115 die in slaughter that never happened

4 Dec, 2001 09:54 AM5 mins to read

By RICHARD LLOYD PARRY

KAMA ADO - The village where nothing happened is reached by a steep climb at the end of a rattling three-hour drive along a stony road.

Until nothing happened here, on Sunday and again on Monday, it was a large village with a small graveyard, but now that has been reversed. The cemetery on the hill contains 40 freshly dug graves, unmarked and identical. And the village of Kama Ado has ceased to exist.

Many of the homes here are just deep conical craters in the earth; the rest are split open like crushed cardboard boxes. At the moment when nothing happened, the villagers of Kama Ado were taking their early morning meal, before sunrise and the beginning of the Ramadan fast. And there in the rubble are tokens of the simple daily lives they led.

A contorted tin kettle, turned almost inside out by the blast, a collection of charred cooking pots, and the fragments of an old fashioned pedal-operated sewing Machine. A split metal chest contains scraps of children's clothes in cheap bright nylon.

In another room are the only riches these people ever had - six dead cows lying higgledy-piggledy, distended by decay. And this is all very strange because, when American B-52s unloaded dozen of bombs and killed 115 men, women and children, nothing happened.

We know this because the United States Department of Defence told us so.

That evening in Washington, a Pentagon spokesman replied to questions about reports of civilian casualties in eastern Afghanistan by saying they were not true, because the US meticulously selected only military targets associated with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

Subsequent Pentagon utterances on the subject have wobbled somewhat, but there has been no retraction of that initial statement: "It just didn't happen".

So God knows what kind of a magic looking glass I stepped through yesterday as I travelled out of the city of Jalalabad along the road to Kama Ado. From the moment I woke up, I was confronted with the wreckage and innocent victims of high-altitude, high-tech, 450kg nothings.

It began at the home of Haji Zaman Gamsharik, the pro-Western, anti-Taleban Mujahideen commander who is being discreetly supplied and financed by the US Government.

The previous day I had followed him around Jalalabad's mortuary, where seven mutilated corpses were being laid out - Mujahideen soldiers of Zaman's who had been killed when American bombs hit the government office in which they were sleeping. And now, it had happened again.

There they were in the back of three pick-up trucks - seven more bloody bodies of seven more Mujahideen, killed when the guesthouse in which they were sleeping in the village of Landi Khiel was hit by bombs on Monday.

Zaman is a proud, haughty man who fought in the mountains for years against the Soviet Union, but I have never seen him look so vulnerable. "I sent them there myself yesterday," was all he could say. "I sent them for security."

But the commander gave us Mujahideen escorts of our own, and we set off down the road to Landi Khiel. We found the ruins of the office where the first lot of soldiers had died, and the guesthouse where they perished on Monday.

There, in the ruins of a family house, was a small fragment of nothing - the tail-end of a compact bomb, bearing the words "Surface Attack Guided Missile AGM 114", and a serial number: 232687.

It was half buried in the remains of the roof of a house where three men died.

"They were a family, just ordinary people," said Haji Mohammed Nazir, the local elder who was accompanying us.

"They were not terrorists - the terrorists are in the mountains, over there."

So we drove on in the direction of the White Mountains, where hundreds of al Qaeda members and perhaps even bin Laden himself, are hiding in the Tora Bora cave complex. A B-52 was high in the sky; a billow of black smoke was visible, blooming out of the valley. Something, surely, was happening over there.

And then, finally, we reached the ruins of Kama Ado.

During the whole day I had only one moment of real fear, when an American B-52 flew directly overhead.

It executed a slow circle; I was conscious of electronic eyes looking down on us, the only traffic on the road. Then, to everyone's relief, it veered slowly away.

Before we left Jalalabad, an American colleague had telephoned the Pentagon and told of our plans to travel to the village where nothing happened.

The information was noted. I can't help wondering what that B-52 would have done to our small convoy if that telephone call had not been made. Perhaps nothing would have happened to me, too.

- INDEPENDENT

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