War crime is repulsive business. It involves the murders of innocent souls – men, women and children as well as prisoners of war who have surrendered their weapons to the enemy army.

The history books overflow with such atrocities – the Ottomans in Armenia, Hitler in Europe, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Ariel Sharon’s Phalange forces in Lebanon, Slobodan Milosevic in Bosnia, Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Saddam Hussein in northern Iraq. The list could go on.

This weekend, the hands of the United States and our allies were again stained with the blood of war crime. Atrocities which so far are being reported by European media. In typical fashion, there has been little attention paid in the U.S. news organizations.

Our allies, the Northern Alliance forces, crushed a prisoner revolt of questionable beginnings by killing possibly hundreds of captured Taliban prisoners.

“We behaved brotherly with them. We treated prisoners according to human rights.”

That is what Abdul Rashid Dostum, commander of a Northern Alliance militia, told The Associated Press Monday.

The journalists were greeted Monday with the wretched stench of rotting corpses and Northern Alliance soldiers looting the bodies for anything valuable, including the gold from tooth fillings, according to news reports.

Journalists were allowed entrance to Qalai Janghi, the hilltop fortress near Mazar-I-Sharif where Northern Alliance forces, with help of U.S. bombing and special forces, brutally killed hundreds of Taliban prisoners of war. Articles confirm that some of the dead were tied at the hands and shot.

Abdul Rashid Dostum was showing the journalists through the damaged fortress, claiming that his forces respected human rights in their crushing of the revolt.

But New York-based Human Rights Watch knows Gen. Dostum well.

In a background report published last month, they list human rights abuses committed in recent years by Northern Alliance forces. Dostum was the first name on a list of people to “actively discourage and refuse to support in any way.”

Curiously, as a Northern Alliance general, Abdul Rashid Dostum is a beneficiary of U.S. aid in the war to drive the Taliban out of power.

Our tax dollars are helping to supply this man and his allies their weapons of war.

On Sept. 30, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said of anti-Taliban forces, including the Northern Alliance: “And clearly we need to recognize the value they bring to this anti-terrorist, anti-Taliban effort – and where appropriate, find ways to assist them.”

And assist them they did.

Early reports suggest that some prisoners staged a revolt and the Northern Alliance, with the help of U.S. warplanes, violently quashed it. However, the facts are not fully known about events of the prison riot.

Amnesty International demanded Tuesday that, “An urgent inquiry should look into what triggered this violent incident . and into the proportionality of the response by United Front, US and UK forces.”

Dostum and his forces are known to have committed egregious war crimes in the past and human rights groups warned of such massacres long ago.

The examples abound.

Human Rights Watch reports that warplanes belonging to the Junbish, the group Abdul Rashid Dostum founded, indiscriminately dropped cluster munitions on residential areas of Kabul on Jan. 5, 1997.

In addition, in late May of that same year, Junbish forces under Dostum summarily executed about 3,000 Taliban prisoners by taking them to the desert to be shot or throwing them down wells and blowing them up with grenades.

It is an act that bears chilling resemblance to the atrocities that occurred this weekend during the revolt at Qalai Janghi.

The two alleged crimes both occurred under the command of Dostum.

Is this the man you want your tax money supporting?

The Northern Alliance militias have shown themselves time and time again to flaunt international law and the Geneva Convention on war and the treatment of prisoners of war. Yet the United States continues to support them militarily.

Demand an immediate halt to funding Northern Alliance forces and bring those suspected of crimes of war, including Abdul Rashid Dostum, to justice in international court. We must call for an immediate investigation into the bloodbath at Qalai Janghi prison.

If we have any interest in peace, it must be our primary interest to enforce the Geneva Convention and international humanitarian law for all sides.

Omar Tesdell is a sophomore in journalism and mass communication from Slater. He is online editor of the Daily.