Many of the men in the family were clean-shaven or wore only moustaches and they had long opposed the Taliban. Unlike the predominantly Pashtun Taliban, the Sharabuddin family were ethnic Tajiks and their main language was Dari. Daoud and his family had gathered to celebrate the naming of a newborn son, a ritual that takes place on the sixth day of a child’s life. Witnesses and survivors described an unprovoked assault on the family compound of Mohammed Daoud Sharabuddin, a police officer who had just received an important promotion.
A half-hearted official investigation ensued. Starkey’s reporting, which first uncovered the horrifying details of what happened that night, forced NATO and the US military to abandon the honour killings cover story. “I thought it was worth investigating because if that press release was true - a mass honour killing, three women killed by Taliban who were then killed by Special Forces - that in itself would have made an extraordinary and intriguing story.” But when he traveled to Gardez and began assembling witnesses to meet him in the area, he immediately realised NATO’s story was likely false. When I visited Starkey in Kabul, he told me that at first he saw no reason to discount the official story. A “senior US military official” told CNN that the bodies had “the earmarks of a traditional honour killing”.ĭocuments provided to The Intercept contain substantial redactions, particularly in areas dealing with allegations of a cover-up of the circumstances of the killings.īut the raid quickly gained international infamy after survivors and local Afghan investigators began offering a completely different narrative of the deadly events that night to a British reporter, Jerome Starkey, who began a serious investigation of the Gardez killings. The story was picked up and spread throughout the media. The US force, the press release alleged, found the women “hidden in an adjacent room”. The Americans killed the insurgents and were securing the area when they made their discovery: three women who had been “bound and gagged” and then executed inside the compound.
As the team approached, they were “engaged” in a “fire fight” by “several insurgents”. According to NATO, the force entered a compound near the village of Khataba after intelligence had “confirmed” it to be the site of “militant activity”. A press release published by NATO in Afghanistan soon after the raid asserted that a joint Afghan-international operation had made a “gruesome discovery”. The February 2010 night raid, which took place in a village near Gardez in Paktia province, was described by the US military at the time as a heroic attack against Taliban militants. This article was originally published in The Intercept.
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