They Hate Us Because We Kill Their Families
“I think most Americans think, ‘it’s a terrible country, but we understand how they see things’, and we probably don’t.” — Robert Jervis on North Korea
I.
A piece of reporting that has stayed with me for months is Anand Gopal’s article “The Other Afghan Women”, from the September 21st, 2021 New Yorker. It is a detailed account of one woman’s experience of three decades of war in Helmand province — rural Afghanistan, far from the capital of Kabul, where tribal and religious norms govern daily life no matter the particular structure and nature of the national government. What emerges rather suddenly is that families in Helmand — and likely throughout rural Afghanistan — have been the victims of untold slaughter and suffering at the hands of every single armed force that has ventured through the province: the Soviets, the warlords, the Taliban, the Americans, and the British.
Yes, you might think. Of course — the civilian casualties, the suffering, the death. And numbness sets in. We have become accustomed to tuning this out after two decades of hearing about our country’s wars. This piece, however, managed to pierce the numbness through its sheer depth and detail. Laid out in painstaking detail, the death toll paid upon the family of the main subject, a woman named Shakira, seems to go on without end:
[T]he vast majority of incidents involved one or two deaths — anonymous lives that were never reported on, never recorded by official organizations, and therefore never counted as part of the war’s civilian toll.
In this way, Shakira’s tragedies mounted. There was Muhammad, a fifteen-year-old cousin: he was killed by a buzzbuzzak, a drone, while riding his motorcycle through the village with a friend. “That sound was everywhere,” Shakira recalled. “When we heard it, the children would start to cry, and I could not console them.”
Muhammad Wali, an adult cousin: Villagers were instructed by coalition forces to stay indoors for three days as they conducted an operation, but after the second day drinking water had been depleted and Wali was forced to venture out. He was shot.
Khan Muhammad, a seven-year-old cousin: His family was fleeing a clash by car when it mistakenly neared a coalition position; the car was strafed, killing him.
Bor Agha, a twelve-year-old cousin: He was taking an evening walk when he was killed by fire from an Afghan National Police base. The next morning, his father visited the base, in shock and looking for answers, and was told that the boy had been warned before not to stray near the installation. “Their commander gave the order to target him,” his father recalled.
Amanullah, a sixteen-year-old cousin: He was working the land when he was targeted by an Afghan Army sniper. No one provided an explanation, and the family was too afraid to approach the Army base and ask.
Ahmed, an adult cousin: After a long day in the fields, he was headed home, carrying a hot plate, when he was struck down by coalition forces. The family believes that the foreigners mistook the hot plate for an I.E.D.
Niamatullah, Ahmed’s brother: He was harvesting opium when a firefight broke out nearby; as he tried to flee, he was gunned down by a buzzbuzzak.
Gul Ahmed, an uncle of Shakira’s husband: He wanted to get a head start on his day, so he asked his sons to bring his breakfast to the fields. When they arrived, they found his body. Witnesses said that he’d encountered a coalition patrol. The soldiers “left him here, like an animal,” Shakira said.
Entire branches of Shakira’s family tree, from the uncles who used to tell her stories to the cousins who played with her in the caves, vanished. In all, she lost sixteen family members.
Gopal, the reporter, sampled over a dozen women in the same village, as well as others in nearby villages, to see if this woman’s story was a particularly grim outlier. “On average,” he writes, “each family lost ten to twelve civilians in what locals call the American War.”
II.
Eddie Gallagher was a Navy Seal chief — one of America’s most lethal weapons, trained in seemingly every form of combat, and in charge of a platoon of Seals and other specialists sent to support the Iraqi army in retaking the city of Mosul from ISIS in 2017. Prior to and during his deployment, his behavior started raising alarms among his fellow Seals — especially his lead petty officer, Craig Miller.
Gallagher would routinely require his platoon to disable their GPS locators and follow him to the forward line of fighting, disobeying their official orders to stay 1000 feet behind front lines to provide air support. He took gear from the snipers in his unit, set up repeatedly in the same exposed sniper nests, and fired indiscriminately on targets in the city. His platoon’s own snipers were so horrified by his shooting sprees that they began to set up nearby and scan his areas frantically, searching for civilians and firing warning shots nearby so that Gallagher wouldn’t murder them. Men in his unit saw him shoot at least three civilians — an older man (the unit sniper recalled this incident so clearly because, he reflected as he watched a red stain spread on the man’s white shirt through his scope, it was Father’s Day), a man fetching water from the Tigris river, and a young girl walking with three of her friends. He would punctuate nearly every shot with a cry of “Got ‘em!”, whether he actually had or not. On other occasions, he would corroborate the visual evidence of one sniper with an admission to another man in the unit.
Gallagher ordered younger Seals in his platoon to fire rocket launcher rounds randomly on the city, taking videos on his phone to share with his Seal friends back home. He was addicted to tramadol, injecting testosterone, stealing from his platoon, and constantly leading his men into dangerous situations, where he would take every opportunity he had to kill, seemingly indiscriminately. He tried to lie to several medics about a self-inflicted wound from a hatchet he carried (gifted to him by a former Seal) in order to be eligible for a Purple Heart (and lifelong medical benefits), but none of the medics accepted his story.
After one day of intense fighting and aerial bombardments, Iraqi forces captured a wounded ISIS fighter and brought him back to their forward base. Out on patrol, Gallagher radioed to the unit to leave the prisoner for him, then abandoned his position to return to the base. Though not equipped as a medic or performing that role in the platoon, Gallagher began to tend to the prisoner by performing a tracheotomy. Another medic arrived and took over, while Gallagher knelt nearby. At a certain point, Gallagher withdrew a knife from his belt sheath and stabbed the prisoner twice in his neck, mortally wounding him. This was observed by at least three members of the platoon. Craig Miller, the lead petty officer, immediately informed the officer in charge of the unit, who served alongside Gallagher (who was enlisted). The officer, Jake Portier, ordered the platoon to assemble around the dead fighter for a picture. Gallagher picked up his head and turned it toward the camera, like a trophy. An American flag turned up, and Portier decided that he would administer Gallagher’s Navy re-enlistment oath as Gallagher knelt in front of the flag, with the dead ISIS fighter lying before him, and his platoon mates recording it for everyone back home. Gallagher would brag about the killing to several Seals via text, desperate for approval from friends who belonged to an notorious yet well-known subculture of killer Seals referred to often as “pirates”.
The ISIS fighter Eddie Gallagher murdered was a seventeen year-old runaway named Moataz. He grew up in Mosul through years of warfare. After ISIS took control of the city in 2015, a short period of relative peace set in, during which Moataz began to venture out to the local soccer fields and meet other young men, including ISIS recruiters. His father, seeing his recruitment, tried and failed again and again to keep him from playing soccer and getting involved with ISIS . His final act of desperation was to chain his son up in their apartment, but Moataz escaped and joined ISIS in the spring of 2017. Months later, he was wounded in the bombing of a building he and other fighters were hiding in. Incredibly, an Iraqi television journalist visited the site of the bombing and thrust a microphone in the face of Moataz as he lay wounded, and he briefly recounted who he was and how he had joined ISIS. More incredibly, his father Mohamed saw the interview on television. He was relieved to see his son was alive, and expected him to go to prison, but hoped that he would be reunited with him someday. Two years later, he learned from an Iraqi news story that Moataz had been murdered after he’d been taken captive by an American.
David Phillips, who interviewed Mohamed in his reporting on Eddie Gallagher’s murders and the Seals who attempted to stop him, detailed his feelings after learning of his son’s death at the hands of the Seals:
“Learning he had been killed by an American after he had been taken captive tore a new wound in Mohamed’s heart. Why would anyone do that to a child? Certainly these Americans had children, they had to know what raising them is like. Mohamed expected that kind of brutality from ISIS and maybe even from some Iraqi forces. But he had always seen the Americans as more professional, more humane. They were supposed to be the good guys. Maybe, despite all their talk about democracy and rule of law, he thought, the Americans weren’t different from anyone else.”
(This is a much-too-brief summary of David Phillips’ incredible book Alpha: Eddie Gallagher and the war for the soul of the Navy Seals, which is stomach-turning, damning, and crucially important for understanding America’s orientation towards the world and it’s reliance on special operations as central to its foreign policy and national security.)
III.
This week, as I was thinking about the two stories above and putting some thoughts together for this post, the New York Times reported on a secret American strike force that operated in Iraq and Syria during the war against ISIS responsible for heavy civilian deaths through its reckless use of air strikes. The force, called Talon Anvil, provided detailed coordinates and targeting for strikes ordered by Army Delta Force officers stationed on the ground (in contrast to previous operations which required strike authorizations from higher-ranking officers and civilians following strict rules of engagement).
The unit was called Talon Anvil, and it worked in three shifts around the clock between 2014 and 2019, pinpointing targets for the United States’ formidable air power to hit: convoys, car bombs, command centers and squads of enemy fighters.
But people who worked with the strike cell say in the rush to destroy enemies, it circumvented rules imposed to protect noncombatants, and alarmed its partners in the military and the C.I.A. by killing people who had no role in the conflict: farmers trying to harvest, children in the street, families fleeing fighting, and villagers sheltering in buildings.
Elements of the story of Talon Anvil parallel those of Eddie Gallagher and Alpha platoon. Warning signs were detected early. Members of the unit and allies attempted to intervene to limit civilian casualties, often to no avail. Concerns and reports of possible war crimes were made to the chain of command, but no actions were taken. And self-defense was used as a claim to justify the overly hostile and ultimately murderous actions. For Talon Anvil, this meant presenting more and more possible targets as defensive targets, which allowed for quicker approval and fewer safeguards, using the rationale that any potential fighter, anywhere, could be engaged in combat against the coalition in the future. One example:
[A]s civilians were trying to flee fighting in the city of Raqqa in June 2017, scores of people boarded makeshift ferries to cross the Euphrates River. He said the task force claimed the ferries were carrying enemy fighters, and he watched on high-definition video as it hit multiple boats, killing at least 30 civilians, whose bodies drifted away in the green water.
A senior military official with direct knowledge of the task force said that what counted as an “imminent threat” was extremely subjective and Talon Anvil’s senior Delta operators were given broad authority to launch defensive strikes.
Another:
As the drone circled, the town appeared to be asleep, the former officer said. Even with infrared sensors, the team did not see movement. Talon Anvil focused in on a building and typed in the chat that a tip from ground forces indicated that the building was an enemy training center. Sensors suggested an enemy cellphone or radio might be in the neighborhood but was unable to pinpoint it to a single block, let alone a single building.
Talon Anvil did not wait for confirmation, and ordered a self-defense strike, the former officer said. The Predator dropped a 500-pound bomb through the roof.
As the smoke cleared, the former officer said, his team stared at their screens in dismay. The infrared cameras showed women and children staggering out of the partly collapsed building, some missing limbs, some dragging the dead.
IV.
What, then, I ask myself, is to be done, and the first answer I can say — so pitifully small, yet necessary — is to look with open eyes. Then, to listen to the stories that rise from the rubble and the graves. This, I admit, I have not dedicated much time or space to doing over the years of war that have been waged ostensibly on my behalf. Finally, to ask, what do those people think of these facts? What do they make of them? How does this make them feel? And how might they act as a result?
I feel that by taking the time and making the space to go through such a process, any sane human being will conclude that this is not a winning approach even in the most transactional sense — nor is it just, nor humane. .
I think often about President Biden’s decision to end the American war in Afghanistan — the political courage it took to admit defeat and end a campaign that had taken so much blood and treasure in its ignominy. I have a great deal of respect for the person who makes that decision.
The next chapter cannot simply be perpetuating the killing and sowing the seeds of terror by rebranding a misguided strategy of turbo-charged special operations as “over-the-horizon” capabilities. If nothing else, we Americans owe it to those innocents who have been killed, murdered, and maimed in this ill-conceived war over the past two decades to look, listen, and learn. And to demand change, unless we are now so numb as to have become comfortable with war crimes done in our name.
