United States Exposed For Being Complicit In Arming And Training Child Soldiers In Afghanistan

Washington, D.C. — The killing of a 10-year-old Afghan boy, Wasil Ahmad by Taliban forces has raised serious questions about the United State’s creation and backing of a militia group using of child soldiers.

Ahmad has been lionized as a national hero in Afghanistan after his death on Monday in the Uruzgan province at the hands of Taliban militants. The boy had previously gained national prominence for helping militia forces break an insurgent siege after his uncle had been wounded.

Ahmad’s death, while fighting alongside his uncle, with a U.S. supported government militia called the Afghan Local Police (ALP) has thrust the grim practice of child soldiers in combat into the international spotlight once again.

“There’s nothing heroic about putting a child in danger by arming him and having him fight in a war. The Taliban killed 10-year-old Wasil Ahmad, but those who encouraged him to fight bear responsibility as well,” Patricia Gossman, the senior Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch, told The Guardian.

Afghan government officials said Ahmad was not formally part of the Afghan Local Police, but his uncle, with whom he fought alongside, was an official member of the group, according to The Guardian

According to a report by The Guardian:

Created in 2010, the Afghan Local Police, known as ALP, is largely an invention of the US military, and was initially overseen by elite US special operations forces. Critics have long pointed to persistent human-rights abuse allegations within an entity they fear provides cover for the empowerment of militias.

According to a US government audit in October, the US Defense Department has provided $469.7m to the ALP from inception through April 2015, and estimates that the force will cost approximately $121m annually to sustain.

The same audit chided the Pentagon for lacking plans to disband the ALP or transition its 30,000 fighters to the official security services after US sponsorship ends, a switch currently slated for September.

When asked by The Guardian for comment about the U.S. funding militia groups that field child soldiers, the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command both refused to comment, with the Pentagon directing attention to a State Department policy on aid to foreign militaries.

“Consistent with US law and policy, the Department of State vets its assistance to foreign security forces, as well as certain Department of Defense training programs, to ensure that recipients have not committed gross human rights abuses. When the vetting process uncovers credible information that an individual or unit has committed a gross violation of human rights, US assistance is withheld.”

Afghan interior minister Sediq Sediqqi said that recruitment of children is against official policy and that it’s a crime to use child soldiers. The spokesman for the Uruzgan provincial governor noted that while Ahmad was not an official member of the ALP, he took up arms to avenge the deaths of 16 family members that had all been members of the ALP and had been killed by the Taliban.

“Recruiting child soldiers violates international law and Afghan law, but tragically it’s been a longstanding practice by some Afghan militias and ALP. Even though some of these forces get US support, there has been little effort to hold abusive commanders accountable for such crimes. It’s high time the Afghan government matched its words with action to end the practice of recruiting child soldiers,” said Human Rights Watch’s Gossman.

The idea of U.S. funding going to directly to groups that employ children soldiers is repugnant and shocking to the conscience. When policy becomes more important than morality, people suffer.

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Jay Syrmopoulos is a political analyst, free thinker, researcher, and ardent opponent of authoritarianism. He is currently a graduate student at University of Denver pursuing a masters in Global Affairs. Jay’s work has been published on Ben Swann’s Truth in Media, Truth-Out, Raw Story, MintPress News, as well as many other sites. You can follow him on Twitter @sirmetropolis, on Facebook at Sir Metropolis and now on tsu.

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Day After Warning Russia About Civilian Casualties, US Bombs Afghan Hospital

Up to 20 civilians were killed by U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan early Saturday morning that hit a hospital in Kunduz. According to reports, another 37 people have been injured and many more remain unaccounted for. The hospital is operated by a French affiliate of Doctors Without Borders, Médecins Sans Frontières (MFS), and was the only functioning health facility in the area.

According to The Guardian, “The hospital was hit during an aerial bombardment on Saturday morning in the besieged city of Kunduz, destroying a large portion of the facility. An MSF source told the Guardian that up to 20 Afghan members of staff and patients were killed and dozens more injured. They said the death toll could rise further. Among the killed were nine MSF staff and seven patients from the intensive care unit, including three children.”

“I was inside my office. Around 2am, the plane started bombing the main building of MSF. It lasted one and a half hours. After 3:30am, I came out from my office and saw all of the hospital was on fire,” said an MSF staff member who wished to remain anonymous. He continued, “We couldn’t save our doctors, our nurses, our cleaners, our friends. They burned inside the hospital. We couldn’t save our brothers and friends.”

MSF posted a tweet claiming that U.S., Afghan, and Taliban forces were all aware of the location of the hospital and were assured it would not be targeted. However, even after alerting U.S. forces the hospital was being bombed, the shelling continued for an additional 30 minutes.

The city of Kunduz is the site of a renewed battle between U.S.-backed Afghan security forces and the Taliban. The U.S. government claims the war in Afghanistan is over and that the country is transitioning into a democracy. The truth is that Afghanistan is in just as poor shape as it was before the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban. In fact, some conditions are worse now than they were before the U.S. installed a Western-friendly government.

Last week, we learned U.S. Marines were instructed to allow Afghan security forces and U.S.-backed Afghan militias to molest children. One Marine broke rank to stop a pedophile and was later forced into retirement for not following orders. And, production of opium — nearly eradicated by the Taliban — is now at record levels under the new regime.

The bombing comes at a critical time for U.S. foreign policy hawks, including President Obama, who in recent days has been criticizing Russia for initiating a bombing campaign of its own in Syria, in support of the Syrian government. While Russia maintains it is targeting terrorists in Syria, Western media reports flooded the airwaves the day Russia’s bombing started with reports of civilian casualties.

This hospital bombing is sure to complicate the West’s rhetoric against Russian aggression — considering their main talking point is concern over civilian and non-terrorist deaths at the hands of Russia in Syria. As news of the United States’ bombing of this hospital spreads, it leaves little room for criticism of Russian airstrikes.

Corporate media reports were quick to condemn Russian aggression, and rightly so; however, they have been utterly silent regarding U.S. collateral damage in recent months. While the United States and its allies continue indiscriminate airstrikes in at least seven countries, the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led incursion into Yemen has taken the lives of 500 children since March. In fact, the U.S. War on Terror has taken the lives of an estimated four million Muslims since 2001, many of whom were women and children.

It’s long past time for the U.S. public and media to oppose the innocent killing of civilians, whether the crimes are committed by Russia or their own government.

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Marine Forced into Retirement After Beating up US-Protected Pedophile

His orders were literally to look the other way and pretend it wasn't happening.

By Claire Bernish

(ANTIMEDIA) Afghanistan — “At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” Gregory Buckley, Sr. recalled his son telling him shortly before he was shot to death on base in southern Afghanistan in 2012.

Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. was distressed about the ongoing sexual abuse by Afghan police of boys brought back to base.

“My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture”

Once again, organized sexual abuse of children has returned to Afghanistan as an acceptable and even expected practice; and the problem is so pervasive it has a name — bacha bazi — literal translation: “boy play.”

Bacha bazi is an ancient practice where powerful and wealthy businessmen and military commanders exploit orphans and boys they ‘purchase’ from village families whom they train to dress in women’s clothes to sing and dance — and become their sexual slaves — for personal entertainment. And Marines and other U.S. troops are not permitted to stop the abuse or say anything about it — even when it occurs inside a military base.

According to the New York Times, “The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.”

Looking the other way is ostensibly customary, and going against the grain by speaking out or otherwise has consequences — as former Special Forces Captain Dan Quinn explained.
“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” said Quinn. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”

Quinn was relieved of duty and removed from Afghanistan after he beat up a U.S.-backed militia commander who kept a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave.


“I picked him up and threw him on the ground,” he asserted.

Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland now faces forced retirement for the same incident. California Representative Duncan Hunter wrote the Pentagon’s inspector general:

“The Army contends that Martland and others should have looked the other way (a contention that I believe is nonsense).”

Nonintervention as de facto policy has facilitated relations between U.S. personnel and Afghan police and militia units it employs to counter the Taliban. Any move against bacha bazi has potential cultural implications as well, since the longstanding practice occurs amongst such powerful men. But this nonintervention comes with the consequence of alienating those villages from which the boys are taken.

Martland and Quinn began receiving numerous complaints about the Afghan Local Police units they were training — including the rape of a 14-year-old girl by a commander, whose ostensible only punishment for the crime was being forced to marry his young victim. One commander stole his troops’ wages to spend on dancing boys while another murdered his daughter for kissing a boy under the guise of preserving her honor.

Buckley and two other Marines were killed in 2012 after a boy who’d been staying on base with infamous Afghan commander, Sarwar Jan, shot them with a rifle.

“As far as the young boys are concerned, the Marines are allowing it to happen and so they’re guilty by association,”said the senior Buckley. “They don’t know our Marines are sick to their stomachs.”
Despite renewed pressure to curb bacha bazi, the cultural differences make the issue a sensitive one to address. As United Nations undersecretary Radhika Coomaraswamy said in a 2009 interview with Frontline:

“The only way to stop bacha bazi is if you prosecute the people who commit the crime, and that’s what we need, because the laws are there in the books against this practice.”

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