(EDIT DAMM CANADIAN NESPAPER AND THEIR SHIT URLS.......)
National Post
Saturday, September 21, 2002
'Americans are coming. get ready to kill them'
Minutes after this photo is taken, U.S. troops are hit -- and a Canadian teen is implicated
One U.S. soldier was killed and four others injured in a fierce gun battle in a remote village in Afghanistan. In exclusive interviews with the National Post, surviving soldiers say the 16-year-old Canadian teenager being held as a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist, Omar Khadr, not only was involved but kept fighting when his comrades fell.
At the Bagram Air Base, where three kilometres of runway line the dusty plain beneath the sawtooth mountains of Afghanistan's Parvan province, fat-bellied C-17 and C-130 cargo planes come and go.
Omar Khadr, a Toronto-area teenager with a Grade 8 education, can no doubt hear the whine of their engines from his well-guarded corner of the U.S. military base, where he celebrated his 16th birthday this week in custody for allegedly killing an American soldier.
One of those planes will likely carry him out of Afghanistan. Where he will go, nobody knows for sure. But officials believe it is unlikely he will be going home to his grandmother's brick house in Scarborough, where he was born. The more likely destination is the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
As the first Canadian captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Mr. Khadr is discussed in U.S. military circles as Canada's John Walker Lindh, the California Muslim convert who pleaded guilty to joining the Taliban. Except that Lindh did not kill a decorated American soldier.
"Would Omar do such a thing as kill someone?" his older sister Zaynab told the National Post this week. "If what the Americans say is true it could have been self-defence or an accident or he could have been forced to do it.
"I was not with him and I don't know the situation he was in, but I know that I can trust Omar to do the right thing, so if he did it then he must have had his reasons."
The U.S. soldiers who fought a 4 1/2-hour gun battle in a remote village called Ab Khail tell a different story.
In exclusive interviews with the Post, they said Mr. Khadr was part of an al- Qaeda unit that fought doggedly, killing two Afghan soldiers and wounding five Americans, one of them, Sergeant 1st Class Christopher J. Speer, fatally. Even when he was wounded and his comrades had all been killed, they said, the Canadian continued to fight.
- - -
Sergeant 1st Class Layne Morris is recovering much quicker than doctors had expected from the grenade explosion eight weeks ago that sent shrapnel tearing through his right eye.
He is almost ready to return to his civilian job as chief of the West Valley City Housing Authority near Salt Lake City, Utah. He no longer wears the black eye patch he got at the hospital and the facial scars have nearly faded.
"The lights are still out," the Utah National Guard reservist said, but his eyelid has opened and his nose has healed.
The 40-year-old father of three boys and a girl leaned against the kitchen counter inside his new home in South Jordan, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City surrounded by the Wasatch Mountains, which Sgt. Morris said remind him of Afghanistan's Hindu Kush range.
His two youngest sons, P.J., 9, and Colton, 8, were devouring a macaroni- and-cheese lunch, as their father, a demolitions expert in the reserves, recalled the day his team of Special Forces troops captured a young Canadian al-Qaeda fighter named Omar Khadr.
In mid-July, Sgt. Morris was at the U.S. army base near Khost, close to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, when a middle-aged Afghan man walked in saying he had information to sell about two Arabs.
"This guy comes in and says: 'My neighbour's al-Qaeda and he's hiding all these anti-tank mines in the backyard,' " Sgt. Morris told the Post in an interview at his home.
"We asked: 'How do you know this?' and he says, 'Well, I helped him bury them.' "
"When?"
"Last night," the man replied.
Although the Taliban had long since been defeated, the region of eastern Afghanistan remains an al-Qaeda stronghold, filled with radicalized fighters trained at Osama bin Laden's notorious jihad camps.
Sgt. Morris, a short man with a receding hairline, could not help but laugh as he recalled the conversation with the informant. "They turn on each other like this," he said, snapping his fingers. "Last night, they're buddies, but this morning he needs 50 bucks, so he turns him in."
The informant was paid a few dollars for his tip (the U.S. military routinely pays cash for good intelligence) and disappeared. Sgt. Morris gathered a team of soldiers and they made their way to the neighbourhood mentioned by the informant.
They stormed the home and found more than two dozen anti-tank mines and an elaborate diagram explaining how to plant them to inflict maximum damage.
One man was taken into custody, but the second Arab named by the informant was gone. Later, another local came forward with information. The missing suspect, he said, was hiding in a nearby village called Ab Khail.
- - -
Two weeks later, on July 27, a joint patrol made up of members of the Special Forces and the 82nd Airborne set off for Ab Khail. The 30 Americans were joined by 20 members of the Afghan Militia Forces, the national army that had been set up by Afghanistan's new interim government after the fall of the Taliban.
Sgt. Morris drove in a tan Toyota Tacoma pickup truck with five other Special Forces officers, among them Sgt. Speer, a 28-year-old aspiring doctor who had been assigned to the unit a week before.
Sgt. Speer had joined the army in 1992 and had already served in Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda. The youngest of three brothers, he loved to draw and was always sketching. He decided to marry his wife, Tabitha, on their first date six years ago.
"Chris treated me like a Princess, always very loving, putting me before everything," Mrs. Speer told the Post this week from Fort Bragg, N.C. in her first interview. "I had never met such a genuine, honest, and giving man.... He called my Dad for his blessing after asking me to marry him."
The Speers have two children, Taryn, 3, and Tanner, 1. "He was able to phone once [from Afghanistan]," Mrs. Speer said. "He spoke to Taryn and told us both that he loved and missed us. I was to give both the kids a hug and kiss and tell them he loved them. I asked him to be careful and he said not to worry."
Sgt. Speer, Sgt. Morris and the rest of the team arrived at Ab Khail shortly before noon. The sun was shining and there was a good breeze. "It didn't seem to be that big, it was mainly a lot of farms, a lot of isolated buildings," said Specialist Christopher Vedvick, 25, of the 82nd Airborne.
The soldiers quickly found their target, a modest family compound, about 30 metres by 30 metres, surrounded by three-metre mud walls and a small gate. The team stormed the property and found men, women and children milling inside. They were ordered to stand against the wall. All obeyed, except one.
"His legs were just mangled," said Sgt. Morris, recalling the middle-aged man propped in a wheelchair. "His legs were in traction from the hips down."
The Afghan, who had braces on both his legs, told the troops he had been in a car accident three months earlier. But after examining his wounds, a doctor said they were no more than two weeks old.
It appeared, the doctor said, that the man had been involved in some kind of explosion -- perhaps from an anti-tank mine. "We knew he was lying right off the bat," Sgt. Morris said. "We knew we had the right guy."
As the soldiers searched the compound for more explosives, the team commander noticed a signal coming from his Global Positioning System. For three days, military communications experts had been tracking a beacon, possibly an al-Qaeda satellite phone.
When they checked their co-ordinates at Ab Khail, they noticed the beacon seemed to originate from a spot 600 metres away. "The boss says to me: 'Morris, go check out this location and see what's there,' " the Sergeant recalled.
Sgt. Morris, accompanied by two other special operations soldiers and four members of the 82nd, including Spc. Vedvick, followed the signal through a wheat field then past a tree near the side of the road.
Lying on a bed in the shade of the tree, an elderly man was fast asleep. Just steps from the man's resting place, the troops found an isolated compound, slightly larger than the first. It too was surrounded by mud walls, with a gate large enough to drive through.
The gate was slightly ajar, just enough for Sgt. Morris to peak inside. The first thing he noticed was a low wall to the right, no more than a metre high, that separated the front hall from the main room. Inside that room he saw five men holding AK-47 assault rifles.
It was not unusual to find armed men in Afghanistan, but the five in the compound seemed to be holding their weapons as if they were about to use them, so Sgt. Morris backed out. To be safe, he ordered the four paratroopers to surround the building and radioed back to his commander.
"Hey, this is a compound and we'll probably want to check this one out," Sgt. Morris told his superior. The commander asked if the sergeant's team could go inside alone.
"No," Sgt. Morris said. "I've got four guys on the perimeter and I'm not going in there with three guys."
The commander agreed, saying the other troops would make their way over once the first compound had been completely searched.
So Sgt. Morris waited.
He was used to waiting. When the war on terrorism began last October, Sgt. Morris, a reservist for the past 19 years, was told to pack for Afghanistan. His unit was dispatched at the end of November to the army base at Fort Campbell, Ky., the last stop before being shipped overseas.
But it would be another three months before he actually stepped foot in Afghanistan. He spent most of his days at Fort Campbell lifting weights and jogging. His wife, Leisl, joked that he had never looked better.
The Americans were relaxed as they waited at the Ab Khail compound. At one point, Sgt. Morris realized the paratroopers guarding the perimeter were even facing the wrong way. "It was funny because the 82nd Airborne guys are sitting on the corners facing out," he said. "They're used to guarding their own. But I told them: 'Hey, we're not really guarding people from coming. You've got to watch over your shoulder and make sure nothing comes out the windows.' "
Just then, the Afghan man napping under the tree awoke and started screaming in Pashtu. Not one of the seven Americans knew what he was saying; the translators were still back at the other compound. A group of Afghan boys and teenagers wandered over and a few of them spoke english.
"What's the old guy ranting and raving about?" Sgt. Morris asked.
"He's just angry," the children replied.
In hindsight, Sgt. Morris believes the sleeping Afghan was a sentry who was supposed to be on the lookout for U.S. troops. When the elderly man awoke and saw the patrol, he started yelling to warn his comrades in the compound.
"The kids weren't telling me that," Sgt. Morris said. "They were protecting them."
An avid photographer who had snapped countless pictures during his tour in Afghanistan, Sgt. Morris, still relaxed, pulled out his camera and shot a frame of the children standing along the village road.
The reinforcements arrived five minutes later.
The first step was to talk to the armed men inside. Two Afghan Militia soldiers approached the compound. They were slouched behind the inner wall when two al-Qaeda fighters jumped up, aimed their AK-47s, and shot the Afghans in the head.
"They just slaughtered them," said Sgt. Morris, who was crouching outside the compound gate, directly behind the dead soldiers.
Within seconds, a flurry of hand grenades and bullets came bursting out of the compound.
"It was mayhem."
- - -
The U.S. army believes one of the five armed men inside the compound was Omar Khadr. Intelligence agencies admit they know very little about the teenager, but they do have a thick dossier on his father.
Ahmed Said Khadr, 54, immigrated to Canada from Egypt in 1977 but, like many Muslims, was outraged by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and in 1985 joined an Ottawa-based aid agency called Human Concern International as its Pakistan regional director.
By the time of Omar's birth near Toronto on Sept. 19, 1986, his father was deeply involved in the region. Pakistani investigators suspect he was doing more than helping Afghan refugees and orphans, however; they claim he received military training, fought alongside the mujahedeen guerrillas and was wounded in battle.
In a seized photograph, he is shown posing with an anti-aircraft gun. But at the time, the mujahedeen were largely considered heroes, allies of the West who were fighting the Soviets with the aid of the British and U.S. intelligence services.
Ahmed Khadr has also been accused of serving as a bagman for the guerrillas, smuggling money from donors in Saudi Arabia across the frontier to the Afghan fighters. A Canadian official who visited the region told Ottawa he had heard rumours that Mr. Khadr was running money, and Canadian intelligence noted in a secret 1996 report that the refugee camps where he worked were known as "transit points and safe havens" for Arab holy warriors fighting in Afghanistan.
From an early age, Omar was shuttled back and forth between Canada and Pakistan as his father pursued his calling. Mr. Khadr did not shield his six children from his views. Omar's sister, Zaynab, was promised in marriage at age 16 to one of Mr. Khadr's colleagues, an alleged member of an Egyptian militant group.
Zaynab Khadr described her brother this week as "a very sweet, simple and easygoing person, very loved by all his family and friends ... he is known to be trustworthy and faithful. He mainly stick [sic] with my Mom and Dad."
During his visits to the Human Concern head office in Ottawa, the older Mr. Khadr never brought his children. He never even mentioned them. "Whenever he came here for meetings he came alone," Mumtaz Akhtar, the group's chairman, told the Post this week. "At one time we thought that he had no family because of the way he operated."
After Mr. Khadr was injured by shrapnel near Kabul in 1992, the family returned to Canada while he received treatment at Toronto hospitals. "We thought he's going to stay here, he will not go back, because he got injured there," said his mother-in-law, Fatimah Elsamnah. But Mr. Khadr took his family back to the troubled region. "He found out he cannot run away from this," she said.
The family was living in Peshawar, Pakistan in November, 1995, when two bombs ripped through the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, killing 17. Zaynab's fiancé, who authorities suspect was involved in organizing the attack, disappeared five days later. On Dec. 3, police raided the Khadr home and found $40,000 in cash.
Mr. Khadr was arrested for allegedly financing the bombing. Pakistani authorities claimed that 10 Egyptian militants deported from Pakistan had said he funded terrorist activities and that his carpet- weaving business was used to finance violence.
While his father was under arrest, Omar, then 9, stayed at a hotel in Islamabad with his mother, Maha, and the siblings. Although Omar has probably spent more time in Pakistan than Canada, the family travelled with their Canadian passports and presented themselves as Canadians. Following his father's arrest, Omar's brother, Abdul, said such a thing would never happen in Canada and spoke of going home to Toronto.
The father was still under arrest when Jean Chrétien, the Prime Minister, came to Pakistan for a state visit in January, 1996 and, under pressure from Canadian Muslim lobby groups, intervened in the case. Mr. Khadr was released without charges soon after, and the family returned to Canada that summer. When he arrived back in Canada, Mr. Khadr kissed the ground.
Aly Hindy, the imam at the Salehedin mosque in Toronto, said in an interview this week that he and Mr. Khadr discussed what he should do next. He had left Human Concern and was thinking of staying in Canada to work as an engineer. "He thought about it and then he said: 'No, I already committed myself to those children and I already have camps of children and orphans and I have to go back,'" Mr. Hindy said.
By this time, Mr. Khadr had his own organization called Health & Education Project International, which had an office at the Toronto mosque, where the Khadrs worshiped and raised money for their charity work. He is believed to have travelled to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, which at the time was bin Laden's new base and the hub for al-Qaeda's network of terrorist training camps.
The children were back and forth between Canada and the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region throughout the 1990s. "The family used to come every year for fund collection. The father I haven't seen for four years, and then the mother used to come with one of the children, used to come to get some funds for the orphans," Mr. Hindy said.
"He was with her," Mr. Hindy said of Omar. But he did not make much of an impression on the imam, who saw only a quiet boy of 12 or 13, in the tow of his mother and big brothers.
Omar left Canada for the last time in the spring of 2001, travelling with his mother. They flew to Pakistan and were in Afghanistan last October when the U.S. launched its campaign to unseat the Taliban and track down the al-Qaeda network responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. "We ... were being bombed day and night," recalled Zaynab. Mr. Akhtar said: "I thought that they were all wiped out."
They survived, but Omar's 19-year-old brother, Abdul Rahman, also a Canadian, who officials believe was schooled at bin Laden's training camps, was captured in November by Northern Alliance forces (friends claim he was doing relief work for his father in Jalalabad).
Omar also ended up near Jalalabad, but his sister said there was nothing illicit about it. "We are NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and we go and come a lot across the border and we do that legally," Zaynab told the Post in one of several e-mails. "So [Omar] could have been doing some work there or visiting a friend."
- - -
The first grenade tossed out of the Ab Khail compound sailed over the wall and exploded less than two metres from Spc. Vedvick. Shrapnel sunk into his left side. The metal fragments also tore into the back of Private 1st Class Brian S. Worth. Moments later, a second grenade hit Spc. Vedvick.
Rifleman Michael Rewakowski ran to help, but another grenade knocked him to the ground and fragments embedded in his right calf, left forearm and left temple. Spc. Vedvick was hit by three grenades altogether and had wounds to his shoulder, arm, elbow, thigh and calf. "There were bullets all around," he said this week from Fort Bragg, N.C., where he is learning to walk again.
Sgt. Morris took cover behind a grainery, but spotted an injured soldier still in the line of fire. "I just ran over and helped him get out of the way," Sgt. Morris said. He received the Bronze Star for his bravery last week but downplayed his heroism, and said he does not even know whom he helped. "It was like the way you'd help an old lady across the street."
Returning to the grainery, Sgt. Morris traced the grenades to the back end of the compound. He decided to try a shot with his rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
"I knew if I could hit that wall, I'd get both those guys with shrapnel," he said. "I had to be careful because the wall was almost eight feet high. If I shoot it low, I'm going to bounce it off and hurt our guys. And if I shoot it too high, I'm going to go over the whole compound and get the guys in the back."
Sgt. Morris crept out from behind the grainery and aimed. "Just as I shot my round -- the same time the recoil hits me -- something just got me like a sledgehammer right in the eye," he said. At first, he thought his rifle had slipped and hit him in the shoulder. Then he thought the grenade launcher had come apart in his hands.
"Then I figured I'd been shot in the eye, that I've got a big hole in the back of my head, and that I'm dead," he remembered. "You're just waiting for the lights to go out and I'm going to fall over. But that all takes place in a half a second, and then a half second later you realize you're not going to die."
A hunk of grenade shrapnel had struck Sgt. Morris on the right side of his nose, ricocheted in behind his eye, and flown out the side of his face. "It cut the optic nerves, so the lights went out," he said.
The four injured soldiers were ushered down the road to the same spot where, 25 minutes earlier, Sgt. Morris had snapped his picture of smiling Afghan children.
"I take it personally that I sat there with those kids and shook hands with all of them and played with them for 45 minutes, gave them candy, and they sat there and listened to the old guy say: 'Hey, the Americans are coming. Get ready to kill them,' " Sgt. Morris said. "That irritates me. That makes me mad."
As fellow soldiers tended to the wounded, the air support began to arrive. Two A-10 Thunderbolts, manoeuverable planes designed for providing close-range support to ground troops, were accompanied by two AH-64 Apache attack helicopters and a pair of F/A-18 Hornets.
The air strikes were intense. Rockets, canons and 250-kilogram bombs struck the compound. "They laid waste to that place," Spc. Vedvick said. Yet even as the bombing destroyed the compound, the armed men inside continued to fight.
A Black Hawk helicopter swooped in to evacuate the wounded to the Bagram air base, almost 200 kilometres to the north. The last thing Spc. Vedvick remembered seeing was a dark mushroom cloud rising high above the compound.
- - -
The bombing lasted three hours, until the Americans decided it was safe to send troops inside. One of the first to go was the medic, Sgt. Speer.
Six days earlier, Sgt. Speer had walked into a minefield to rescue two wounded Afghan children. He applied a tourniquet to one and bandaged the other, then waved down a passing truck to take them to the U.S. army hospital.
It was risky, but Sgt. Speer may have been thinking about his own children. Before leaving for Afghanistan, he had hidden letters for them: "It's no secret how much I love you. Take care of each other. Love Daddy."
Inside the obliterated compound, Sgt. Speer and the other Americans found four bodies. They continued searching for more.
Watching them from behind a pile of rubble was Omar Khadr, who had been injured in the air strikes but was the only fighter left alive. He held a pistol in one hand and a grenade in the other, according to a U.S. military report.
When Sgt. Speer was within range, Mr. Khadr threw his grenade, the military report said. It blasted apart and chunks of metal wedged into Sgt. Speer's head. As the soldier fell, U.S. troops opened fire on Omar. He was shot, but not fatally, and the two wounded men were evacuated by helicopter to Bagram.
The injured U.S. soldiers spent only a day at Bagram before being airlifted to a hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. Sgt. Speer had the worst injuries. His wife flew in to sit at his bedside.
"She held his hand, whispered to him, and gave him a kiss on the cheek," said Leisl Morris, who had also flown to Germany to see her husband. "And he turned and puckered to kiss her."
Sgt. Speer's injuries, however, were too severe. He died on Aug. 6. A month later, the army informed Mrs. Speer that the grenade that killed her husband had been thrown by a teenager from Canada.
- - -
As he recovered from his injuries at Bagram, Mr. Khadr surprised his U.S. captors by claiming that he was a Canadian. "I was amazed," said Spc. Vedvick. The U.S. notified authorities in Ottawa, who confirmed his identity.
The Department of Foreign Affairs then began pressing the Americans to allow Canadian diplomats to visit the wounded teen and argued that as a juvenile, Mr. Khadr should be treated differently from the other prisoners.
But the U.S. State Department has turned down Canada's requests and officials believe Mr. Khadr will be sent to the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, where hundreds of captured al-Qaeda "enemy combatants" are being held. He is said to be in good health and there is speculation his transfer to Guantanamo is being delayed while he is interrogated about al-Qaeda.
At her Scarborough home, where the smell of baking wafted from the kitchen, Ms. Elsamnah said her grandson was just a child. "Nobody is fair," said the elderly woman, dressed in long robes and wearing a hijab around her head. "To talk about this young child as a criminal is not fair."
"There are many ways of explaining it," added his sister Zaynab. "You can get a [firearms] licence very easily so he might have had [the gun] for protection; he is Arab after all. It is very dangerous there now. Or he could have been given it by someone."
Sgt. Morris may be back in Utah, but his thoughts remain fixed on Afghanistan. "I watched two guys get killed right in front of my eyes, and then another guy last for a couple of weeks and then die," he said. "I feel the same way about him that I do about John Walker Lindh. It's the same thing, and I think they need to be dealt with harshly."
QUOTES:
"Chris treated me like a princess, always very loving, putting me before everything."
-- Tabitha Speer, whose husband, Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, died after the battle.
"It's no secret how much I love you. Take care of each other. Love Daddy."
-- Sgt. Speer in a letter to his daughters before leaving for Afghanistan.
"I feel the same way about him that I do about John Walker Lindh. It's the same thing, and I think they need to be dealt with harshly."
-- Sgt. 1st Class Layne Morris, a Special Forces operative who took grenade shrapnel in his eye.
"If he did it then he must have had his reasons."
-- Zaynab Khadr, older sister of Omar Khadr, a Canadian teen-ager who allegedly threw the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer.
BATTLE IN AB KHAIL:
1. U.S. forces searching a compound send seven troops to follow a GPS signal 600m away
2. The troops pass an old man sleeping under a tree
3. The soldiers find a compound full of Al-Qaeda fighters carrying AK-47s. They surround the building and call for back-up
4. The old man wakes up and begins yelling to the men inside the compound
5. Sgt. Layne Morris asks local children what the man is saying. They say he's "angry". He snaps a photo
6. When reinforcements arrive, two Afghan Militia men yell inside the compound. As they crouch along the inside wall, Al-Qaeda soldiers hiding on the other side shoot them in the head. Bullets and grenades fly for three hours, injuring four American troops. When the gunfire ends, U.S. troops search the compound. Sgt. Christopher Speer is hit with a grenade allegedly thrown by Omar Khadr, a 15- year-old Canadian hiding in the compound. The Canadian is taken into custody. Sgt. Speer dies 11 days later in the hospital.
Source: Kagan McLeod, National Post
