The New York Times: American and NATO troops firing from passing convoys and military checkpoints have killed 30 Afghans and wounded 80 others since last summer, but in no instance did the victims prove to be a danger to troops, according to military officials in Kabul. 'We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,' said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who became the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan last year...
The persistence of deadly convoy and checkpoint shootings has led to growing resentment among Afghans fearful of Western troops and angry at what they see as the impunity with which the troops operate -- a friction that has turned villages firmly against the occupation. Many of the detainees at the military prison at Bagram Air Base joined the insurgency after the shootings of people they knew, said the senior NATO enlisted man in Afghanistan, Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Hall...
One such case was the death of Mohammed Yonus, a 36-year-old imam and a respected religious authority, who was killed two months ago in eastern Kabul while commuting to a madrasa where he taught 150 students. A passing military convoy raked his car with bullets, ripping open his chest as his two sons sat in the car...
'The people are tired of all these cruel actions by the foreigners, and we can't suffer it anymore,' said Naqibullah Samim, a village elder from Hodkail, where Mr. Yonus lived. 'The people do not have any other choice, they will rise against the government and fight them and the foreigners. There are a lot of cases of killing of innocent people.'... Numbers do not include shooting deaths caused by convoys guarded by private security contractors. Some tallies have put the total number of escalation of force deaths much higher.
