Pits with what appear to be bodies of people slaughtered last November in a campaign of ethnic cleansing have been found in Bamiyan, just a few miles from the rubble of two giant Buddhist statues dynamited by the Islamist regime.
The graves were discovered on Friday near an airstrip which has been used by aid agencies and the American military. The site was sealed off to allow the UN to gather evidence.
The team, which included a human rights adviser and a police adviser, was accompanied by a representative from Afghanistan's interior ministry. It is the UN's first potential war crimes investigation in Afghanistan since the Taliban fell last December.
Bamiyan was home to an ethnic minority, the Hazaras, which endured bloody pogroms at the hands of a mostly Sunni regime which considered their form of Shi'ite Islam apostasy. Hazara leaders claim the Taliban massacred 15,000 of their people during sweeps through northern and central Afghanistan.
When the Guardian visited Bamiyan last December Hazaras hiding in the mountains said Taliban fighters, reinforced by Arabs, went on a rampage after the US started bombing in October.
After the soldiers departed in November survivors trickled back down the valley to find homes burned and dozens of people missing. Some hoped they had been taken south as Taliban prisoners but most feared the worst.
"We do not yet know the number of bodies or exactly when they were buried. These graves were unknown until now," said Manoel de Almeida e Silva, a UN spokesman.
"Representatives of the Hazara community in Bamiyan believe that the graves contain bodies of members of their community killed approximately one month before the fall of the Taliban."
Forensic teams would be summoned if suspicions of a war crime were confirmed, he added. Bamiyan is 80 miles north-west of Kabul, an eight-hour drive through mountains.
Hazaras, said to be descended from Genghis Khan's Mongol warriors, form around 10% of the population and were backed by Iran against the ethnic Pashtun Taliban.
Hazara fighters killed thousands of Taliban fighters and prisoners in the north in 1997. When Hazara strongholds fell the following year the regime massacred entire communities in revenge.
Meanwhile in Kabul yesterday, exactly six months after the US started bombing, civilian victims of the campaign gathered at the US embassy to request compensation for injuries, deaths and damaged property.
Some limping, some blinded, they presented 400 claims for compensation in the hope of emulating those in Grenada, Panama and Iran who extracted money from Washington after being harmed by the US military.
The San Francisco-based human rights group Global Exchange organised the petition after surveying bomb sites and counselling survivors. Each family was seeking $10,000, said Marla Ruzicka, a spokeswoman.
Sixteen members of the Jamakan family were killed near Kunduz on November 18, leaving only Amina, eight, and her father alive. "He is not well in the head, he has trouble sleeping," she said. They needed money to rebuild the home, she added.
In a nearby village shrapnel broke all the toes in Dad Mohammad's left foot and blinded his son, Abdul Rashid, nine. His foot still in bandages, Mr Mohammad, 45, said foreign medical treatment might help Abdul to see more than just dim lights.
A US congresswoman visiting Kabul last week, Dana Rohrabacher, promised to lobby Washington for compensation but Ms Ruzicka said the embassy was rebuffing the initiative.
Gul Ahmad, 50, said nothing at all because since a missile exploded in his home he has lost the power of speech. His mouth twisted, he proffered a note from an aid agency congratulating him on attending a counselling workshop.
