Siege of Kunduz and Taliban surrender In late 2001, around 8,000
Taliban fighters, including
Chechens,
Uzbeks and
Arabs, as well as suspected members of
al-Qaeda, surrendered to the
Junbish-i Milli faction of
Northern Alliance General
Abdul Rashid Dostum, a U.S. ally in the
war in Afghanistan, after the
siege of Kunduz. Several hundred of the prisoners, among them American
John Walker Lindh, came to be held in Qala-i-Jangi, a fort near
Mazar-i-Sharif, where they staged a bloody uprising which took several days to quell. The remaining 7,500 were loaded onto
containers for transport to
Sheberghan Prison, a journey that in some cases took several days.
Human rights advocates say hundreds or thousands of them went missing.
Prisoner transports and massacres In late 2001, Carlotta Gall, Jamie Doran and
Newsweek began reporting rumors that Dostum's forces, who were fighting the Taliban alongside the US Special Forces, intentionally suffocated as many as 2,000 Taliban prisoners in container trucks in an incident that has become known as the Dasht-i-Leili massacre. The first allegations that dozens of prisoners had suffocated in the containers appeared in a December 2001 article in
The New York Times. A 2002 documentary named
Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death by
Jamie Doran produced testimony from eyewitnesses alleging hundreds or even thousands of prisoners had died, either during transport in the containers or being shot and dumped in the Dasht-i-Leili desert after arriving at the hopelessly overcrowded Sheberghan prison. Witnesses presented in the documentary also alleged that wounded and unconscious survivors of the container transports had been executed in the desert in the presence of U.S. soldiers. Doran's documentary, which was viewed by the European and German parliaments, caused widespread concern in Europe and among human rights advocates. It was not reported on in the United States mass media.
Allegations of American involvement Allegations of American involvement were disputed by
Robert Young Pelton, who had been in the area reporting for
National Geographic and
CNN. Pelton also said the number of prisoners who suffocated in the containers was roughly 250, a far smaller number than alleged in Doran's documentary. He claims he saw US medics treating some of the prisoners. He says some of the bodies may be victims of the Taliban or of Malik's executions in the 1990s. In 2016, Dostum spoke to
Ronan Farrow, reluctantly admitting that local commanders had loaded prisoners from the uprising at Qala-i-Jangi into multiple containers and that American forces had been present. Dostum denied that either he or the Americans murdered the prisoners and would not directly say whether he had ordered the commanders to do this nor whether witnesses were later killed. ==Investigations==