The Death Convoy Of Afghanistan

The Special Forces A-teams were the shock troops of the U.S. assault on the Taliban. They were the crucial link between the Northern Alliance militia on the ground and U.S. firepower in the air. Attached to each A-team in the Afghan campaign was at least one Air Force Special Operations soldier called a combat air controller. It was the high-precision airstrikes called in by those CACs that destroyed the Taliban forces. Each A-team was assigned to a specific local commander, and 595's assignment was to work with General Dostum.

595's role in the Afghan conflict made them legends to the wider public. Heloed into Afghanistan, like the rest of the teams, in a Special Forces Chinook, they met up with Dostum on Oct. 19 at his headquarters at Darra-e Suf in the mountain fastnesses south of Mazar-e Sharif. It was the 595 unit that famously carried out its missions on horseback; it was snippets from Nutsch's dispatches that a euphoric Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took to reading at his press briefings. Invigorated --by American air power--and lubricated by the money distributed lavishly to wavering locals by the CIA paramilitaries--Dostum and his fellow Northern Alliance commanders swept north out of the mountains. The climax of the brief campaign began on Nov. 4, when the Northern Alliance launched a three-pronged assault on the major city in the north, Mazar-e Sharif, orchestrated and micromanaged by an assembly of Special Forces, including two A-teams.

595 members had been with Dostum at the surrender negotiations, and then again at the actual surrender at Yerganak. As a consequence they were not with their CIA colleagues, Mike Spann and Dave Tyson, when that pair went to Qala Jangi prison to question the fresh batch of Qaeda and Taliban hard-liners who had arrived there after the abortive breakout from Konduz. The 595 commander, Nutsch, felt bitter about Spann's death. "This was a guy we considered part of our unit," he told Robert Young Pelton, a reporter working for CNN and National Geographic Adventure. "If we had been there, Mike's death would not have happened."

Over the three days that the first convoys of dead were arriving at Sheberghan, Special Forces troops were in the area. There was also a separate, four-man U.S. intelligence team, in combat gear, at the prison doing first selections of Qaeda suspects for further questioning. According to Pelton, a swashbuckling freelancer who specializes in writing about dangerous places, Special Forces soldiers were mainly concerned about security at the prison. At the same time the containers of dead were arriving, many truckloads of living prisoners were also streaming in: On the evening of Dec. 1, for instance, a container arrived bearing the 86 survivors from Qala Jangi. One of them was John Walker Lindh. It was the 595 team's medic, Bill, who first treated Lindh. Pelton believed at the time, and still does, that the dead from container trucks numbered "40-some odd" and were mostly people who died of wounds suffered in the siege of Konduz. "When I was with 595, we went over this time and again," says Pelton. "What happened is that these people basically died because they were wounded." A senior Defense Department official, speaking to NEWSWEEK on background, said the Pentagon asked the commander of the Fifth Special Forces Group to look into the reports of container deaths. That commander, Col. John Mulholland, reported back that the A-team knew that numbers, perhaps even large numbers, of Taliban prisoners had died on the journey to Sheberghan. But the Special Forces believed that these deaths had occurred from wounds or disease. news-week put this account to Colonel Mulholland through the public-affairs office of the Special Operations Command, but got no response by the time NEWSWEEK went to press.

For the Red Cross, the killings at Sheberghan represented an agonizing dilemma. The organization's code of operating out of the public eye--a trade-off that allows them access to places no one else is allowed to go, and enables them to provide aid to people in the most difficult circumstances--inhibited its officials from going public with what they heard. "We approached the ICRC more than two months ago to look into this, and they showed no interest," says Aziz ur Rahman Razekh of the Afghan Organization of Human Rights. "We got a frosty reception."

In fact, the Red Cross was concerned from the start about the fate of prisoners turning up at Sheberghan. The Taliban's surrender of the northern towns was an extended process; and the first dribble of prisoners from Konduz--captured on its outskirts--began to arrive at Sheberghan on Nov. 22-23. The ICRC office in Mazar-e Sharif learned of these arrivals; and on Nov. 29, a small team sought entry to Sheberghan prison. They were turned away. Asked about this now, an ICRC official says: "The authorities did not want us there." (Dostum's spokesman denies that prison officials refused them access.)