Global Policy Forum

By Brian Williams

United Nations officials have ended their initial search of three Afghanistan burial sites suspected of being mass graves, including one that showed evidence of victims being buried alive.

The graves are believed to be the tip of the iceberg of war crime atrocities in Afghanistan. Their discovery was a graphic reminder of the still many untold stories of the fundamentalist Taliban's rule of Afghanistan and the U.S.-led war that drove them from power last December.

U.N. spokesman Manoel de Almeida de Silva said on Tuesday the world organisation would wait for a final report by three foreign forensic experts who had visited the three sites before deciding on further action. "For the moment they are referring to sites, not to mass graves. We have to wait and see what they call the sites in their final report," he told a news conference.

The three sites under investigation are at Daoudi in central Bamiyan Province, where residents say there were massacres of ethnic Hazaras by the Taliban; at the main northern city of Mazar-I-Sharif, where residents say there were separate killings by the Taliban when they were in power and later by the so-called Northern Alliance that helped to drive them from power; and at Shabargan, 120 km (75 miles) west of Mazar-I-Sharif, where there have been accusations of the killing of captured Taliban by Northern Alliance fighters.

De Silva said in the Daoudi investigation, the forensic experts discovered 18 bodies and carried out autopsies on three people, who were found to have died from gunshot wounds to the head and back. The three were recovered from shallow graves on the outskirts of Bamiyan City, site of three ancient Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban in an action that shocked the world last year.

"One body had its hands tied behind its back, indicating a summary execution," de Silva said.

The 18 bodies recovered had all died up to three years ago and while the Taliban were still in power. He said in the Mazar-I-Sharif investigation, the experts found bodies, both old and new, in a large trench near the city's airport.

The city was heavily fought over both during the Taliban's rise to power and when the U.S.-led war drove the fundamentalists from power last year. De Silva said because of the complexity of the situation at Mazar-I-Sharif, where new corpses were found thrown on top of previously killed victims, a more extensive investigation would be carried out.

At Shabargan, a total of 15 bodies were recovered from a pit near a notorious Northern Alliance-run prison where captured Taliban have spoken of being crammed together in small cells and fed a near-starvation diet. De Silva said autopsies were carried out on three victims.

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