130 Afghan People Executed

Report: 130 Afghan People Executed
By Priscilla Cheung
Friday, Oct. 26, 2001; 6:20 p.m. EDT

UNITED NATIONS –– Taliban soldiers executed Afghan civilians indiscriminately after taking over the strategic Yakoalong district this year, according to a U.N. report released Friday.

Kamal Hossain, author of the report, said about 130 civilians were executed – most of them by firing squad – during three days of carnage after the Taliban took over Yakoalong from opposition forces in January.

Hossain's report is one of the most detailed accounts yet of alleged Taliban atrocities. He is investigating rights abuses in Afghanistan for the U.N. Human Rights Commission.

Fifty more people were reported killed later in January.

"Most of the killing at this stage seems to have been indiscriminate, in the sense that all adult males in areas searched were rounded up and taken for execution," Hossain said.

The district has changed hands several times since last December. The Taliban retook Yakoalong from allied opposition forces in May, leading to the massacre of 180 more people in the region, Hossain reported.

Hossain, who visited Pakistan in March to investigate reports of the killings, found "a substantial body of evidence gathered from reliable sources."

His report also details developments in Afghanistan between March-August 2001, before the Sept. 11 terror attacks on America brought world attention to the war-ravaged nation.

U.S.-led troops have been bombing targets in Afghanistan, where the ruling Taliban are fighting opposition forces based in the north.

Yakoalong is in Bamiyan province, where Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in February ordered the destruction of all statues of Buddha, including two mammoth carvings in a Bamiyan mountainside made in the 3rd and 5th centuries.

The district links central Bamiyan to northern regions.

Between Jan. 8-13, Taliban commanders sent out search parties to villages in the area to round up male civilians, including some prominent local figures.

Some were killed on the spot, while others were taken away to face the firing squad.

"The old were detained for one or two days; the young were sentenced to death by firing squad," the report said.

Some victims "were tortured prior to execution, particularly through bayoneting and mutilation by knives," it said. At least one firing squad victim was skinned, it said.

A number of execution sites and mass graves have been identified, as have some of the commanders, the report said. While some victims were combatants, "the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the target of the attacks was the civilian population," it said.

The soldiers also broke into homes, "where women and children were terrorized and in many cases food stocks and valuables were looted," the report said.

"Evidence of the scale and method of execution suggests that it could not have been done without the knowledge of the Taliban commanders," it said.

© Copyright 2001 The Associated Press