U.S. Special Forces Covered Up Deaths of Pregnant Afghan Women?

In February of 2010, a botched US special forces raid in a village outside of Gardez, Afghanistan led to the deaths of multiple civilians. Now the Pentagon has released documents pertaining to the raid, which claim that “the amount of force utilized was necessary, proportional and applied at appropriate time.”

According to The Intercept however, the testimony of witnesses in the village suggest otherwise. A total of seven people died in the raid, including a teenage girl and two pregnant women. Multiple eyewitnesses and Afghan investigators have claimed that US soldiers tried to dig their bullets out of one of the pregnant women. But while the documents indicate that these eyewitness were interviewed and deemed credible, they fully reject the idea that the special operators tried to cover anything up.

Also the supposed “combatants” that were killed in the village turned out not to be Taliban, but were in fact a police commander and his cousin. When the raid began, they believed they were being attacked by the Taliban, and tried to defend the village with rifles before they were cut down by the US soldiers.

No evidence that the Taliban was present in the village has been found. Yet the documents suggest that their deaths were justified because they were armed and showed “hostile intent.”