Jury finds Afghan family guilty in honor killings

KINGSTON, Ontario (AP) — A jury on Sunday found three members of an Afghan family guilty of killing three teenage sisters and another woman in what the judge described as "cold-blooded, shameful murders" resulting from a "twisted concept of honor," ending a case that shocked and riveted Canadians.

 

Prosecutors said the defendants allegedly killed the three teenage sisters because they dishonored the family by defying its disciplinarian rules on dress, dating, socializing and using the Internet.

The jury took 15 hours to find Mohammad Shafia, 58; his wife Tooba Yahya, 42; and their son Hamed, 21, each guilty of four counts of first-degree murder. First-degree murder carries an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.

After the verdict was read, the three defendants again declared their innocence in the killings of sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar 17, and Geeti, 13, as well as Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, Shafia's childless first wife in a polygamous marriage.

Their bodies were found June 30, 2009, in a car submerged in a canal in Kingston, Ontario, where the family had stopped for the night on their way home to Montreal from Niagara Falls, Ontario.

The prosecution alleged it was a case of premeditated murder, staged to look like an accident after it was carried out. Prosecutors said the defendants drowned their victims elsewhere on the site, placed their bodies in the car and pushed it into the canal.

Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger said the evidence clearly supported the conviction.

"It is difficult to conceive of a more heinous, more despicable, more honorless crime," Maranger said. "The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameful murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your completely twisted concept of honor ... that has absolutely no place in any civilized society."

In a statement following the verdict, Canadian Justice Minister Rob Nicholson called honor killings a practice that is "barbaric and unacceptable in Canada."

Defense lawyers said the deaths were accidental. They said the Nissan car accidentally plunged into the canal after the eldest daughter, Zainab, took it for a joy ride with her sisters and her father's first wife. Hamed said he watched the accident, although he didn't call police from the scene.

After the jury returned the verdicts, Mohammad Shafia, speaking through a translator, said, "We are not criminal, we are not murderer, we didn't commit the murder and this is unjust."

His weeping wife, Tooba, also declared the verdict unjust, saying, "I am not a murderer, and I am a mother, a mother."

Their son, Hamed, speaking in English said, "I did not drown my sisters anywhere."

Hamed's lawyer, Patrick McCann, said he was disappointed with the verdict, but said his client will appeal and he believes the other two defendants will as well.

But prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis welcomed the verdict.

"This jury found that four strong, vivacious and freedom-loving women were murdered by their own family in the most troubling of circumstances," Laarhuis said outside court.

"This verdict sends a very clear message about our Canadian values and the core principles in a free and democratic society that all Canadians enjoy and even visitors to Canada enjoy," he said to cheers of approval from onlookers.

The family had left Afghanistan in 1992 and lived in Pakistan, Australia and Dubai before settling in Canada in 2007. Shafia, a wealthy businessman, married Yahya because his first wife could not have children.

Shafia's first wife was living with him and his second wife. The polygamous relationship, if revealed, could have resulted in their deportation.

The prosecution painted a picture of a household controlled by a domineering Shafia, with Hamed keeping his sisters in line and doling out discipline when his father was away on frequent business trips to Dubai.

The months leading up to the deaths were not happy ones in the Shafia household, according to evidence presented at trial. Zainab, the oldest daughter, was forbidden to attend school for a year because she had a young Pakistani-Canadian boyfriend, and she fled to a shelter, terrified of her father, the court was told.

The prosecution said her parents found condoms in Sahar's room as well as photos of her wearing short skirts and hugging her Christian boyfriend, a relationship she had kept secret. Geeti was becoming almost impossible to control: skipping school, failing classes, being sent home for wearing revealing clothes and stealing, while declaring to authority figures that she wanted to be placed in foster care, according to the prosecution.

Shafia's first wife wrote in a diary that her husband beat her and "made life a torture," while his second wife called her a servant.

The prosecution presented wire taps and mobile phone records from the Shafia family in court to support their honor killing allegation. The wiretaps, which capture Shafia spewing vitriol about his dead daughters, calling them treacherous and whores and invoking the devil to defecate on their graves, were a focal point of the trial.

"There can be no betrayal, no treachery, no violation more than this," Shafia said on one recording. "Even if they hoist me up onto the gallows ... nothing is more dear to me than my honor."

Defense lawyers argued that at no point in the intercepts do the accused say they drowned the victims.

Shafia's lawyer, Peter Kemp, said after the verdicts that he believes the comments his client made on the wiretaps may have weighed more heavily on the jury's minds than the physical evidence in the case.

"He wasn't convicted for what he did," Kemp said. "He was convicted for what he said."

Source : news.yahoo.com

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Afghanistan: How Well Is the U.S. Really Doing in Kandahar?

NATO commanders are boasting of dramatic progress just weeks into the U.S.-led push into Taliban strongholds around Kandahar province. They say the heavily pounded insurgents have fled some areas for good, setting the stage for the Kabul government to finally establish its rule in the region and to initiate reconstruction. These upbeat claims coincide with talk about behind-the-scenes negotiations with the militants, suggesting that for all the fierce hostilities, an endgame is in mind, if not in sight.

But the military's purported gains in the southern war zone do not align with the bleak picture painted by most sources on the ground.

When General David Petraeus assumed command of U.S. and multinational forces in June, he inherited a slow-cooked counterinsurgency strategy that put a priority on protecting Afghans over Taliban body count. There was also deepening skepticism about the war from the American public and President Obama, who declared a summer 2011 timetable to start withdrawing troops. And Petraeus had a deadline: a war review was slated for December, meaning measurable results had to be posted within months, not years. So while counterinsurgency has remained the stated strategy, military planners have gone back to what they do best: killing insurgents as aggressively as possible, with the aim of dealing a decisive blow to the Taliban in Kandahar, the movement's birthplace and strategic nerve center.

Now, as the fighting season winds down, the coalition's spin machine is in high gear. A host of recent stories have supported the military's assertion that clearing operations in districts surrounding Kandahar are making headway, with some going so far as to say that insurgents have been "routed." These stories tend to be lopsidedly sourced to military and civilian officials. Yet many reports from journalists embedded with troops in the field are at variance with the official assertions. Most describe a stalemate at best, or even describe the Taliban as having the initiative. Aid organizations, meanwhile, note that civilian casualties in Kandahar are at an all-time high. Thousands have fled their homes en masse. Development projects are at a near standstill.

There's a familiar precedent to all of this. Before the Kandahar offensive, a military-driven public-relations thrust came in advance of the siege of Marjah, a Taliban-held town in central Helmand province's opium-poppy belt. In the weeks ahead of the February operation to oust them, military officials framed the operation as a stepping-stone for the broader push east. With most of the Taliban already long gone, U.S. forces encountered few hiccups in Marjah. A governor was quickly installed as part of a government-in-a-box strategy that would connect neighboring population centers and take them into Kabul's orbit. But since then, the insurgents have regrouped in Marjah. Nine months on, despite some small improvements — increased commerce, reopened schools — the Taliban still threatens anyone who might cooperate with the Afghan government in Marjah, which has continued to struggle under a replacement governor. Hit-and-run attacks harass U.S. forces there each day.

It is still too early to gauge the impact of operations around Kandahar. As they do every year, insurgents have begun to decamp for the borderlands for the winter — which would bring a decline in violence in any event. Embedded reporting is also limited to narrow snapshots and not the bigger picture. Sometimes, even those glimpses are not available. In October, for instance, a day before a key operation kicked off in Arghandab district, all media embeds were abruptly cancelled. (The two-week blackout was followed by bold assertions of success.) Some of the secrecy may relate to the ongoing black ops carried out by special-forces units to dismantle the Taliban's leadership structure. Senior military sources insist that on any given day, two to three low- to mid-level commanders are killed, along with as many as 20 to 30 foot soldiers. These figures are impossible to confirm.

In the meantime, NATO commanders have intimated that contacts between Afghan officials and the Taliban are taking place with the U.S. military's consent. But with their efforts overwhelmingly focused on wiping out insurgents, there's a growing consensus this is nothing more than a psychological ploy to confuse the enemy — and one that could backfire. By targeting Taliban commanders, some say that the coalition risks further atomizing an insurgency that already has many moving parts, leaving less experienced guerrillas to fill the vacuum and extend the fighting. The political deal needed to take troops home could well be pushed further out of reach. At the same time, optimistic reports from Kandahar could create unrealistic expectations among the American public. If the Taliban remains robust when fighting resumes in the spring, what remains of U.S. popular support may come crashing down. In that case, any exaggeration of the current campaign's progress would be more than misleading. It would be self-defeating.

Source : www.time.com

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NATO official: Bin Laden, deputy hiding in northwest Pakistan

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri are believed to be hiding close to each other in houses in northwest Pakistan, but are not together, a senior NATO official said.

"Nobody in al Qaeda is living in a cave," said the official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the intelligence matters involved.

Rather, al Qaeda's top leadership is believed to be living in relative comfort, protected by locals and some members of the Pakistani intelligence services, the official said.

Pakistan has repeatedly denied protecting members of the al Qaeda leadership.

The official said the general region where bin Laden is likely to have moved around in recent years ranges from the mountainous Chitral area in the far northwest near the Chinese border, to the Kurram Valley which neighbors Afghanistan's Tora Bora, one of the Taliban strongholds during the U.S. invasion in 2001.

Tora Bora is also the region from which bin Laden is believed to have escaped during a U.S. bombing raid in late 2001. U.S. officials have long said there have been no confirmed sightings of bin Laden or Zawahiri for several years.

The area that the official described covers hundreds of square miles of some of the most rugged terrain in Pakistan inhabited by fiercely independent tribes.

The official also confirmed the U.S. assessment that Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, has moved between the cities of Quetta and Karachi in Pakistan over the last several months.

The official would not discuss how the coalition has come to know any of this information, but he has access to some of the most sensitive information in the NATO alliance.

The official, who has day-to-day senior responsibilities for the war, offered a potentially grimmer view than what has been publicly offered by others.

"Every year the insurgency can generate more and more manpower," despite military attacks, he said.

Although there has been security progress, he pointed to an internal assessment that there are 500,000 to 1 million "disaffected" men between the ages of 15 and 25 along the Afghan-Pakistan border region, he said.

Most are Afghan Pashtuns and make up some of the 95 percent of the insurgency who carry out attacks just to earn money, rather than fight for a hard-core Taliban ideology.

The official said it is now absolutely vital for the Afghan government to address the needs of this group with security, economic development and jobs in order for the war to end, and for Afghanistan to succeed.

"We are running out of time," he said.

The entire scenario is made more complex by the fact that "there is a huge criminal enterprise in this country," dealing in human, drug and mineral trafficking, he said. Those crimes are also tied into the insurgency.

He acknowledged the overall strategy now is to increase offensive airstrikes and ground attacks in order to increase the pressure on the Taliban and insurgents groups to come to the negotiating table with the current Afghan government.

There is a growing sense that many insurgent leaders may be willing to accept conditions such as renouncing al Qaeda because they want to come back to Afghanistan.

But, the official cautioned, hard core Taliban groups such as the Quetta Shura run by Mullah Omar, the Haqqanis, the HiG (Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin) and the Pakistani Taliban still could potentially muster as many as 30,000 fighters.

The U.S. continues to face a more localized insurgency in the south. In places like Marja and the Helmand River Valley, the majority of the fighters are captured within a few miles of their homes.

The insurgent leader Mullah Abdullah Zakir has increased his strength in the south, the official said. He essentially exerts some levels of control and influence both in the greater Kandahar region and across the south from Zabul to Farah province.

The official continued to stress the urgency of getting the Afghan government to deal with the multitude of problems it faces.

Right now, the U.S. war plan approved by President Barack Obama extends through 2014, the official said. That is the official document that spells out matters such as troop rotation schedules.

The U.S. military could sustain a war "'indefinitely," the official said. But the goal is to achieve reconciliation and allow the Afghan government to function and provide security and services to the people.

Without that, he said, "we will be fighting here forever."

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The Most of Special Picture

From Around the World

The Space Between
Afghan children play soccer in a dilapidated house in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Toxic Memories
Family photos on a wall bear the marks of a flood of toxic mud that flowed through the home in Kolontar, Hungary. The flooding was caused by the rupture of a red sludge reservoir at a metalworks in western Hungary.

Taking a Dip
Boys swim and play at a flooded park near Lake Xolotlan in Managua, Nicaragua.

Crash and Burn
A local resident stands on a street median as he watches fuel tankers burn along the GT road in Nowshera, Pakistan. Gunmen in Pakistan set fire to up to 40 NATO supply trucks headed for Afghanistan.

READ MORE - The Most of Special Picture

2010: U.S. To Wage War Throughout The World

by : Rick Rozoff.

January 1 will usher in the last year of the first decade of a new millennium and ten consecutive years of the United States conducting war in the Greater Middle East.

Beginning with the October 7, 2001 missile and bomb attacks on Afghanistan, American combat operations abroad have not ceased for a year, a month, a week or a day in the 21st century.

The Afghan war, the U.S.'s first air and ground conflict in Asia since the disastrous wars in Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1960s and early 1970s and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's first land war and Asian campaign, began during the end of the 2001 war in Macedonia launched from NATO-occupied Kosovo, one in which the role of U.S. military personnel is still to be properly exposed [1] and addressed and which led to the displacement of almost 10 percent of the nation's population.

In the first case Washington invaded a nation in the name of combating terrorism; in the second it abetted cross-border terrorism. Similarly, in 1991 the U.S. and its Western allies attacked Iraqi forces in Kuwait and launched devastating and deadly cruise missile attacks and bombing sorties inside Iraq in the name of preserving the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of Kuwait, and in 1999 waged a 78-day bombing assault against Yugoslavia to override and fatally undermine the principles of territorial integrity and national sovereignty in the name of the casus belli of the day, so-called humanitarian intervention.

Two years later humanitarian war, as abhorrent an oxymoron as the world has ever witnessed, gave way to the global war on terror(ism), with the U.S. and its NATO allies again reversing course but continuing to wage wars of aggression and "wars of opportunity" as they saw fit, contradictions and logic, precedents and international law notwithstanding.

Several never fully acknowledged counterinsurgency campaigns, some ongoing - Colombia - and some new - Yemen - later, the U.S. invaded Iraq in March of 2003 with a "coalition of the willing" comprised mainly of Eastern European NATO candidate nations (now almost all full members of the world's only military bloc as a result of their service).

The Pentagon has also deployed special forces and other troops to the Philippines and launched naval, helicopter and missile attacks inside Somalia as well as assisting the Ethiopian invasion of that nation in 2006. Washington also arms, trains and supports the armed forces of Djibouti in their border war with Eritrea. In fact Djibouti hosts the U.S.'s only permanent military installation in Africa to date [2], Camp Lemonier, a United States Naval Expeditionary Base and home to the Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), placed under the new U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) when it was launched on October 1, 2008. The area of responsibility of the Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa takes in the nations of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Seychelles, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Yemen and as "areas of interest" the Comoros, Mauritius and Madagascar.

That is, much of the western shores of the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, among the most geostrategically important parts of the world. [3]

U.S. troops, aerial drones, warships, planes and helicopters are active throughout that vast tract of land and water.

With senator and once almost vice president Joseph Lieberman's threat on December 27 that "Yemen will be tomorrow's war" [4] and former Southern Command chief and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Wesley Clark's two days later that "Maybe we need to put some boots on the ground there," [5] it is evident that America's new war for the new year has already been identified. In fact in mid-December U.S. warplanes participated in the bombing of a village in northern Yemen that cost the lives of 120 civilians as well as wounding 44 more [6] and a week later "A US fighter jet...carried out multiple airstrikes on the home of a senior official in Yemen's northern rugged province of Sa'ada...." [7]

The pretext for undertaking a war in Yemen in earnest is currently the serio-comic "attempted terrorist attack” by a young Nigerian national on a passenger airliner outside of Detroit on Christmas Day. The deadly U.S. bombing of the Yemeni village mentioned above occurred ten days earlier and moreover was in the north of the nation, although Washington claims al-Qaeda cells are operating in the other end of the country. [8]

Asia, Africa and the Middle East are not the only battlegrounds where the Pentagon is active. On October 30 of 2009 the U.S. signed an agreement with the government of Colombia to acquire the essentially unlimited and unrestricted use of seven new military bases in the South American nation, including sites within immediate striking distance of both Venezuela and Ecuador. [9] American intelligence, special forces and other personnel will be complicit in ongoing counterinsurgency operations against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the nation's south as well as in rendering assistance to Washington's Colombian proxy for attacks inside Ecuador and Venezuela that will be portrayed as aimed at FARC forces in the two states.

Targeting two linchpins of and ultimately the entire Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), Washington is laying the groundwork for a potential military conflagration in South and Central America and the Caribbean. After the U.S.-supported coup in Honduras on June 28, that nation has announced it will be the first ALBA member state to ever withdraw from the Alliance and the Pentagon will retain, perhaps expand, its military presence at the Soto Cano Air Base there.

A few days ago "The Colombian government...announced it is building a new military base on its border with Venezuela and has activated six new airborne battalions" [10] and shortly afterward Dutch member of parliament Harry van Bommel "claimed that US spy planes are using an airbase on the Netherlands Antilles island of Curaçao" [11] off the Venezuelan coast.

In October a U.S. armed forces publication revealed that the Pentagon will spend $110 million to modernize and expand seven new military bases in Bulgaria and Romania, across the Black Sea from Russia, where it will station initial contingents of over 4,000 troops. [12]

In early December the U.S. signed a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Poland, which borders the Russian Kaliningrad territory, that "allows for the United States military to station American troops and military equipment on Polish territory." [13] The U.S. military forces will operate Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) and Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) batteries as part of the Pentagon's global interceptor missile system.

At approximately the same time President Obama pressured Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to base missile shield components in his country. "We discussed the continuing role that we can play as NATO allies in strengthening Turkey's profile within NATO and coordinating more effectively on critical issues like missile defense," [14] in the American leader's words.

"Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has hinted his government does not view Tehran [Iran] as a potential missile threat for Turkey at this point. But analysts say if a joint NATO missile shield is developed, such a move could force Ankara to join the mechanism." [15]

2010 will see the first foreign troops deployed to Poland since the breakup of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 and the installation of the U.S's "stronger, swifter and smarter" (also Obama's words) interceptor missiles and radar facilities in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the South Caucasus. [16]

U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan, site of the longest and most wide-scale war in the world, will top 100,000 early in 2010 and with another 50,000 plus troops from other NATO nations and assorted "vassals and tributaries" (Zbigniew Brzezinski) will represent the largest military deployment in any war zone in the world.

American and NATO drone missile and helicopter gunship attacks in Pakistan will also increase, as will U.S. counterinsurgency operations in the Philippines and Somalia along with those in Yemen where CIA and Army special forces are already involved.

U.S. military websites recently announced that there have been 3.3 million deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001 with 2 million U.S. service members sent to the two war zones. [17]

In this still young millennium American soldiers have also deployed in the hundreds of thousands to new bases and conflict and post-conflict zones in Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Colombia, Djibouti, Georgia, Israel, Jordan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Mali, the Philippines, Romania, Uganda and Uzbekistan.

In 2010 they will be sent abroad in even larger numbers to man airbases and missile sites, supervise and participate in counterinsurgency operations throughout the world against disparate rebel groups, many of them secular, and wage combat operations in South Asia and elsewhere. They will be stationed on warships and submarines equipped with cruise and long-range nuclear missiles and with aircraft carrier strike groups prowling the world's seas and oceans.

They will construct and expand bases from Europe to Central and South Asia, Africa to South America, the Middle East to Oceania. With the exception of Guam and Vicenza in Italy, where the Pentagon is massively expanding existing installations, all the facilities in question are in nations and even regions of the world where the U.S. military has never before ensconced itself. Practically all the new encampments will be forward bases used for operations "down range," generally to the east and south of NATO-dominated Europe.

U.S. military personnel will be assigned to the new Global Strike Command and for expanded patrols and war games in the Arctic Circle. They will serve under the Missile Defense Agency to consolidate a worldwide interceptor missile network that will facilitate a nuclear first strike capability and will extend that system into space, the final frontier in the drive to achieve military full spectrum dominance.

American troops will continue to fan out to most all parts of the world. Everywhere, that is, except to their own nation's borders.

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