First, the history. The Taliban was surrounded at the town of Kunduz. One man, Amir Jhan, agreed to negotiate their surrender. He had fought alongside the Taliban and was trusted by both sides. He was respected even by people like Dotsum. In the process of negotiating the surrender, Jhan counted the number of prisoners. He says there were 8,000. Now there are only 3,015 left. Where are the rest?

Four hundred seventy of the prisoners were suspected al-Qaida members. They were taken to Qala Jangi, and that was where the press focused attention. That's where the prison revolts started and where CIA agent Johnny Spann was killed.

What no one was aware of was that the other 7,500 prisoners were being processed through another fort, Qala-I-Zeini. They were transported to Sherberghan in shipping containers -- one of my witnesses said that 200 to 300 people were loaded into each container. The Taliban were suffocating. They cried out for air. In the film it says the answer came quite swiftly when Northern Alliance soldiers fired into the containers. One witness implicates himself by admitting to shooting into containers and killing prisoners. He was ordered by his commanders.

The containers were loaded onto trucks and moved towards Sherberghan. On that road, a taxi driver saw them in a makeshift gas station. He smelled something horrific and asked the attendant about it. The attendant said look behind you, and he turned around to see blood pouring out of three containers on the back of a truck.

When they arrived, one witness -- another soldier -- talks about how an American officer, on seeing the carnage, told them to get [the bodies] out of the town of Sherberghan. Two drivers who were interviewed separately talk of being forced to take container loads of the dead, wounded and unconscious into the desert of Dasht-I-Leili, where the bodies were taken from the containers. Some of them were alive. One of the drivers described some of them as being perfectly healthy. Others were wounded. They were lined up and summarily shot by machine-gun fire by the Northern Alliance.

Do you have other evidence of American complicity?

Crucially, one of the drivers was asked, "Were there any American soldiers present at Dasht-I-Leili?" He says yes. He was asked, "Do you mean right here where the killing took place?" He says, "Yes, here." He was asked how many, and he says lots of them, 30 to 40. He's saying that 30 to 40 American soldiers were witness on at least one occasion to these events.

Why did you come forward with the footage before your documentary was finished?

There is a mass grave with very many bodies in it at this moment, and I had received the word from Afghanistan that there was possibly tampering going on. By breaking the story, my hope is that this evidence is not removed and that an independent inquiry of some kind can take place. What do innocent people have to fear from an inquiry?

In your documentary, there are allegations that American soldiers tortured Taliban prisoners. When did that happen?

The torture took place after those prisoners that were left arrived at Sherberghan. According to eyewitnesses, these were fairly isolated instances. They included the breaking of necks, the cutting of tongues, the cutting of beards -- a great insult in the Islamic faith -- and the cutting of fingers.

I read that your film also claims that one prisoner had acid poured on him.

Yes, that's an allegation from one of the eyewitnesses.

You said before that some of your witnesses implicated themselves. How did you get them to talk to you?

The most important thing in this is that these witnesses have absolutely nothing to gain. They don't get a single cent and they put themselves in immense danger by agreeing to take part in this.

So what were their motives?

With the soldiers, I spent hours talking to them, negotiating and cajoling. They did not want to do interviews. They were happy to tell me things, they just did not want to do interviews [on camera]. I spent hours persuading them.

As for the drivers, it was perfectly clear from the way they talked and the expressions on their faces: They were frankly disgusted by what they'd been forced to do.

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