The Kill Team, kill Haji
How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent
civilians and mutilated their corpses – and how their officers failed
to stop them. Plus: An exclusive look at the war crime photos censored
by the Pentagon.Mark Boal Early
last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of
American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time
to kill a haji. Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an
Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during
lunchtime
chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the
ethics of bagging "savages" and debated the probability of getting
caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from
the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the
arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and
actually pull the trigger. Bravo Company had been stationed in the area
since summer, struggling, with little success, to root out the Taliban
and establish an American presence in one of the most violent and
lawless regions of the country. On the morning of January 15th, the
company's 3rd Platoon – part of the 5th Stryker Brigade, based out of
Tacoma, Washington – left the mini-metropolis of tents and trailers at
Forward Operating Base Ramrod in a convoy of armored Stryker troop
carriers. The massive, eight-wheeled trucks surged across wide, vacant
stretches of desert, until they came to La Mohammad Kalay, an isolated
farming village tucked away behind a few poppy fields. to provide
perimeter security, the soldiers parked the Strykers at the outskirts of
the settlement, which was nothing more than a warren of mud-and-straw
compounds. Then they set out on foot. Local villagers were suspected of
supporting the Taliban, providing a safe haven for strikes against U.S.
troops. But as the soldiers of 3rd Platoon walked through the alleys of
La Mohammad Kalay, they saw no armed fighters, no evidence of enemy
positions. Instead, they were greeted by a frustratingly familiar sight:
destitute Afghan farmers living without electricity or running water;
bearded men with poor teeth in tattered traditional clothes; young kid
s
eager for candy and money. It was impossible to tell which, if any, of
the villagers were sympathetic to the Taliban. The insurgents, for their
part, preferred to stay hidden from American troops, striking from a
distance with IEDs. While the officers of 3rd Platoon peeled off to talk
to a village elder inside a compound, two soldiers walked away from the
unit until they reached the far edge of the village. There, in a nearby
poppy field, they began looking for someone to kill. "The general
consensus was, if we are going to do something that fucking crazy, no
one wanted anybody around to witness it," one of the men later told Army
investigators. The poppy plants were still low to the ground at that
time of year. The two soldiers, Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and Pfc. Andrew
Holmes, saw a young farmer who was working by himself among the spiky
shoots. Off in the distance, a few other soldiers stood sentry. But the
farmer was the only Afghan in sight. With no one around to witness, the
timing was right. And just like that, they picked him for execution. He
was a smooth-faced kid, about 15 years old. Not much younger than they
were: Morlock was 21, Holmes was 19. His name, they would later learn,
was Gul Mudin, a common name in Afghanistan. He was wearing a little cap
and a Western-style green jacket. He held nothing in his hand that
could be interpreted as a weapon, not even a shovel. The expression on
his face was welcoming. "He was not a threat," Morlock later confessed.