The Dasht-i-Leili massacre was the mass suffocation of approximately 2,000 surrendered Taliban prisoners in unventilated shipping containers in the Afghan desert on November 30 and December 1, 2001. The prisoners’ surrender — accepting roughly 2,000 enemy combatants at Mazar-i-Sharif — had been negotiated by the Central Intelligence Agency via the Northern Alliance; the transport order was issued by the CIA; and the loading and transport was overseen by Northern Alliance warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum.[1][2][3]
Operation
The Northern Alliance came to us and said, “We can’t hold 2,000 prisoners. What should we do?” And we told them to put them in trucks, truck them out into the desert, and let’s just hold them there out in the desert until we can divide them up and send them to jails around the country. So [Dostum] was in charge of these prisoners. They trucked these 2,000 people jammed into containers out into the desert. And one of the 16 survivors told us that when they opened the trucks, the bodies fell out like sardines from a can — because nobody had punched air holes in the trucks, and there was no food or water. And so almost all 2,000 of them suffocated.[2][3]
John Kiriakou’s view, shared with other agency personnel of the period, was that Dostum failed to ventilate the containers deliberately: “We always believed Dostam did it on purpose because he was that kind of a psychopath.”[4]
The 2009 attempted reopening
During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to direct the National Security Council to investigate the massacre. The investigation never occurred — “the agency got to him right away.”[4][5]
In 2009 Kiriakou, then senior investigator on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee under John Kerry, was approached by a prominent human-rights activist who introduced him to a witness — a former twelve-year-old child who had been concealed behind a rock during the “box-up” (the unveiling of the containers) and who had seen two English-speaking men in black t-shirts and blue jeans on the ground. Kiriakou wrote a Kerry-signed letter to the CIA inquiring whether agency personnel had been on the ground at Dasht-i-Leili. The agency’s response, classified top secret and held in a vault Kiriakou did not at that time have clearance to access, was — per a colleague who relayed it to him — “go fuck yourself.”[5][6][7]
When Kiriakou proposed to take the story to the Washington Post, Kerry stopped him: “And now he doesn’t [want to get to the bottom of Dasht-i-Leili].”[8]