User:Sherurcij/Khadr

The Firefight and Capture
The 15-year old Khadr was captured following a four-hour firefight between six American soldiers and five Afghans in a series of mud huts in the village of Ab Khail. According to his brother Abdurrahman Khadr, he had been sent to accompany three of the men visiting the residence, to serve as a translator for the gathered Mujahideen at his father's request.

From approximately February 2002, a team of American soldiers were using the abandoned Soviet airbase in Khost, Afghanistan as an intelligence-gathering outpost, as they tried to blend in and gain the trust of the local community.

In the early morning of July 27 2002, a team had been sent from the airbase to the home of an elderly wheelchair-bound man believed to be a bomb-maker.

While at the house, a report came in that a certain monitored satellite phone had just been used a short distance from the group's present location. Six soldiers were sent to investigate the site of the phonecall.

The group consisted of XO Captain (alternatively identified as Major) Mike Silver, Sgt Christopher Speer from Delta Force, Layne Morris and Master Sgt. Scotty Hansen, both from the 19th Special Forces Group and two others.

Arriving at a series of mud huts surrounded by a stone wall approximately 100 metres radius from the main hut, the Special Forces team saw children playing around the huts. Setting up a security perimeter, the team sent two Afghan interpreters toward the huts. The approaching Afghans were shot by the five men inside the stone wall - and several women immediately fled the huts and ran away while the occupants began throwing grenades at the American troops. At this point, Hansen and another soldier then ran up to the compound and dragged the two interpreters away - an action that would see Hansen awarded a Bronze Star after the battle.

Morris and Silver had now taken up positions outside the stone wall, with Silver "over Morris's left shoulder explaining where he should try to position his next shot" when Morris fell back into Silver, with a cut above his right eye and shrapnel embedded in his nose. "I thought his weapon had malfunctioned, that was my first thought," was Silver's recollection of the wound later attributed to an unseen grenade.

Morris was dragged a safe distance from the action and a MedEvac was arranged to airlift him to Bagram Airbase, while the Special Forces called for an air strike against the huts. Over the next 45 minutes, a pair of Apache attack helicopters attacked the huts, two A-10 Warthogs bombed the location and finally a pair of F-18 Hornets dropped 500lb bombs on the houses.

Unaware that Khadr and an unidentified Mujahideen had survived the bombing, the five remaining members split up and picked their way over the carcasses of dead animals and three fighters, with Hansen and two unknown soldiers entering the compound first, while Silver and Speer remained just behind them.

According to Silver's 2007 telling of the story, he then heard a sound "like a gunshot", and saw Hansen and his two soldiers duck - as a grenade flew past them and exploded near Speer, who was at the rear of the group. Nobody had seen the origin of the grenade. In 2008, an accidentally-released written statement by one of Hansen's team stated that they had already begun taking "directed rifle fire" from an unknown surviving Mujahideen before the grenade was thrown.

Silver initially claimed that two of Hansen's men then opened fire, later using the phrase ""Within seconds...we had him [Omar] pinpointed and we opened fire." Initially said to have been carrying a pistol and to have been shot in the chest three times . Later reports suggested that the first of the shots had actually been into the head of a wounded Mujahideen who was lying beside the rifle he had been firing at the Americans, struggling to move. Khadr had actually been crouched on his knees with his back to the soldiers, wounded by shrapnel that had just permenantly blinded his left eye , when they entered the hut, and he was found to have been shot twice in the back by the same soldier, identified only as OC-1 in documents, as had shot the struggling Mujahideen.

Time at Bagram
The unconscious Khadr was airlifted to receive medical attention at Bagram, where interrogations began immediately after he gained consciousness. In a complaint lodged with Amnesty International, Khadr states that he was refused pain medication for his wounds, that he had his hands tied above a door frame for hours, had cold water thrown on him, had a bag placed over his head and was threatened with military dogs. Unallowed to use washrooms, he was forced to urinate on himself.

He spent three months recuperating. During that time he was often singled out for extensive labour by American soldiers who "made him work like a horse", referring to him as "Buckshot Bob" and calling him a murderer.

Time at Guantanamo
He was transferred to Guantanamo Bay in October 2002 to face charges of terrorism and war crimes for his actions.