The “Kill Team” is a name given to members of the 5th Stryker Brigade, a platoon of U.S. soldiers stationed near Kandahar in Afghanistan. The Kill Team photos posted here were published by the Rolling Stone magazine with an accompanying line which read: “War Crime Images the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to See!”. Members of the Kill Team are accused of killing at least 4 unarmed Afghani civilians and mutilating several corpses. Their actions are chronicled in photos the Kill Team members took during their killing spree at the beginning of 2010.
Thanks to nosy investigative journalists, the war crimes committed by the Kill Team are now becoming public knowledge, but the Pentagon went to great measures to prevent the photos from reaching the public. A massive effort by the Pentagon was launched to pull the pictures out of circulation as these had the potential to become as large as the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.
The Rolling Stone Magazine obtained more than 150 images showcasing the war crimes committed by the Kill Team on the people of Afghanistan and interviewed several eye witnesses who proved that most of the US soldiers within the unit hated the Afghanis and wanted them dead – civilians or not. The Kill Team treated the images of their war atrocities as war souvenirs while the units officials did nothing to stop them.
Not all of the Kill Team photos contain gore, but they all have a story attached to them.
One of the victims of the Kill Team was a 15 year old Afghan boy named Gul Mudin. U.S. soldiers from Bravo Company decided that their hatred for Afghans need to be upgraded from words into actions so when an unarmed Afghan boy came to sight on January 15, 2010, they ambushed him, ordered him to stay still and threw a grenade at him. The soldiers then opened fire at the boy from close range. To make the killing justified, Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and Pfc. Andrew Holmes made it look as though they were under attack.
Sgt. Calvin Gibbs used a pair of medical shears to cut off the pinky fingers of their kills to keep as trophies. In the case of killed Gul Mudin, he gave the pinky to Pfc. Andrew Holmes as the boy was the first Afghani he killed. You can see from the photos in which the murderers pose with the boy that the pinky is missing which means they were taken after the trophy was severed.
Sgt. Calvin Gibbs routinely collected weapons found at the strike scenes to use them to frame their victim as enemy combatants with. He used a pistol recovered at the scene of a helicopter strike in 2009 to make the execution of Gul Mudin look like a legitimate kill.