Deadly night raids based on faulty U.S. intelligence, then covered up by a classified war loophole, this is the focus of a major new investigation by reporter Lynzy Billing into CIA-backed Afghan special forces called “Zero Units,” which left a trail of civilian deaths across Afghanistan but have yet to be held accountable after the U.S. ended its two-decade-long occupation.
Lynzy Billing initially returned to Afghanistan to find out more about the deaths of her own mother and sister nearly 30 years earlier, but started to focus on the Zero Units’ night raids when she first heard eyewitness testimony. Over the next four years, she visited the sites of more than 30 raids in Afghanistan and interviewed hundreds of people, including survivors and families of victims. She also spoke to soldiers inside the Zero Units, who were the men tasked with killing their own compatriots on U.S. orders.
This story really started in early 2019 when I went back to Afghanistan to look into my past and what had happened my family. And it was in Nangarhar province in the east of the country where I had met a distant relative, and I was investigating the death of my mother in a raid there that had happened decades earlier, where I met a woman called Mahzala. And she was a widow, and she was in her fifties, and she was by herself, because she was telling me this story of a night raid that had killed her two only children. And after
— source democracynow.org | Jan 12, 2023
