URUZGAN, Afghanistan'After killing 21 Afghan soldiers, at least some of them loyal to the U.S.-supported interim government, U.S. forces beat and kicked 27 of the dead men's colleagues who were held prisoner for 16 days before being released last week with an apology, according to several of those held.
The soldiers, captured during a Jan. 23 nighttime raid in which U.S. special-operations forces appear to have mistakenly targeted friendly forces in the remote village of Uruzgan, were treated harshly at first, several of them said, with two saying they blacked out from their beatings and two others claiming they suffered broken ribs. Then the ill treatment stopped, they said, perhaps because the U.S. forces realized they had captured and killed friendly troops, not Taliban or al Qaeda fighters.
The accounts of recently released captives, as well as soldiers who escaped the attack and others here, add to a growing body of evidence that the United States killed the wrong people and captured the wrong people before denying for more than two weeks that anything had gone awry.
On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged for the first time that U.S. soldiers might have killed Afghan allies in the operation, and a Pentagon spokesperson conceded that the detainees and the dead did not appear to have belonged to either the Taliban or al Qaeda.
\Everybody knows there are no Taliban here,"" said Abdul Qudus Irfani, the newly appointed Uruzgan district chief and a close ally of interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai. ""The Americans should have asked us.""
The attack began about 2 a.m. in this village a two-day drive from Kandahar along riverbeds and across high, rocky deserts. And from the beginning of the operation, confusion apparently reigned on all sides.
Police officer Allah Noor was awakened by a noise, maybe gunfire, he's not sure. He stepped from his mat on the floor of the main district office building, out into the dark, and saw soldiers in black masks and goggles with flashlights attached to the ends of their assault weapons. They were speaking a language he didn't recognize.
The 40-year-old Noor stepped quickly back inside the room and told his commander.
""It's OK, they're our friends,"" the commander, Police Chief Abdul Rauf, told him. ""Just stay in here.""
Then the gunshots broke out.
When the sun rose a few hours later, 21 people were dead; the district building and the village school had been pounded into rubble by rifle, rocket and cannon fire; and Noor and 26 others, having been bound hand and foot and flown by helicopter 150 miles south, were lying face down in the gravel at Kandahar air base, being kneed in the sides, having their faces shoved into the ground and being walked on by U.S soldiers, several of them said in separate interviews.
