Afghan officials say they\u2019ve got video of a man overseeing the torture of Afghan civilians. Exactly who ordered the man to torture is a matter of fierce dispute \u2014 and also helps explain this year\u2019s erosion of trust between Washington and Kabul.<\/p>\n
Allegedly, there\u2019s a videotape in Afghan government hands showing a man named Zakaria Kandahari presiding over the torture of an Afghan civilian who, along with 15 others, recently disappeared from Wardak Province. According to the New York Times, Kandahari, an American citizen, is \u201cseen conducting\u201d the torture session and \u201csupervising\u201d others.<\/p>\n
But there is great disagreement over who Kandahari actually is. The Afghans say that Kandahari leads a U.S. Army Special Forces unit recently kicked out of Wardak over allegations of torture, disappearances and executions. The U.S. military command says unequivocally that Kandhari was an interpreter for the unit, not a leader; that he\u2019s not actually an American; and that the unit was not involved in any torture.<\/p>\n
The video is only one component of the evidence Afghans told the paper they\u2019ve compiled against Kandahari and the Special Forces A-Team that was in Wardak\u2019s Nerkh District. A 16-year old named Hikmatullah said Kandahari picked him up on incorrect suspicion of being an insurgent. \u201cMr. Kandahari beat and kicked him until his shoulder was dislocated. He was released after three days, he said,\u201d the paper reports, \u201cbut his brothers are missing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The suspicion helps explain why President Hamid Karzai abruptly called in February for U.S. special operators to leave Wardak Province. It took only a few weeks for Karzai, the recipient of CIA money, to soften his position: the elite troops immediately left Nerkh, but they\u2019re still working out a timetable with the Afghan government to vacate Wardak entirely. Click here for the full story.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Afghan officials say they\u2019ve got video of a man overseeing the torture of Afghan civilians. Exactly who ordered the man to torture is a matter of fierce dispute \u2014 and also helps explain this year\u2019s erosion of trust between Washington and Kabul. Allegedly, there\u2019s a videotape in Afghan government hands showing a man named Zakaria […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-important-news-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35577,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35576\/revisions\/35577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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