KABUL, Afghanistan — When a younger Afghan police officer killed two American Marines in southern Afghanistan in 2011, he was appearing out of his personal outrage relatively than taking orders from the Taliban, in response to his household and closest mates.
Nonetheless, the insurgents lobbied arduous to safe the discharge of the previous officer, Mohammad Dawood, 31, from an Afghan jail, whilst American officers had been privately digging in to maintain him detained. He turned considered one of simply six prisoners — out of 5,000 launched by the Afghan authorities in whole — over whom a bitter disagreement virtually derailed historic peace talks that opened this month between the federal government and the insurgency, however whose names had not been publicly launched.
On the time Mr. Dawood opened fireplace, insider assaults by Afghans in opposition to their American and NATO allies had been rising to a disaster level that may change the conflict. It was that sensitivity that led American officers to push to maintain him in jail — whilst they urged the Afghan authorities to launch hundreds of Taliban prisoners with Afghan blood on their palms. France and Australia, too, lobbied in opposition to the discharge of males who had killed their residents.
Solely a last-minute deal to remand the six to a type of home arrest in Qatar allowed the opening of peace talks on Sept. 12.
Mr. Dawood’s case, detailed in a number of interviews with The New York Occasions, and along with his id confirmed by American and Afghan officers, stands as an indication of the issue — and difficult decisions — concerned in attempting to make peace in the midst of a bitter conflict. Taliban negotiators had been keen to go to the brink to safe the discharge of an attacker who was not even considered one of their very own, however whose assault furthered their aim of taking the struggle to American and NATO forces.
Mr. Dawood’s killings of Lt. Col. Benjamin Palmer and Sgt. Kevin Balduf in 2011 signify solely a fraction of greater than 40 years of violence. However now the Afghan authorities and the Taliban, each events with vastly totally different views of what the way forward for Afghanistan entails, will attempt to form how the conflict may finish.
“We’re not joyful in regards to the launch of some prisoners, and we all know our allies Australia and France should not joyful in regards to the launch of some,” stated Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. particular envoy for Afghan peace. “However we perceive that this troublesome step was within the service of one thing much more necessary, which is to get the Afghan conflict to come back to an finish, and it was a essential step.”
The Taliban have constantly made prisoner releases a precedence — most notably in the 2014 exchange of an American soldier held by the Taliban for 5 years, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, for 5 senior Taliban figures who had been being held on the Guantánamo Bay jail camp. That deal introduced heavy criticism for the Obama administration, and through his marketing campaign for the presidency in 2016, Donald Trump repeatedly called Sergeant Bergdahl a traitor who must be executed.
Each Mr. Khalilzad in addition to Mutlaq al-Qahtani, the Qatari particular envoy for the method, refused to debate particulars of the association relating to the six prisoners, together with the place in Qatar the lads are being held and underneath what circumstances. Amrullah Saleh, Afghanistan’s vp, in a current interview stated the lads wouldn’t be allowed to go away Qatar — all of the pages on their passports are crossed out aside from the one with the Qatari visa.
Stopping lethal insider assaults just like the one by Mr. Dawood was as soon as an pressing crucial for the Obama administration. By the tip of President Barack Obama’s first time period, cultural tensions and rising stress from the Taliban had spilled over into violence as Afghan troops turned their weapons on their Western allies, threatening to derail the conflict effort.
By the peak of the conflict, People had been constructing outposts inside outposts to defend themselves from the very folks they had been purported to be coaching and combating alongside.
Insider assaults turned a grim characteristic of the battle. The deaths of Colonel Palmer, 43, and Sergeant Balduf, 27, got here throughout a flurry of such killings that peaked in 2012, accounting for 15 p.c of coalition troops who had been killed or wounded in Afghanistan that 12 months.
Of the 4 American troops killed in fight in 2020, two had been killed in an insider assault in February, marking the final American troops to die from hostile fireplace earlier than the peace settlement between america and the Taliban.
However as was the case for a lot of such assaults, Mr. Dawood was not part of an rebel group when he killed the 2 Marines, in response to these near him and to an Afghan official acquainted with his case.
Born in Naw Bahar, a small, staunchly anti-Taliban village in Baghlan Province, Mr. Dawood was considered one of 5 brothers and the son of Mohammad Zahir, a poor wheat farmer. He studied at a madrasa in Kunduz and Baghlan, earlier than learning in Pakistan and Iran, the place like many Afghans he labored for a quick time.
Safdar Mohseni, head of the Baghlan provincial council, stated Mr. Dawood had almost definitely turned to the Taliban in jail, in search of assist.
“He was a very good particular person to me in each manner — psychologically, scientifically, religiously — and was a patriot,” stated Saqi Mohammad Numani, a non secular scholar who taught Mr. Dawood for a number of years. “Like Dawood, I’ve hundreds of scholars who should not in favor of violence and terror, and Dawood was not in favor of violence.”
After coming back from Iran, Mr. Dawood was engaged to be married, however since he was low on cash, he joined the Afghan police. He skilled in Kabul for six months in 2010, and graduated as a sergeant, in response to a senior police official who served alongside him in southern Afghanistan.
Not lengthy after Mr. Dawood left police coaching in 2011, he was assigned to the Afghan Nationwide Civil Order Police’s Fifth Brigade, a new unit the American navy was coaching in Afghanistan’s risky Helmand Province. Because the Taliban started regaining floor, U.S. and NATO forces began a concerted effort to professionalize the police to carry what districts the Afghan authorities nonetheless managed.
On Might 12, 2011, Mr. Dawood walked from the Afghan portion of his base in Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital of Helmand, and entered the American facet, the place his Marine advisers lived, slept and ate.
A small group of Marines had been outdoors consuming dinner when Mr. Dawood lifted his assault rifle and started firing, killing Colonel Palmer and Sergeant Balduf. Marines fired again, wounding Mr. Dawood.
Cultural misunderstandings and disgust with Westerners had been traced to many insider killings. When the assaults started in earnest in 2008, they took a deep toll on the Amerian-Afghan relationship, sowing doubt and mistrust that was solely exacerbated by the stress of coaching and fight.
In a rustic rife with anti-Semitism, Mr. Dawood appeared to show to that in an try to justify his actions. He instructed investigators he killed the People as a result of he thought they had been Jews and he didn’t wish to stay amongst them. He stated nobody had provoked him, although the senior Afghan official stated that Mr. Dawood’s fundamentalist schooling in Iran and Pakistan was most likely a catalyst for this contempt.
Mujib Mashal contributed reporting from Doha, Qatar.
