Al Hittin
A Compendium of reports on the current War on Islam
The Kill Team: How U.S. Soldiers in Afghanistan Murdered Innocent Civilians
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During the first five months of last year, a platoon of U.S.
soldiers in Afghanistan went on a shooting spree, killing at least four
unarmed civilians and mutilating several of the corpses. The “kill team”
– members of the 5th Stryker Brigade stationed near Kandahar – took
scores of photos chronicling their kills and their time in Afghanistan.
Even before the war crimes became public, the Pentagon went to
extraordinary measures to suppress the photos, launching a massive
effort to find every file and pull the pictures out of circulation
before they could touch off a scandal on the scale of Abu Ghraib.The images – more than 150 of which have been obtained by Rolling Stone – portray a front-line culture among U.S. troops in which killing innocent civilians is seen as a cause for celebration. “Most people within the unit disliked the Afghan people,” one of the soldiers told Army investigators. “Everyone would say they’re savages.”
Many of the photos depict explicit images of violent deaths that have yet to be identified by the Pentagon. Among the soldiers, the collection was treated like a war memento. It was passed from man to man on thumb drives and hard drives, the gruesome images of corpses and war atrocities filed alongside clips of TV shows, UFC fights and films such as Iron Man 2. One soldier kept a complete set, which he made available to anyone who asked.
On
January 15th, 2010, U.S. soldiers in Bravo Company stationed near
Kandahar executed an unarmed Afghan boy named Gul Mudin in the village
of La Mohammad Kalay. Reports by soldiers at the scene indicate that
Mudin was about 15 years old. According to sworn statements, two
soldiers – Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and Pfc. Andrew Holmes – staged the
killing to make it look like they had been under attack. Ordering the
boy to stand still, they crouched behind a mud wall, tossed a grenade at
him and opened fire from close range. This photograph shows Mudin’s
body lying by the wall where he was killed.
Following
the routine Army procedure required after every battlefield death, the
soldiers cut off the dead boy’s clothes and stripped him naked to check
for identifying tattoos. Here they are shown scanning his iris and
fingerprints, using a portable biometric scanner.
In
a break with protocol, the soldiers also took photographs of themselves
celebrating their kill. In the photos, Morlock grins and gives a
thumbs-up sign as he poses with Mudin’s body. Note that the boy’s right
pinky finger appears to have been severed. Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs
reportedly used a pair of razor-sharp medic’s shears to cut off the
finger, which he presented to Holmes as a trophy for killing his first
Afghan.
Holmes
poses with Mudin’s body. According to a fellow soldier, Holmes took to
carrying Mudin’s severed finger with him in a zip-lock bag. “He wanted
to keep the finger forever and wanted to dry it out,” one of his friends
would later report. “He was proud of his finger.”
Prior
to the murder of Mudin, in November 2009, the soldiers of Bravo Company
were dispatched to recover the body of an insurgent who was killed by
rockets from a helicopter gunship. As they collected the remains, which
appear to be those shown here, one took out a hunting knife and stabbed
the corpse. Staff Sgt. Gibbs, who had recently joined the platoon as a
squad leader, began playing with a pair of scissors near the dead man’s
hands. “I wonder if these can cut off a finger?” Gibbs asked
A
pistol found at the scene of the helicopter strike. Gibbs routinely
collected such weapons and planted them on the bodies of unarmed
civilians they killed, in order to frame their victim as enemy
combatants. The presence of a “drop weapon” virtually guaranteed that a
shooting would be considered a legitimate kill.
Another
photo of Afghan children. According to one soldier, members of 3rd
Platoon also talked about a scenario in which they “would throw candy
out in front and in the rear of the Stryker; the Stryker would then run
the children over.”
An
unidentified soldier next to the wreckage of an Afghan National Police
truck that had been blown up near the base’s gate. Inside the truck,
Staff Sgt. Gibbs found a working AK-47 with a folding butt stock and two
magazines. According to witnesses, Gibbs placed the AK-47 and the
magazines in a metal box in one of the Strykers and later used them as
“drop weapons” to frame two unarmed civilians the platoon killed as
enemy combatants.
In
the process of suppressing the photographs, the Army may also have been
trying to keep secret evidence that the killings of civilians went
beyond a few men in 3rd Platoon. In this image, the bodies of two Afghan
men have been tied together, their hands bound, and placed alongside a
road.
A
sign – handwritten on cardboard fashioned from a discarded box of
rations – hangs around the dead men’s necks. It reads: TALIBAN ARE DEAD.
According to a source in Bravo Company, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity, the men were killed by soldiers from another platoon, which
has not yet been implicated in the scandal. “Those were some innocent
farmers that got killed,” the source says. “Their standard operating
procedure after killing dudes was to drag them up to the side of the
highway.”
The
collection of photos includes several dozen images of unidentified
casualties, including this one of a severed head. In many of the photos
it is unclear whether the bodies are civilians or Taliban. It is
possible that the unidentified deaths are unrelated to 3rd Platoon, and
involved no illegal acts by U.S. soldiers. But taking such photos, let
alone sharing them with others, is a clear violation of Army standards.
An
unidentified image of severed legs passed around among the members of
Bravo Company. Even if such unidentified bodies were enemy combatants
rather than innocent civilians, their inclusion in the collection of
photos bespeaks a shocking disregard for human life. “We were operating
in such bad places and not being able to do anything about it,” Morlock
tells Rolling Stone. “I guess that’s why we started taking things into
our own hands.”Source: Rolling Stones
