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| Shahara, now 3, sits tucked inside the shawl of her mother, Masooma, in Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Saturday, April 20, 2013 as Masooma recalls the night she says a U.S. soldier killed her husband and attacked her children in a southern Afghanistan village. Masooma says the soldier grabbed Shahara's pony tails and shook her head violently after killing her father. |
KANDAHAR,
Afghanistan (AP) -- Sitting on a dirty straw mat on the parched
ground of southern Afghanistan, Masooma sank deeper inside a giant black
shawl. Hidden from view, her words burst forth as she told her side of
what happened to her family sometime before dawn on March 11, 2012.
According
to Masooma, an American soldier wearing a helmet equipped with a
flashlight burst into her two-room mud home while everyone slept. He
killed her husband, Dawood, punched her 7-year-old son and shoved a
pistol into the mouth of his baby brother.
"We
were asleep. He came in and he was shouting, saying something about
Taliban, Taliban, and then he pulled my husband up. I screamed and
screamed and said, `We are not Taliban, we are not government. We are no
one. Please don't hurt us,'" she said.
The soldier wasn't listening. He pointed his pistol at Masooma to quiet her and pushed her husband into the living room.
"My
husband just looked back at me and said, `I will be back.'" Seconds
later she heard gunshots, she recalled, her voice cracking as she was
momentarily unable to speak. Her husband was dead.
Masooma,
who like many Afghans uses only one name, defied tribal traditions that
prohibit women from speaking to strangers to talk to The Associated
Press while - half a world away - the military prepares to court-martial
a U.S. serviceman in the killing of her husband and 15 other Afghan
civilians, mainly women and children.
The AP
also interviewed other villagers about the case, all of whom are
identified by the U.S. Army as witnesses or relatives of witnesses. They
included a sister and brother who were wounded and two men who were
away during the killings and returned to find wives and children slain.
The sister and brother told AP how they tried to run away and hide from a
soldier with a gun, only to be shot - and see their neighbors and
grandmother killed.
U.S. Army Staff Sgt.
Robert Bales of Lake Tapps, Washington, is accused of the killings.
Prosecutors say Bales slipped away from his remote outpost to attack two
nearby villages, returning in the middle of the rampage and then for a
final time soaked in blood. During a hearing last fall, other soldiers
testified that Bales spent the evening before the massacre watching a
movie about revenge killings, sharing contraband whiskey from a plastic
bottle and discussing an attack that cost one of their comrades his leg.
Bales
has not entered a plea, but his lawyers have not disputed his
involvement in the killings. They have said his mental health may be
part of his defense; he was on his fourth combat deployment and had
suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as well as a concussive
head injury while serving in Iraq. The Army is seeking the death
penalty.
The killings took place in Kandahar's
Panjwai district, deep in the ethnic Pashtun heartland that spawned the
Taliban movement, an area where women are hidden inside all-enveloping
burqas and rarely leave their homes.
Masooma's
account of the night has been reported variously over the past year,
differing over details such as whether there was one or more than one
U.S. soldier involved. However, the four hours she recently spent with
the AP was her first face-to-face interview with a news organization.
She spoke as her burly brother-in-law Baraan loomed nearby.
The
interview took place outside Baraan's single-story mud home in Kandahar
city, because Alokzai and Najiban villages, where the killings
occurred, are too hostile for foreigners to visit. Even in Kandahar,
some 150 kilometers (90 miles) away, the AP journalists sought to avoid
being seen by Baraan's neighbors, who he feared would react negatively
to their presence.
Masooma said that the
soldier returned to the family's bedroom after killing her husband. She
stood in terror. Her children hid under their blankets. The soldier
moved slowly and seemed angry. Gesturing to show how he hit her in the
arms and shoved her to the ground, Masooma said he then moved toward her
son Hikmatullah, then 7.
Her son said he
remembers the sight of the attacker in full military uniform. "I was so
afraid. I pretended I was asleep," he said.
Masooma said the soldier found Hikmatullah and punched him repeatedly in the head.
She
said the soldier then found her 2-year-old daughter, Shahara. He
grabbed her pigtails and violently shook her head back and forth.
He then went to the crying baby Hazratullah and shoved the muzzle of his black pistol into the infant's mouth, she said.
"He
just held it there in his mouth. I screamed and screamed, `He is just a
baby. Don't kill him. Don't kill him.' But he just kept the gun in his
mouth. He didn't say anything. He just stared at him," she recalled. As
she recounted the attack, Hazratullah fussed and squirmed beneath the
giant shawl that enveloped her.
After some
time, she said, the soldier took the gun from the baby's mouth and
walked back into the living room. Masooma dug her bare foot into the
dirt to demonstrate how the soldier slipped his foot beneath her
husband's head to lift it from the floor, as if to be sure he was really
dead. The soldier looked down at her husband, shrugged his shoulders
and returned to searching her home. After he finished rifling through
their belongings, he left.
Investigators say
Bales was armed with a 9 mm pistol and an M-4 rifle outfitted with a
grenade launcher when he walked off his base and went on a nighttime
killing spree in five homes, including Masooma's. He faces 16 counts of
premeditated murder; six counts of attempted murder; seven counts of
assault; and one count each of possessing steroids, using steroids,
destroying a laptop, burning bodies, and using alcohol. He is being held
in a military prison at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, south of Seattle in
Washington state.
On April 23, Bales appeared
in a military courtroom at Joint Base Lewis-McChord for a hearing that
focused on what might happen if he is convicted, including which
relatives and friends could speak on his behalf during a sentencing
hearing. Such testimony could help determine whether he receives the
death penalty.
The U.S. government flew Baraan
and five other Afghan men - all members of families who were attacked -
to Seattle to familiarize them with the U.S. judicial system and notify
them that they would likely have to return when the court-martial
begins in September. Only three of those who went to the U.S. in March
said they saw the attack. Some, like Baraan, went on behalf of relatives
who were slain or women prevented from traveling.
None
of the Afghan witnesses was able to identify Bales as the attacker, but
other evidence, including tests of the blood on his clothes, implicated
him, according to testimony from a DNA expert.
The
AP also spoke with several others who survived the attack or lost
family members. To avoid putting the Afghans in danger should they be
seen talking to foreigners, the AP arranged for those interviews to take
place at a nondescript hotel in Kandahar. The Afghans drove the dusty,
dangerous road from their villages to the hotel and then returned home.
Said
Jan, an elderly man who was visiting Kandahar during the attack and
lost his wife and three other family members, said he went to the United
States expecting justice.
"I thought we were
going to America to see him hanged," Said Jan said. "Instead they showed
us a courtroom and kept us in rooms asking us more and more questions."
Said Jan said he wasn't interested in returning for the trial.
"None
of us will go," agreed Mohammed Wazir, who also went to the U.S. in
March. "Why would we care about seeing America? We will only go if he is
hanged."
Wazir said he returned home from a
trip the morning after the attack to find 11 members of his family dead -
his wife, his mother, two brothers, a 13-year-old nephew and his six
children. Their bodies were partially burned.
He
was left only with his 3-year-old son, Habib Shah, who had accompanied
him on the trip to Spin Boldak, a town on the Pakistani border.
While
Wazir spoke of the horror of finding his home spattered with blood,
still smelling of burned flesh, Habib, now 4, played by his side,
chewing on his toy police car, occasionally running it across his
father's legs, loading small candies on the roof and giggling when they
tumbled off.
"He misses his mother all the time," Wazir said, trying to straighten Habib's curly brown hair.
From
another home that was attacked that night, 16-year-old Rafiullah
remembers the American soldier smashing through the door waving his
pistol. Awakened in a small room with his grandmother and his sister
Zardana, he said he didn't know what to do. "We just ran and he ran
after us."
Zardana, 11, said a cousin dashed
over to help. He was shot and killed, she said. "We couldn't stop. We
just wanted somewhere to hide. I was holding on to my grandmother and we
ran to our neighbors." Their neighbor, Naim, came out of his house to
see what the noise was all about and was shot and wounded. His daughter
then ran to him but was killed by the American soldier, Zardana said,
struggling to remember and fiddling with her green scarf decorated with
tiny sequins.
Zardana, who said she saw
soldiers in a nearby field as she ran from one house to the next,
remembers trying to hide behind her grandmother at the neighbor's house.
But the soldier found them.
Gesturing with his hand as if spraying the room with gunfire, Rafiullah said the soldier "just went bang, bang, bang."
Rafiullah was wounded in both his legs, his grandmother was killed and Zardana was shot in the head.
She
removed her scarf to show where the wound had healed; the effects will
last a lifetime. She suffered nerve damage on her left side and has to
walk with a cane. Her hand is too weak to hold anything heavy.
Zardana
spent about two months recovering at the Kandahar Air Base hospital and
three more at a naval hospital in San Diego receiving rehabilitation
therapy, accompanied by her father, Samiullah.
Listening
as she spoke, Samiullah smiled at his lanky daughter, encouraging her
to say the only English phrase she knows: "Thank you."
Zardana
spoke of her treatment in San Diego and the doctors and nurses who
helped her learn to walk again, gave her toys and still find ways to
stay in touch.
"They showed me so much love,"
she said with a tiny smile. "They asked me about what happened and when I
told them how my grandmother died and how afraid I was and how I was
shot, they cried and cried."
The accounts of
many villagers have varied over the past year, making it a challenge for
investigators and journalists to find out a full narrative of the
attack.
For example, Masooma gave an telephone
interview to a reporter days after the attack, with Baraan, her
brother-in-law, acting as a translator. According to the resulting
story, she described a single attacker in her home, but said she saw
many soldiers outside.
Three months later, her
family allowed a female Army investigator to question her. The
investigator testified at a hearing last fall that Masooma clearly
stated two soldiers carried out the attack. The investigator said she
had no reason to doubt Masooma's credibility.
At
the same hearing, Baraan testified, insisting Masooma was mistaken when
she said there were two soldiers. Lawyers for the soldier accused in
the killings suggested Baraan might be influencing Masooma - especially
since the defense was not allowed to speak with her.
No
physical evidence has emerged to suggest more than one soldier took
part in the killings. Surveillance footage from the base showed one
soldier returning to the camp; the soldiers who greeted him said he was
covered in blood.
Nevertheless, many Afghans
villagers, including some eyewitnesses, continue to insist multiple
soldiers were present during the attack.
In
the interview with the AP, Masooma did not waver in her insistence that
one soldier attacked her home, and Baraan denied that she ever reported
seeing many soldiers outside. Masooma did recall flares lighting the sky
until "night seemed like day" - which is consistent with testimony from
the hearing, as guards said they fired a flare that illuminated the sky
for 20 seconds after hearing gunshots. Masooma also said she heard
helicopters overhead; there was no corroborating testimony at the
hearing.
Masooma is absolutely certain of one thing: what it will take for her to find closure.
"I just want to see him killed," she said of Bales. "I want to see him dead. Then I can let go."
