In December 2001, between 250 and 2,000 Taliban insurgents who had surrendered to the National Islamic Movement of Afghanistan (part of the Northern Alliance) were massacred while being transported to Sheberghan Prison in the Jowzjan Province. Fighters loyal to General Abdul Rashid Dostum tightly packed the prisoners into shipping containers in Kunduz and sealed them inside, while denying them water and sustenance, and reportedly shot all those who had not died of suffocation by the time the convoy arrived at Sheberghan. The prisoners' corpses were subsequently buried in mass graves throughout the Leili Desert.
Controversy emerged following allegations of American involvement, particularly after the 2002 documentary Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death was published by Scottish journalist Jamie Doran and screened for the European Parliament. That same year, teams were dispatched by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and the United Nations to conduct forensic investigations in the Leili Desert, where mass graves containing recently deceased bodies were discovered, with their autopsy reports revealing causes of death that were consistent with the means of homicide that had been described by eyewitness testimonies.
In 2008, PHR reported that the mass graves had been tampered with since the initial investigation. The massacre was not widely covered in American mass media until July 2009, when Dostum denied that his troops had perpetrated the massacre shortly after the Obama administration publicly "ordered national security officials to look into allegations that the Bush administration resisted efforts to investigate a CIA-backed Afghan warlord over the killings of hundreds of Taliban prisoners in 2001."
Events
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.