U.S. serviceman kills 16 in house-to-house village shooting, Afghan officials say.
Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan -- A lone American serviceman slipped away from his base in southern Afghanistan before dawn Sunday and went on a methodical house-to-house shooting spree in a nearby village, killing 16 people, nearly all of them women and children, according to Afghan officials who visited the scene.
The NATO force confirmed that the assailant was in military custody, and that he had inflicted an unspecified number of casualties during the shooting spree at about 3 a.m. Sunday. The U.S. Embassy called for calm and expressed deep condolences; the Taliban referred to the killings as an “act of genocide.”
The British Broadcasting Corp. reported that the shooter was a staff sergeant and a member of the U.S. special operations forces who had been involved in training the Afghan police.
I agree it is appalling, but the Taliban - murderers of hundreds, if not thousands of men, women and children during their reign in Afghanistan, - calling the murder of 16 civilians by a deranged U.S. SSgt a "genocide"? Really?
ReplyDeleteI certainly don't agree with what the Taliban says about this - but when American soldiers do things like this, in addition to the fact that it's completely immoral and a war crime, it just plays into the hands of the Taliban, who can then make ridiculous statements like this to try to attract more Afghans to their cause.
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