Mass Grave Plundered at Site of Taleban Prisonersâ€™ Massacre (Tom Coghlan)

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December 24, 2008- The Afghan Government has called on Nato troops to guard an alleged war crimes site that has been plundered and as many as 2,000 bodies apparently removed.

The mass grave at Dasht-e-Leili in northern Afghanistan is thought to contain the remains of between 1,000 and 2,000 Taleban prisoners massacred by fighters loyal to the Uzbek warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum in November 2001. The killings occurred in the remote Leili desert as General Dostum’s forces fought alongside US special forces. {xtypo_quote_right} Farid Mutakhail, head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission in the north, said that the digging might have been going on for four or five months. “We found that most of the bones that were excavated from the grave were thrown into the Pul-e-Surkh river,” he said. {/xtypo_quote_right}

Prisoners were packed into sealed shipping containers and left to suffocate. Others are alleged to have died when fighters riddled other containers full of prisoners with bullets before burning and burying the bodies.

A State Department intelligence assessment from November 23, 2002, released recently under freedom of information laws, assessed that up to 2,000 Taleban prisoners died in the incident, despite initial claims from the US Government that the number was in the dozens. The mass grave site is a forbidding and desolate spot in an area notorious for bandits and thieves.