detention center in southern Israel.

Israeli media reports also cited military sources as saying that 500 militants affiliated with Hamas or other Islamist armed groups have been killed since the start of the offensive. However, estimates from the United Nations and others have estimated that up to three-fourths of the dead are civilians, many of them women and children.

For a third day on Thursday, most international flights to and from Tel Aviv were canceled, after a rocket fell Tuesday near Ben Gurion International Airport. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration late Wednesday lifted a ban on American carriers flying into or out of Ben Gurion, but only US Airways had so far announced a resumption of service, and most European and regional airlines were continuing their suspensions.

Israel’s summer tourism season, already dampened by the outbreak of fighting, has been hit hard by the curtailed air service, and industry officials were voicing concern about long-term economic damage. Hamas has trumpeted the flight suspensions as an important military success.

While most of Israel’s casualties have been military — with 32 troops killed to date — three civilians have died on the Israeli side of the frontier. After a Thai farm worker was killed Wednesday by a mortar in the fields of a farm community close to Gaza, Thailand urged Israel to transfer about 4,000 of its nationals to safer areas and provide better protection for them.

Special correspondent Sobelman reported from Jerusalem and staff writer King from Cairo.

AFP Photo / Jack Guez

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Car Bomb, Mortar Rounds Kill At Least 50 People In Syria

Car Bomb, Mortar Rounds Kill At Least 50 People In Syria

By Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times

BEIRUT — At least 50 people were killed and scores injured Tuesday in Syria during a series of mortar and car-bomb attacks targeting pro-government districts in Damascus and the central city of Homs, the state media and a pro-opposition monitor reported.

The deadliest strike was a car bombing near a busy intersection in war-ravaged Homs that left at least 36 people dead and 85 injured, Syria’s official news agency reported. Some reports indicated that two car bombs may have been involved and that the death toll reached 45.

The assault marked the latest in a series of stepped-up attacks on civilian targets in Homs, which has long been a key battleground in the Syrian conflict, now in its fourth year. A number of neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble in the conflict. Earlier this month, 25 people were killed in a pair of car bombings.

In recent months, Syrian forces have recaptured much of Homs from rebels and cornered remaining opposition fighters into a few enclaves, including the heart of the Old City. The government says that hundreds of rebels have surrendered and negotiations are continuing in a bid to convince remaining fighters in the Old Town and elsewhere to lay down their arms or evacuate. Officials have talked about life in Homs getting back to normal, but gunfire and shelling remain daily occurrences.

Tuesday’s wave of attacks comes a day after President Bashar Assad announced that he would seek a third seven-year term in elections scheduled for June 3. Opposition activists have dismissed the elections as a farce. There was no known direct link between the attacks and the announcement of Assad’s candidacy.

The government blamed all of Tuesday’s attacks on “terrorists,” its standard term for armed rebels fighting to overthrow the government.

In the capital, authorities reported that 14 civilians, mostly students, were killed and 86 injured when two mortar shells struck an Islamic school in the Shaghour district in the Old City. The district is firmly under government control and is patrolled by pro-Assad militiamen. Tuesday’s strike was among the deadliest mortar attacks reported in Damascus.

Rebels based in the capital’s outskirts frequently fire mortar rounds into the city and government-controlled suburbs. Syrian authorities call the attacks indiscriminate. The mortar strikes have escalated in recent weeks as government forces have moved to oust rebels from outlying areas of the capital.

©afp.com / Joseph Eid

In Libya, Civilians Bear Cost Of War

The Libyan revolution might have deposed a dictator, but it also created months of chaos, with a vacuum of authority and accountability. Civilians in Libya have experienced countless human rights abuses, the reports of which are just beginning to surface.

News from Libya has often been confusing and sometimes contradictory, so information about human rights has tended to be buried in reports about the progress of the rebels in their fight against Gadhafi. The rebel leaders of the National Transitional Council have objected to the presence of UN military observers and police to help restore order, leaving many questions about the extent of human rights abuses by both sides. Now, with Gadhafi’s power essentially gone, news of the conflict’s effects on civilians has made the need for peace — and for subsequent justice and accountability — even more pressing.

The Associated Press reported that the Libyan rebels have been rounding up thousands of black Africans and detaining them in temporary jails. The rebels accused the detainees of fighting as mercenaries for Gadhafi, even though many say they are innocent migrant workers. Many black Africans from other countries, such as Mali and Niger, had come to Libya seeking work in recent decades. Since many of those people have different forms of ID and often served in Gadhafi’s military at some point, the rebels are suspicious that they are all mercenaries even if they claim to support the rebel cause. The rebels assert they are treating the detainees well, but the fact still remains that they have been holding people — by some estimates, more than 5,000 people in Tripoli — against their will without a trial.

Handling the prisoners is one of the first major tests for the rebel leaders, who are scrambling to set up a government that they promise will respect human rights and international norms, unlike the dictatorship they overthrew.

The rebels’ National Transitional Council has called on fighters not to abuse prisoners and says those accused of crimes will receive fair trials. There has been little credible evidence of rebels killing or systematically abusing captives during the six-month conflict. Still, the African Union and Amnesty International have protested the treatment of blacks inside Libya, saying there is a potential for serious abuse.

“The danger is that there is no oversight by any authorities, and the people who are carrying out the arrests — more like abductions — are not trained to respect human rights,” said Diana Eltahawy of Amnesty International. “They are people who carry a lot of anger against people they believe committed atrocities.”

Even so, the treatment of detainees is significantly better than the reports of human rights abuses by the pro-Gadhafi forces. The International Criminal Court has already issued indictments against Gadhafi, his son Saif al-Islam, and his intelligence chief Abdallah al-Senousi for allegedly ordering security forces to kill unarmed protesters when the conflict began in February.

Since then, the abuses have intensified. Physicians for Human Rights found that troops loyal to Gadhafi have forced civilians to act as human shields and have employed systematic rape as a weapon of war. Their report urges further investigations into these human rights abuses so that the perpetrators will be punished for their actions: “Prosecutions, vetting, and other necessary methods of accountability will guide the Libyan people as they choose how best to forge a secure and just social and political order in the aftermath of conflict.”

Other human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have collected evidence that confirm abuses by Gadhafi’s troops, including arbitrary slayings, hostage-taking, and rapes. The UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has said that many Libyans have “disappeared,” with their whereabouts and welfare unknown. A spokesperson for OHCHR said, “We are also deeply concerned about reports that there are still thousands of people unaccounted for who were arrested or taken prisoner by Gadhafi security forces either earlier in the conflict, or before it even started.”

The exact numbers of civilian deaths, and the extent of the violence, are still unclear as the conflict continues.

Civil wars always have a significant impact on civilians as well as soldiers, and the ramifications of internal violence do not disappear when “peace” is declared. Once the Libyan revolution is complete, the new government will have to deal with the devastation left behind by a bloody, months-long conflict. Hopefully, the new leaders will hold human rights violators accountable for their wartime actions and will make a firm commitment to protecting all citizens.