General Abdul Rashid Dostum is an Afghan warlord, periodically aligned with the Northern Alliance and periodically with the Taliban. He oversaw the loading and transport of approximately 2,000 surrendered Taliban prisoners into unventilated shipping containers during the Dasht-i-Leili massacre of November 30 – December 1, 2001 — an operation in which all but sixteen of the prisoners suffocated.[1][2][3]
John Kiriakou’s characterization:
General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who’s like the greatest traitor in the history of Afghanistan, he’s with the Northern Alliance, then he’s with the Taliban, then he’s with the Northern Alliance again, he’s with the Taliban again — and he’s just a traitor of the worst ilk.[1]
Kiriakou’s view, shared with other CIA personnel of the period, is that Dostum’s failure to ventilate the Dasht-i-Leili containers was deliberate: “We always believed Dostum did it on purpose because he was that kind of a psychopath.”[3] In a separate telling, Kiriakou adds that Barack Obama promised during the 2008 campaign to order a National Security Council investigation of the massacre, but that “never happened because the agency got to him right away.”[4][5]
Elsewhere Kiriakou names Dostum — “anti-Taliban, then pro-Taliban… then pro-Taliban again” — as the man who ordered the surrendered prisoners into the airless trucks, and says the CIA was “certain that he did it specifically to murder them.”[6] In yet another telling, Kiriakou gives the death toll as roughly 2,000 packed into sealed tractor-trailers with no air holes or water, of whom only 14 survived — calling Dostum “a genocidal, murderous maniac” he believes did it on purpose.[7] Kiriakou has repeatedly called Dostum one of the most “grizzly war criminals” still alive, still “operating uh freely in the world” despite having overseen the massacre.[8] He describes Dostum as a “monster” who has shifted allegiance repeatedly — Soviet, Taliban, Northern Alliance, American, then Taliban again — and who remains alive and, as of Kiriakou’s account, allied with the Taliban.[9]
Interviewed on camera, 2002
Kiriakou filmed Dostum in the spring of 2002 for a documentary called Return to Kandahar, made a few months after the events at Dasht-i-Leili.[10] The clip he chose to play back years later has Dostum describing the 1990s: “when these guys fought each other over a million people died, and half of the city of Kabul was destroyed. That’s not a football game.”[11]
His own characterisation is unqualified — Dostum “clearly is, was, a war criminal” — and he notes the man went on to become vice president or deputy prime minister, “one or the other.”[12][13] It was Dostum’s men who loaded the containers.