Dasht-i-Leili massacre

In December 2001, between 250 and 2,000 Taliban insurgents who had surrendered to the National Islamic Movement of Afghanistan (part of the Northern Alliance) were massacred while being transported to Sheberghan Prison in the Jowzjan Province. Fighters loyal to General Abdul Rashid Dostum tightly packed the prisoners into shipping containers in Kunduz and sealed them inside, while denying them water and sustenance, and reportedly shot all those who had not died of suffocation by the time the convoy arrived at Sheberghan. The prisoners' corpses were subsequently buried in mass graves throughout the Leili Desert.

Controversy emerged following allegations of American involvement, particularly after the 2002 documentary Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death was published by Scottish journalist Jamie Doran and screened for the European Parliament. That same year, teams were dispatched by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and the United Nations to conduct forensic investigations in the Leili Desert, where mass graves containing recently deceased bodies were discovered, with their autopsy reports revealing causes of death that were consistent with the means of homicide that had been described by eyewitness testimonies.

In 2008, PHR reported that the mass graves had been tampered with since the initial investigation. The massacre was not widely covered in American mass media until July 2009, when Dostum denied that his troops had perpetrated the massacre shortly after the Obama administration publicly "ordered national security officials to look into allegations that the Bush administration resisted efforts to investigate a CIA-backed Afghan warlord over the killings of hundreds of Taliban prisoners in 2001."