U.S. Sgt. Robert Bales

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U.S. Sgt. Robert Bales

The American authorities on Saturday released the identity of the U.S. sergeant that killed 16 people a week ago, in an Afghan village, in a move that shocked the entire world and strained the already tense ties between Afghanistan and the United States.
The man is called Robert Bales, is a 38-year-old Staff Sergeant, is married and father of two children, and was decorated as a combat veteran who enlisted shortly after September 11, 2001.
According to Fox News, the man arrived on Friday at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, after being extracted from Afghanistan and taken to a transit prison in Kuwait. The Afghan lawmakers demanded that the man be judged in a public trial on Afghan territory. They urged the president not to sign any agreement with the United States on the continuing of the American presence on Afghan territory, unless the desire of the Afghan families that suffered from the rampage last week are satisfied by a public trial.
Bales is said to have enlisted on November 8, 2001, soon after the war on Afghanistan started, and one day before the Taliban were defeated by the Northern Alliance.
In 2003, the sergeant was deployed in Iraq during Operation Free Iraq, and then had two more assignments between 2006 and 2009. In December 2011 began his latest assignment, in Afghanistan.
The military officials said that the man is being held in pre-trial confinement, pending the trial, and the fact that he was brought to America does not mean an announcement of formal charges against him, nor that he would be judged on American soil.
The family said that there were no signs of aggression or anger that would have indicated he would do what he did. The man is said to never have spoken against Muslims or Afghans, which makes his action even harder to fathom.
According to the lawyer, during his Iraqi assignments he was wounded twice. A battle-related injury is said to have required medical intervention to remove a part of his leg. An injury to his head is said to have been caused by a vehicle incident, not related to the combat activity.
In 2002, Bales is said to have necessitated a 20-hour anger management counseling, after he was arrested in a Tacoma hotel for an assault investigation.
The defense did not say whether their client was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but added that they could make a point in the defense, such a trauma is being documented by specialists.
He is reported to have left Camp Belambay, where he was protecting Special Operation Force to create local militias, in the middle of the night, with night-vision goggles. He entered three houses in two villages in the Panjway district in Kandahar province.
In the first village he killed four people in a house, in the second village, he killed 11 family members in a house. According to ABC News, as he walked back, he entered another village past his base, where he killed another person. He then entered the base and turned himself in.
He is said to have passed a mental health screening in 2008, when he was trained to become a sniper. He was cleared during subsequent screenings.
The killing spree caused the Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to say that the U.S. authorities would prosecute very seriously this case and that if found guilty, the man could face death penalty.
The Afghan authorities went to great lengths to contain the popular reaction to this tragedy, which manifested itself by a rally of the students in Jalalabad, in which some 1,000 students participated, and a strange incident at the airport where Leon Panetta was expected to land for a visit to the ally country.
The pressure brought into question the idea of a precipitated withdrawal from Afghanistan, but Panetta insisted that this incident should not influence the withdrawal of the troops, which is scheduled to end in 2014.
In an unprecedented move, Russia offered an airport for the U.S. troops to transit in and out of Afghanistan, after the Defense Secretary had a talk with the Kyrgyz authorities, which insisted that they wanted Manas Transit Center turned into a civilian airport after 2014, when the contract with the American army expires.
The Bales incident is one in a stream of incident that tensed the ties between the Americans and Afghans. Four American soldiers were shown in a video last year urinating on Taliban dead bodies.
Quran copies were burnt by accident in a military base, causing a wave of rage, which resulted in the death of about 30 people.

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