Army seeks answers for Afghan civilian deaths

A helicopter attack that killed at least 15 civilians in Afghanistan’s Oruzgan province was called in by a Special Forces A-team that did not have “eyes on” their target and resulted in a 48-hour standdown for U.S. special operations forces, said an Army officer familiar with the incident.
In the wake of the incident, the commander of coalition and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, apologized to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and then to the Afghan people in a Feb. 23 television address. “I have instituted a thorough investigation to prevent this from happening again,” McChrystal said.
The Army officer familiar with the incident described a confusing situation involving multiple special operations task forces and aerial platforms that descended into tragedy in part due to “a miscommunication, unfortunately a fatal one.”
The events that led to the attack began early in the morning of Feb. 21 while, together with Afghan security forces, the A-team was clearing a bazaar in the town of Khod. “They found Taliban IED-making materials and stuff like that,” the Army officer said.
The A-team involved in the incident was Operational Detachment Alpha 3124, a team that specializes in high-altitude, low-opening parachute operations, and which is based at Firebase Tinsley in Oruzgan. (Firebase Tinsley was known as Firebase Cobra until recently, when it was renamed in honor of Capt. John Tinsley of 7th Special Forces Group, who was killed near there Aug. 12.)
The team leader received word that a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle flying overhead had spotted a convoy of vehicles that appeared to be heading toward the team. The A-team did not have a Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receiver, or ROVER, which would have enabled the team leader, a captain, to view the Predator footage in real time.
“There’s maybe one per base, and if it goes down you’re out of luck,” the Army officer said. Instead, the team leader relied on the word of the Predator pilot, flying the aircraft remotely. “The bottom line is he didn’t have access to the footage in the field, and so at that point then he’s kind of taking the Predator on his word,” the officer said.
The Predator pilot said he had positively identified weapons in the convoy, the Army officer added.
However, while the A-team leader had no real-time access to the Predator feed, the three levels of command above him did, the Army officer said. The next higher level of command was the company, or B-team — in this case B Company, 3rd Special Forces Group — based at the large coalition headquarters in Tarin Kowt, the capital of Oruzgan. But while the B-team has a Predator feed, it lacks the staff to monitor it full time. “That is not their responsibility,” the Army officer said.
Responsibility for commanding and controlling the A-team’s actions, and monitoring the Predator feed, rested at the battalion, or special operations task force, level and at the group, or combined joint special operations task force, level, he said. “It begins at the SOTF and then the CJSOTF,” he said. “My understanding is that both those levels were watching it.”
Col. Tim Nye, a spokesman for Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command-Afghanistan, which commands all U.S. special operations forces in country except those working for the highly secretive Joint Special Operations Command, declined to answer any questions about the incident. But the Army officer said the battalion-level command was SOTF 12, formed around 2nd Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group, and based at Kandahar Airfield. The CJSOTF is led by 3rd Special Forces Group commander Col. Gus Benton, who is on a 60-day deployment before Col. Don Bolduc takes command in April.
When a “scout-weapons team” of two OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters arrived to monitor and possibly attack the convoy, there was a misunderstanding between the pilots and the team leader, the Army officer said. “In the communication and the radio traffic, the team leader came under the impression that they had [also] seen weapons,” he said. “In the after-action [review] of the whole thing, apparently they were communicating that they either understood that the Predator had seen weapons or they were basically relaying that information back, and so there was a miscommunication, unfortunately a fatal one.”
It is unclear what orders, if any, Benton or Lt. Col. Brian Petit, the SOTF 12 commander, gave in relation to the convoy as it was tracked by the Predator.
But after a lengthy delay, the A-team leader eventually decided to call an airstrike on the convoy from the Kiowa Warriors, the Army officer said. At about 9 a.m., the helicopters attacked. The Kiowa Warrior can carry Hellfire missiles, 2.75-inch Hydra rockets and a .50-caliber machine gun. It is not clear which weapons were used in the attack.
The first sign that something might be amiss came when the pilots wheeled around to attack again and noticed “a flash of color” in the clothing of those in the vehicles. Because Pashtun men rarely wear anything but earth-toned garments, “this kind of turned them on to the fact that there might be women on the convoy, and so they checked fire,” the Army officer said.
After getting the word from the pilots, the team leader, who had prior enlisted service as a Special Forces sergeant, relayed the information to the SOTF tactical operations center using an Iridium satellite phone.
Further confusing the situation, a Joint Special Operations Command element combining ground troops and helicopters launched from Kandahar Airfield landed at Tarin Kowt, with the apparent intention of attacking the same convoy, the Army officer said. “They were en route and then the strike occurred, so they stopped the operation,” he said. It is unclear why two U.S. forces were launching to attack the same target.
After the attack, commanders debated which coalition element to send to the site of the attack. Eventually they decided to send ODA 3124 — the team that had called in the strike. It was four hours after the attack by the time the team arrived at the scene, the Army officer said. “There apparently was quite a bit of pondering of what to do after this strike,” he said. “The team leader apparently called up fast. ... The call went up and then it did not get transmitted above the SOTF in a timely manner. That’s one of the things that’s being investigated now.”
Also complicating the investigation, he said, was the fact that “supposedly for some reason they don’t have any Predator footage after the actual engagement,” even though it’s not unusual in Afghanistan for a Predator to stay on station after a strike to conduct battle damage assessment and to track anyone returning to or arriving at the target site.
When the A-team got there, the soldiers found that “two of the vehicles were completely shot up.”
News accounts have said as many as 27 civilians were killed in the attack, but the Army officer said that those numbers may be exaggerated. “My understanding is that it was 15 guys that they confirmed on the ground had been killed [and] there was a wounded woman and a wounded child. ... They lived,” the officer said.
“It seems that these guys were legitimate civilians,” the officer said. They were members of Afghanistan’s Hazara minority “coming out of Daikundi [province] and were ... going to go down through Helmand and then into Iran.” (However, a March 3 McClatchy Newspapers account based on telephone interviews with survivors of the attack said the convoy included “more than three dozen relatives heading to Kandahar for supplies and Kabul for medical treatment.”)
In the wake of the incident, all CFSOCC-A forces were ordered to stand down for 48 hours beginning Feb. 22, said International Security Assistance Force spokesman Air Force Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis. “They literally pulled everybody off the battlefield and told them that they had to reread all of the tactical directives and the ROE [rules of engagement] and everything,” the Army officer said. The standdown meant “pulling teams that were literally in the middle of operations. They had to leave what they were doing and go back to base,” the Army officer said.
“It is not unusual for forces to review their existing guidance and procedures after a major event of this nature — regardless of whether or not anything went wrong, which only the investigation will tell us,” Sholtis said.
That investigation is being led by Army Maj. Gen. Timothy McHale, the deputy commander of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan. “The investigation led by Maj. Gen. McHale is ongoing,” Sholtis said March 5. “Because of that, it’s inappropriate for us to provide or confirm details on the incident at this time or provide a timeline for its completion and review.”