Afghanistan : "International Forces" Handcuffed Then Executed Children

An extraordinary series of claims leveled at western military forces in Afghanistan that have received a suspiciously thin amount of mainstream media coverage.

News of the massacre was no doubt overshadowed by the priority of covering the deaths of 8 CIA officers by a suicide bomber at their Afghanistan base, from where the drone attacks were launched that killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan, Waziristan and Pakistan in 2009.

TimesOnline :

American-led troops were accused yesterday of dragging innocent children from their beds and shooting them during a night raid that left ten people dead.

Afghan government investigators said that eight schoolchildren were killed, all but one of them from the same family. Locals said that some victims were handcuffed before being killed.

President Karzai sent a team of investigators to Narang district, in eastern Kunar province, after reports of a massacre first surfaced on Monday.

“The delegation concluded that a unit of international forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan village in Narang district of the eastern province of Kunar and took ten people from three homes, eight of them school students in grades six, nine and ten, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead,” a statement on President Karzai’s website said.

Another account :

“At around 1 am, three nights ago, some American troops with helicopters left Kabul and landed around 2km away from the village.

“The troops walked from the helicopters to the houses and, according to my investigation, they gathered all the students from two rooms, into one room, and opened fire.”

"I spoke to the local headmaster. It’s impossible they were al-Qaeda. They were children, they were civilians, they were innocent"

The headmaster of the school : “First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting and came outside. When they saw him they shot him as well. He was outside. That’s why his wife wasn’t killed.”

Eight of the victims were aged 11 to 17.

In Kabul, outraged protesters chanted “Death to Obama”. One of their signs read "Stop Killing Us."