#wardak

Source:  Elliott D. Woods

Hashmat Nasary

On the night of March 8, 2019, four staffers at a Swedish-run health clinic in Afghanistan's Wardak Province... were jolted awake again sometime after midnight. The main gate to the clinic, which was next to the guard's room, had been blown in, and the staff heard hurried footsteps in the ruined entryway.... Seconds later, the door to the guard's room crashed open. The soldiers who burst in wore night-vision goggles and told the clinic staffers to face the wall. They bound the men, covered their heads with hoods, and led them to a room that one of the workers, who The Intercept is identifying only as Hashmatullah for his safety, believed was the clinic's pharmacy. Hashmatullah couldn't see, but he guessed that there were five or six soldiers in the room. "You're here to serve the Taliban," the soldiers alleged. They spoke in Dari and Pashto, Afghanistan's two main languages, but the detainees also heard English. "We know when they use English that they’re foreigners," Hashmatullah told The Intercept. The March raid on the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, or SCA, clinic in Wardak, which has not been previously reported, was one of a growing number of assaults by CIA-backed Afghan militia units on medical facilities in Afghanistan, according to witnesses and documents seen by The Intercept. The secretive, pro-government Afghan militia blamed for several such attacks in Wardak is known as 01. Ostensibly overseen by the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan's intelligence service, the unit and its counterparts across the country are trained and directed by the CIA. The 01, which operates in central Afghanistan, including in Wardak, Logar, and Ghazni provinces, is known for rolling into villages at night and leaving a trail of death and destruction. The units are "responsible for extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances, indiscriminate airstrikes, attacks on medical facilities, and other violations of international humanitarian law or the laws of war," said Patricia Gossman, associate Asia director for Human Rights Watch... Many witnesses to night raids say 01 is deliberately targeting civilians.... Nowhere has the violence been worse than in Wardak, where since January, staff at Swedish Committee clinics have reported 20 security incidents. In one of the most egregious, soldiers believed by NGO staff to belong to 01 raided a clinic in Wardak's Tangi Saidan, which is in a different part of the province from Tangi Valley, forcing their way into the clinic and shooting a person accompanying a patient. Four others were taken outside and three, including two SCA employees, were executed; another SCA employee was detained and forcibly disappeared before being released.

Wardak January 2019

(U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Teddy Wade/ Released)

January 2019

Bashir Ahmadi

Wardak, Beautiful Afghanistan. #pashto #pakhtoography #wardak #nature #valley #nature #beauty #afghanistan #kabul #ghazni #nangarhar #laghman #herat #jalalabad #peshawar #quetta #kpk #love #decent #nature  #instagram #facebook #snap #scenery #nikon #canon #photography #sony #blue #fresh #peace (at Wardak) https://www.instagram.com/p/CWDXdcqNFnB/?utm_medium=tumblr