The Hague — US forces may have committed war crimes in Afghanistan from 2003-04 by torturing prisoners in what appeared to be deliberate policy, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) said on Monday. Unveiling the results of a lengthy initial probe into atrocities in Afghanistan, prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said she would decide "imminently" whether to ask to launch a full-blown investigation — and take the world’s only permanent war crimes court into uncharted territory. She stressed that the Taliban militia and the affiliated Haqqani network, Afghan state forces and US troops as well as the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) all appeared to have carried out war crimes since the Islamic militia was ousted by a US-led invasion in 2001. And she blamed the Taliban and its allies for the deaths of about 17,000 civilians since 2007 to December 2015 in a brutal insurgency with "numerous attacks" on schools, hospitals and mosques. But for the first time, Bensouda...
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