In January, United States Marines were found to have made a video of
themselves urinating on the corpses of Taliban killed in battle.
A month later copies of the Koran were inadvertently burned at an American
airbase, triggering weeklong riots that left 30 dead, hundreds wounded and
led to the reprisal killing of six Americans.
Last month a US soldier went on a shooting rampage in which he is accused of
killing 17 civilian villagers.
Mr Karzai’s statement said: “The only way to put an end to such painful
experiences is through an accelerated and full transition of security
responsibilities to Afghan forces.” American defence officials anxious
that the photographs might provoke revenge attacks reportedly spent weeks
trying to dissuade the paper from publishing them.
The newspaper published two of the photographs, one of which showed soldiers
holding up the severed legs of a bomber and giving a thumbs-up sign. The
second picture showed a paratrooper posing with what appeared to be the hand
of a corpse resting on his shoulder.
There was a concerted effort to condemn the photographs once they had been
released.
Ryan Crocker, American ambassador, called them “morally repugnant”,
while the Pentagon called the soldiers’ conduct “inhuman” and the
White House said their behaviour was “reprehensible”.
By Thursday lunchtime however, Afghanistan had yet to see much angry reaction.
Members of parliament suggested that the reaction would be more muted than
instances where the Koran had been desecrated, or civilians had been killed.
Hafiz Mansour, a member from Panjshir, told AP: “It is different from an
American soldier going and killing children, or Americans burning Holy
Korans.
“These issues and the suicide bombers are completely different. I don’t
think there will be big protests.”
Mohammad Naim Lalai Hamidzai, a member from Kandahar, added that there was
little sympathy for suicide bombers such as those seen in the pictures.
The photographs were taken on two separate occasions. The first was in
February 2010 when soldiers were called to a police station in Qalat, the
capital of Zabul province, following a suicide bombing.
A few months later the same platoon went to the morgue in Qalat after three
insurgents accidentally blew themselves up while preparing a roadside bomb.
On both visits the soldiers were supposed to get fingerprints of the dead
for a database being maintained by US forces.
The incidents happened during a year-long deployment of the 3,500 strong 82nd
Airborne’s 4th Brigade Combat Team, which is based at Fort Bragg, North
Carolina. During the deployment it lost 35 men, including at least 23 to
suicide bombers or improvised explosive devices.
The whistle-blowing soldier said those in the photographs had felt “satisfied”
to discover Taliban killed by their own bombs, and the pictures were
distributed among other servicemen. He told the Los Angeles Times: “Their
buddies had been blown up by IEDs so they sort of just celebrated.”
US officials said most of the soldiers in the photographs had been identified.
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