Word: dostum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...have been triggered by the scale of the carnage, by reports alleging massacres of captured Taliban fighters in other centers and by reports from a number of Western journalists who claim to have seen a number Taliban corpses with their hands tied behind their backs. Alliance leader General Rashid Dostum insists his men never tied up the prisoners. And both he and U.S. and British officials insist that what transpired at Qalai Janghi was a pitched battle in which the prisoners had elected to die fighting, leaving the anti-Taliban forces no choice but to eliminate them as swiftly...
...Qalai Janghi prisoners were foreign Taliban volunteers who surrendered with the Taliban at Kunduz, and had then been separated from their Afghan comrades and brought to General Dostum's fortress. The Northern Alliance had promised amnesty for Afghan Taliban fighters; the foreigners were a problem. The U.S. had made clear during the siege of Kunduz that it would not accept any outcome that allowed Al Qaeda operatives to escape to other countries - they should, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said bluntly, "either be killed or taken prisoner." Dostum had taken the captives to his fortress, announcing that he would hand them over...
...Dostum's intentions were unclear, his security arrangements proved catastrophic. Even before the revolt began, two senior Northern Alliance commanders were killed in the fortress on Saturday night by a hand grenade detonated by a Taliban prisoner. But the conflagration that killed most of the prisoners began on Sunday morning, triggered - according to an emerging consensus among news reports - when prisoners set upon two CIA operatives sent to interrogate them in the hope of weeding out Al Qaeda members. One of these men, Johnny "Mike" Spann, was reportedly beaten to death; the other escaped to a far corner...
...British calls for an inquiry into the events, that paper's fiercely anti-war columnist Robert Fisk accuses the U.S. and Britain of complicity in a war crime. His argument is echoed in The Guardian where Isabel Hilton argues that the involvement of American and British personnel alongside General Dostum's men necessitates an investigation. "Were they fighting by Dostum's rules or by their own?" she writes. "Or do we no longer bother with the distinction...
...prisoners at Kala-i-Jangi were primarily foreign Taliban volunteers who had surrendered Saturday to the forces of Northern Alliance commander General Rashid Dostum. They had been taken to the fortress outside Mazar-i-Sharif for questioning to determine whether they had links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. On Sunday, the Taliban prisoners overpowered their guards and seized weapons from the fort's armory, taking over the southwest corner and exchanging fire with Northern Alliance soldiers both inside and outside the compound. Two Americans were trapped inside; one of them, CIA officer Spann, was quickly killed, witnesses...