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U.S.
troops find remains of CIA-led missile strike in Afghanistan The Pentagon defended the Feb. 4 Hellfire missile strike, with its chief spokesman for the Afghan war saying that those killed “were not innocents.” “We do not know who were the individuals at the strike site,” Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem said Monday in Washington. “The indications were there, that there was something untoward that we needed to make go away.” When asked if U.S. officials would be able to identify Sept. 11 terror suspect Osama bin Laden’s remains from DNA, Stufflebeem said: “I can’t even verify that we have bin Laden DNA to compare it to, at this point. But I can substantiate that we are trying to gather DNA for identification purposes.” Meanwhile, the Afghan Red Crescent Society graduated its first class of women health care volunteers Monday, a major step in a country where a quarter of all children die before age 5 and where educating women was banned under the Taliban. The 59 graduates in the 10-day course are all teachers who are expected to go back to their villages or neighborhoods and instruct other women about such health care basics as the necessity of childhood vaccines and how to treat diarrhea, a leading killer of Afghan children. Also Monday, a Pentagon spokeswoman said U.S. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has asked for an investigation into allegations that Afghans mistakenly taken prisoner by U.S. military forces in a raid last month were beaten and mistreated. Victoria Clarke said the military “has nothing to indicate that anything like that happened,” but is looking into it nonetheless in the wake of newspaper reports. The U.S. military is investigating the Jan. 23 raid in the village of Khas Uruzgan, north of Kandahar, in which 19 people were killed. U.S. commanders acknowledged last week that they mistakenly took 27 prisoners in the raid, believing they were al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. The 27 were released last week. Several contended in reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post that they were beaten and kept in a cage with wooden bars during their detention in Kandahar. Clarke said the U.S. team at the site of the Feb. 4 missile strike recovered “small pieces of bone and human flesh,” as well as some documents, a number of small weapons and some ammunition. The materials were removed for analysis, she said. “The materials will be sent back for further analysis,” she said. Asked about reports from the scene that those who were killed were peasants gathering scrap metal, Stufflebeem said: “These were not peasant people up there farming.” He declined to specify what was occurring to arouse suspicion. The women who graduated Monday from the Afghan Red Crescent Society's course — 32 in the capital of Kabul and 27 in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif — will join 10,000 male volunteers already working in the country. Except for one class of 25 women taught in secret under the Taliban, the society had not been allowed to train women in Afghanistan since the Taliban took power in 1996. The teacher of that class was arrested by the Taliban and threatened with prison for educating women, said Grethe Ostern of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. In other developments: — Prime Minister Hamid Karzai reopened the Afghan Embassy in the United Arab Emirates on Monday, raising Afghanistan’s flag in a hotel in the capital, Abu Dhabi, in the presence of Emirates Foreign Ministry officials. The Emirates was one of only three countries to have diplomatic relations with the Taliban. — German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping headed for Kabul on Monday to visit German troops taking part in the Afghan protection force and inspect an air base along the way that the Germans are setting up in neighboring Uzbekistan |
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