ASIA-PACIFIC: Afghan night of terror leaves anger in its wake By Charles Clover and Deh Rahwut
A stain on the floor of Tor Agha's courtyard in Kakrak, Afghanistan, is a grisly reminder of the terror he lived through on Sunday night.
"Here we found half the body of a child," he says, and then points to another stain on the opposite wall. "The rest was over there." Crossing the compound he points to a step: "And the head, here."
The blood has dried and builders are covering the hole that a US bomb or shell punched in his wall, but the memory, he says, will never go away.
His house, which helped host an engagement party last Sunday, became a killing zone where at least 40 people were killed in 90 minutes of bombardment by US aircraft.
Next door, wandering through a grove of pomegranate trees, one can still find dried human intestines and shredded clothing hanging from tree branches.
If what the villagers say is true, this would be the worst toll in civilian casualties in the entire Afghan campaign, which locals blame on celebratory shooting into the air -acustom at Afghan weddings and engagement parties - that was mistaken for an attack on US aircraft.
The US military counters that its aircraft were responding to fire directed at them - not random shooting.
Incredibly, a second engagement party was bombed the same night, killing six, in the nearby village of Syasang. Two other villages in the same district were also bombed in the night of terror they will never forget.
"In the morning we had to collect the pieces of the men, women, and children and take them to the mosque. We mostly didn't know which pieces belonged to which corpse," says Tor Agha.
"There is no Taliban here, there is no Mullah Omar here, no bin Laden," says Seyd Gul Agha, a relative of one of the victims in the Syasang bombardment. "I think it was a stupid, terrible mistake."
All four of the bombed villages are part of the Deh Rahwut district in southern Afghanistan, a lush valley that cuts through harsh desert. Pomegranate trees and opium poppies seem to be the two main cash crops, and the region's favourite son is still Mullah Omar, the former leader of the Taliban, who comes from Deh Rahwut and who some say is in hiding in the area.
Ironically, Deh Rahwut was also the region from which Hamid Karzai, now Afghanistan's interim president, launched his US-backed guerrilla campaign to unseat the Taliban.
But, as a result of the bombing, Mr Karzai is rapidly losing any credibility he might once have enjoyed here.
"If we had an election here between Mullah Omar and Karzai, Karzai would lose badly," says Haji Akhtar Mohammed. "Karzai is just a traffic cop working for the Americans."
There is still considerable confusion over the details of the bombardment. Some villagers say the death toll was 206, but most put it at 40-45. US investigators say they have seen only five graves.
Locals in Kakrak say the bride and groom were killed in the Syasang ceremony, while in Syasang they say the bride and groom were killed in Kakrak.
Actually, both parties were Kozda, or engagement parties, not weddings, where the betrothed were not present. But local anger is stoked by the perception that the parties were targeted, and that the bombardment was premeditated.
Each building hosting the parties bears a neat hole in the roof where the bomb or shell went in. The governor of Urzgan province, where Deh Rahwut is located, yesterday asked the US to name those who provided information which led to the bombings.
The US military has said it received reliable information from several sources that senior Taliban leaders were sheltering in a remote village close to Deh Rahwut.
A special forces team went in to "cordon and search" the village, but called in air strikes after seeing anti-aircraft fire directed at coalition warplanes coming from the area.
Akbar Jan, a young man in Kakrak, says: "They are lying if they say we were shooting at them. Okay, maybe one wedding. But two? They hit four villages on the same night. Were we all shooting at them?"
In both Syasang and Kakrak, villagers say that, following the bombings, US soldiers came along with Afghan officials from the nearby province of Kandahar and questioned them, sometimes aggressively.
Bismallah Jan, from Syasang, says: "They were asking us, 'Where is your opium? Where are your weapons?' They didn't say a word about Mullah Omar or al-Qaeda."
Abdul Malik, the groom-to-be from Kakrak, was at his fiancýe's house the night of the massacre, thus escaping the devastation. "From this family of 14, I am the only one left," he says. "I will take to court the people who have done this."