Reconstructie aanval in Takhar met burgerdoden van 2 September 2010

Reconstructie van de aanval van Special Force in Takhar waarbij tien burgerdoden vielen

Kate Clark: "The Takhar attack, Targeted killings and the parallel worlds of US intelligence and Afghanistan".

Enkele aantekeningen:

(...) The intelligence behind the killing began with the tracking of phone calls made by the man whom the US military meant to kill on 2 September 2010 – Muhammad Amin

(...) Yet, Zabet Amanullah was not an alias; it was the name of an actual person. When the two men’s identities were mixed up, it was Zabet Amanullah who appeared in the crosshairs of the US military.

(...) Zabet Amanullah’s election campaign convoy was bombed by US special forces. As the provincial governor, Abdul Jabar Taqwa, said, ‘Without any co‐ordination, without informing provisional authorities, they attacked, on their own, civilian people who were in a campaign convoy.’

(...) Nine other men, all civilians and fellow election campaigners, were killed in the attack. ISAF and the Special Forces Unit, however, continue to view their death as legally justified.

Verklaring ISAF
Coalition forces conducted a precision air strike targeting an Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan senior member assessed to be the deputy shadow governor for Takhar province this morning. He regularly coordinates and conducts attacks with known IMU and Taleban insurgents and travelled from Pakistan to Takhar this spring. Intelligence tracked the insurgents travelling in a sedan on a series of remote roads in Rustaq district… The security force was unable to immediately dispatch a ground force to assess the results, but initial reflections indicate eight to 12 insurgents were killed or injured in the strike, including a Taleban commander. Multiple passengers of the vehicle were positively identified carrying weapons.

Andere lezing
An alternative version of events quickly emerged according to which ISAF had targeted the election campaign convoy of Abdul Wahab Khorasani, a parliamentary candidate for Takhar. Khorasani was injured in the attack and spoke to journalists from his hospital bed. The ten dead ‘insurgents’, along with several injured ones, were his election workers and many were relatives of him or his agent, who was also his uncle, Zabet Amanullah.5 Immediately after news of the strike broke, many people in Takhar and Kabul assumed the agent, Zabet Amanullah, was the real target because he was the only person of real standing in the convoy. They also believed the Americans had their intelligence wrong and that all the dead, including Zabet Amanullah, were civilians.


Opbouw rapport
This report starts by providing essential background to the attack of 2 September 2010. It gives an overview of the insurgency in Takhar and the US military response. It then examines the US ‘kill or capture’ strategy and its relation to the laws of war and discusses the intelligence that led the Special Forces unit to attack the convoy, as well as the crucial intelligence which was not gathered, in particular the biographies of the two men (whom the military still insists are one person).

The next section gives a detailed account of the attack itself, as reconstructed from extensive witness testimony. Section 4 discusses the evidence that the laws of war may have been broken during the attack, especially with regard to the intelligence gathering operation. The final section touches on existing misgivings with intelligence gathering in Afghanistan within the most senior levels in the US military and discusses the possible political and military ramifications when military operations are based on limited understanding of the Afghan political landscape.