Foes Say Radio Messages Link Taliban Leader to Mass Killings

A commander with the opposition Northern Alliance claims that intercepted radio messages indicate that the leader of the Taliban regime, Mullah Mohammed Omar, authorized mass killings in Afghanistan’s Bamian province in January.

The massacres have been confirmed by a U.N. investigation, and if there is evidence of Omar’s involvement, it could provide the basis for his prosecution in an international war crimes court.

Haji Aliyar, an opposition commander in the province’s Yakaolang district, said in a satellite phone interview with The Times that Taliban fighters had massacred about 300 civilians in the district northwest of the capital, Kabul, in January.

The fundamentalist regime had lost control of Yakaolang in December, and the massacres occurred when the Taliban retook the area and held it for almost two weeks before opposition forces fought their way back into the district.

The district is now under Northern Alliance control.

Aliyar said that when Northern Alliance fighters pushed back into the district more than a week after the killings, he saw the bodies of civilians who had been shot with their hands tied behind their backs.

“There were two women and three children among them. The rest were old men and men,” he said. Aliyar said the children’s ages ranged from 5 to 12.

“There was an order from Mullah Omar to kill those people,” he said. “All the commanders were saying during radio communications that Mullah Omar gave the order and that killing and looting were allowed.”

It is extremely difficult for journalists in northern Afghanistan to visit the Yakaolang district because it means crossing Taliban-held territory. The people quoted in this story were interviewed mainly in Jabal os Saraj or neighboring Gulbahar, in opposition-held territory.

Said Mohammed Hussein, 30, of Yakaolang said he has a list of 11 names of family members and neighbors killed in the massacre, and three others who died of exposure and hunger when they fled into the mountains to escape the Taliban.

Kurban Ali Orfan, a district leader of a party representing ethnic Hazaras, listed three relatives who were killed.

Many of the victims in Yakaolang were Hazaras, a Shiite Muslim minority in Afghanistan. The Taliban, ethnic Pushtuns and Sunni Muslims have all targeted Hazaras in previous massacres, for instance during mass killings in 1998 when the Taliban took the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

A U.N. report cited recently in Newsday listed the names, ages and occupations of 178 people killed in the January massacres.

Aliyar said when the Taliban retook the district, people in the village of Nayak came out to meet the Taliban to show that they were civilians. He said the Taliban tied the hands of the men behind their backs, took them away and shot them.

He said about 30 people were shot in the village of Bedmushkin on the same day.

In addition to the shootings of civilians, several Northern Alliance fighters in the Shahidan district were half-skinned by the Taliban, Aliyar said.

Many women and children fled Nayak and other villages into the mountains, where they died of exposure, according to Aliyar.

Aliyar said that seven families of refugees had taken shelter in the mosque in Nayak. The Taliban took seven men from the refugee families and shot them outside the mosque, he said.

“I couldn’t believe they could do that to refugees, who’d left their homes looking for safety,” Aliyar said. “I couldn’t understand how they could take them out of the mosque and shoot them in the head, out in the street.”

When he saw the victims of the January massacres, he said, the bodies were lying in piles in three locations, surrounded by spent cartridges, some of which were covered with blood.

Some of the dead were buried in mass graves; others were buried individually by their families.

Commander Abdul Satar, 33, who was in Yakaolang about a month after the killings and saw the mass graves of victims, said he learned the details from relatives of the dead.

He said a pavilion had been erected over the mass graves, decked with green flags.

“Our tradition is that if a person died a violent death, his grave is marked by a flag,” he said. According to Satar, 220 people were buried in the mass graves.

Relatives of the dead told him of one family of four brothers who begged the Taliban to spare one of their lives so there would be a breadwinner for the family, but all four were shot.

Two brothers who owned a shop offered to pay the Taliban to spare their lives, but they were killed too, he said.

According to the Newsday report, U.N. staff in Afghanistan gathered witness accounts of the January massacres and visited mass graves. Their report went to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and to Mary Robinson, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights.