"I took some flesh home and called it my son."

The NATO airstrike that killed more than 70 civilians near Kunduz earlier this month was a deadly confluence of two primary elements that characterize the living hell of Afghanistan: relentless violence and crushing poverty.

The villagers were slaughtered while trying to siphon gasoline from two fuel tankers that the Taliban had hijacked from the occupation forces. The trucks were stranded in the ford of a shallow river. Unable to get the trucks out, the insurgents invited local villagers to come gather the fuel for themselves. The prospect of salvaging a can or two of free fuel to help them get through the coming winter drove many of the villagers out into the dead of night. At about 1 a.m, an airstrike ordered by a German commander struck the fuel tankers and the surrounding area.

The result was a firestorm that ripped the villagers to pieces and roasted their bodies beyond all recognition. But that was not the end of it, nor, perhaps, the worst of it. For then the survivors of the slain had to come to the smoking field and try to find their loved ones amidst the gruesome, ungodly residue.

The Guardian's Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, who has contributed some of the most remarkable reporting from the Terror War's fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan, spoke to some of the survivors. Their stories speak with bleak and harrowing eloquence of the reality of the war, beyond all the pious rhetoric and strategic reviews and "serious" analysis in the imperial courts.

Below are some excerpts, but you should read the entire piece, which was the top story, blazoned across the top of the front page, in the print edition of Saturday's Guardian. Saturday editions of UK papers are generally the equivalent of Sunday editions of US paper, the big showcase edition of the week. Try to imagine a major American paper giving up such prime real estate to let the victims of the "good war" in Afghanistan tell their story in their own words.

From the Guardian:

At first light last Friday, in the Chardarah district of Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan, the villagers gathered around the twisted wreckage of two fuel tankers that had been hit by a Nato airstrike. They picked their way through a heap of almost a hundred charred bodies and mangled limbs which were mixed with ash, mud and the melted plastic of jerry cans, looking for their brothers, sons and cousins. They called out their names but received no answers. By this time, everyone was dead.

What followed is one of the more macabre scenes of this or any war. The grief-stricken relatives began to argue and fight over the remains of the men and boys who a few hours earlier had greedily sought the tanker's fuel. Poor people in one of the world's poorest countries, they had been trying to hoard as much as they could for the coming winter.

"We didn't recognise any of the dead when we arrived," said Omar Khan, the turbaned village chief of Eissa Khail. "It was like a chemical bomb had gone off, everything was burned. The bodies were like this," he brought his two hands together, his fingers curling like claws. "There were like burned tree logs, like charcoal.

"The villagers were fighting over the corpses. People were saying this is my brother, this is my cousin, and no one could identify anyone."

So the elders stepped in. They collected all the bodies they could and asked the people to tell them how many relatives each family had lost.

A queue formed. One by one the bereaved gave the names of missing brothers, cousins, sons and nephews, and each in turn received their quota of corpses. It didn't matter who was who, everyone was mangled beyond recognition anyway. All that mattered was that they had a body to bury and perform prayers upon.

...Jan Mohammad, an old man with a white beard and green eyes, said angrily: "I ran, I ran to find my son because nobody would give me a lift. I couldn't find him."

He dropped his head on his palm that was resting on the table, and started banging his head against his white mottled hand. When he raised his head his eyes were red and tears were rolling down his cheek: "I couldn't find my son, so I took a piece of flesh with me home and I called it my son. I told my wife we had him, but I didn't let his children or anyone see. We buried the flesh as it if was my son."

He broke off, then shouted at the young Assadullah, who had knocked at the old man's house and told his son to come with them there was free fuel for everyone, "You destroyed my home", Assadu-llah turned his head and looked at the wall. "You destroyed my home," he shouted again. Jan Mohammad dropped his head again on his palm and rolled it left and right, his big gray turban moving like a huge pendulum, "Taouba [forgiveness]," he hissed. "People lost their fathers and sons for a little bit of fuel. Forgiveness."

Omar Khan, the village chief, was crying now and looking at the ceiling.

...Islamu-ldin, a 20-year-old from Issa khail village with tufts of hair sprouting from his cheek, took his turn to speak. He said he ran for three hours to get to the riverbed to look for his brother.

"Our village is far from the river, I searched a lot through the dead, and I found my brother. I recognized him from his clothes. But we only found his upper body, maybe someone took the legs, maybe it just burned to ashes."

Omar Khan was weeping openly now. A few other men resisted, but their eyes were as red as those of Jan Muhamad, who was babbling and shouting at the young Assadullah again and again.

.."At midnight my brother and nephew went to get fuel. I also wanted to go but I didn't have a car," said Saleh Muhamad. "At one in the morning I went to bed. When I heard the explosion I called my brother but his phone was off … when I arrived at 3am there were dead everywhereI was searching for my brother and nephew but I couldn't find anyone.

"I had a torch with me and I could see well, but I still couldn't recognise anyone." His eyes looked straight through me as he said: "I found one body and took it home and we buried it. It was a full body, with arms and legs. We buried it well."

Further comment would be superfluous here. Omar Khan's reaction is the only proper, fully human response to the horrific reality of these monstrous operations of power, the blind, brute drive for domination.

Comments (12)

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Michael B said:

	Having a hard time with comments section Testing. And thanks for all your excellent journalism Chris Floyd.
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September 12, 2009
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Bill Jones said:

	The same day that this atrocity was perpetrated The Obama regime was horrified by this. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8237179.stm
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September 12, 2009
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Grandma Jefferson said:

... Rob wept at this article, as did I. Another grand demonstration of the love of humanity that is the hallmark of the Imperium. I haven't written lately, because I never expected to witness the collapse of a civilization, and watching it happen here has left me speechless. But it has to collapse, because it can't be fixed. But I'm always here, and as always, grateful to Chris for his peerless reporting of acts ignored by the Ministry of Propaganda, and his refusal to be silent in the putrid face of true Evil.

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September 12, 2009
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Grandma Jefferson said:

...And again... Rob says, "There are no words to describe these monsters. To blow innocent poor to bits, merely for the crime of taking gas to stay alive, is a crime against all humanity, and nobody cares. Nobody is screaming in the streets to put an end to this pointless barbarism and savagery. And we are all lost, damned forever, and we deserve everything that's coming to us." He's too upset to type, so I'm doing it for him.

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September 12, 2009
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Yankee 30 said:

	... BillJones said: "The same day that this atrocity was perpetrated The Obama regime was horrified by this." I hear the echo.
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September 13, 2009
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windy said:

Zen and the art of vehicle repair http://www.boston.com/news/wor...ghanistan/ McChrystal is expected to ask for more troops soon, but would not elaborate on numbers Friday. "My position here is a little bit like a mechanic. We've got a situation with a vehicle and I've been asked to look at it and tell the owner what the situation is and what it will cost to make the vehicle run correctly and I will provide that," he said. "Now I understand that the vehicle owner then has to make a decision on what the car is worth, how much longer he intends to drive it," he added. "Whether he wants it to look good or just run."

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September 13, 2009
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Yankee 30 said:

A waking dream "I took some flesh home and called it my son." After all the eloquent eulogies from the who's who of American realpolitik, the touching memories of what a swell guy he was(how old were YOU when you realized your father was a jerk?)... the solemn scene on that grassy knoll in Arlington for overweight, alchoholic blowhard Ted Kennedy was ripped asunder when several F-16s screamed in low out of a western sky unleashing at least three 500lb bombs. Les Visible says, "Civilization, you gotta love it. Some say it’s been here for some time. I’m with the group that’s waiting for it to arrive." Me too. I'm waiting for the day when we can cure cancer with music.

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September 13, 2009
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Sean O'Neil said:

If this were not such a cruel and inhumane reality... ...I would assume it was some kind of sick joke being perpetrated on all of us. So, we're doing this to the Afghani people because...? ...because...? ...because...? Near as I can figure, it's because they're furriner terrrrisssss... and they're labelled as such because they dare to repel invading forces, soldiers who invade Afghani land to bring death and destruction. If another nation's soldiers --or, to make it more accurate, a collective of many nations' soldiers-- were to invade America and rain Hell upon us all, would we be terrrrrrrrissssss for repelling them? No, I didn't think so. I guess that's because we're so fucking exceptional. Oh how I praise the Flying Spaghetti Monster by the hour, for the lucky fate of having been born in such an exceptional country.

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September 13, 2009
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Cass said:

Mechanics 101 and tanks for the memory The link from Windy above to McChrystal's comments about war as car mechanics made me feel sick. I guess it depends whether you trained the guys who stole and wrecked the car in the first place, after which you you drop a few bombs on it yourself to try and get the bad guys. Then you try and fix it. Unfortunately, the Afghan people have to live in this "car", and will still have to live in it after the mechanics have wiped their hands on oily rags and buggered off. After massive election fraud, the independent committee has decided to count the fraudulent ballots. What the hell, eh? And Karzai will be reimplanted in Kabul and the death and despair will go on. Some Conservative elder in the UK (Hague? I lost the link) has apparently decided that a Con government will try and change the minds of the British people about the war in Afghanistan by explaining the "mission" more clearly. I think the UK may be in the unenviable position that we are here in Canada. Both large parties seem to love war. We have no one to vote for either, although Canadian support has been dropping continuously. No wonder the percentage of voters in recent elections (all three of them) has plunged. Meanwhile, a retired history professor is horrified at the militarization of his university in Kingston, Ontario. Military, Queen's 'have nothing in common': retired prof http://www.thewhig.com/Article...e=1750209 Military Family Appreciation Day will feature a ceremonial kickoff involving CFB Kingston Base Commander Rick Fawcett, who will arrive on the field in a Bison Armoured Vehicle. "I made a point last year to [the organizer] that it was in poor taste to have tanks on the field," said Smith. I think I feel a major depression coming on.

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September 13, 2009 | url
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Michael Hureaux said:

... And still there come thousands of fools on the U.S. left who reject the strengths of marxist method and practice because it was once contaminated by stalinist garbage. The reality is that the imperial powers create a generation of Stalins everytime they bomb and eviscerate civilians whose culture they've never taken the time to understand. People have a tendency to go with what they know, and if all they've known for a considerable time is brutality and poverty, the means by which they will break away from brutality and poverty will be poor and brutal. People may, for a time as they did with Gandhi, attempt to be larger than their oppressors. But the oppressor, always eager to maintain an unfair advantage, will turn around and do as the British occupiers did in India and Pakistan, and work to create a tribal clash that bogs down the newly independent country. We're seeing the same dynamic in South Africa today. At some point, the mass tires of devouring each other, and begins to strike at the neo-colonialist. The west knows this, and that is why it is seeking to consolidate its position in the third world with the "war on terror". But it won't work, and the empire will fall, and it will fall ugly. And there is nothing that any of the postmodern moralists from the "enlightened civilizations" such as our own have to say that will convince me that they've even begun to understand that reality. It's all uphill from here.

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September 13, 2009
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Yankee 30 said:

	... Paul Craig Roberts, September 14, 2009: "...The telltale part of Obama’s speech was the applause in response to his pledge that “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits.” Yet, Obama and his fellow politicians have no hesitation to add trillions of dollars to the deficit in order to fund wars."
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September 14, 2009
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Carl said:

	Blame the Pilots The Americans want to blame the Germans, but they have admitted that the American pilots with their night vision could see that the trucks were not moving and that civilians were swarming about. At the very least, they could have fire a few warning shots with a strafing run, but dropping a bomb is more fun. This will continue until a pilot is prosecuted for war crimes.
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September 19, 2009
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