Afghan Family Says Errant U.S. Missile Killed 10, Including 7 Children
Relatives, friends and colleagues of Zemari Ahmadi angrily dismissed any suggestion he had ties to ISIS-K. The U.S. military is investigating.
Matthieu Aikins and
KABUL — Zemari Ahmadi was coming home Sunday evening, having dropped off colleagues from the local office of an American aid group where he worked, relatives and colleagues said in interviews Monday.
As he pulled into the narrow street where he lived with his three brothers and their families, many of their children, seeing his white Toyota Corolla, rushed out to greet him, family members said. Some clambered onto the car in the street, one jumped in while others gathered in the narrow courtyard of the compound as he pulled in.
It was then, friends and family say, that the vehicle was hit with a missile which they believe was fired by an American drone, blowing out doors and windows in the courtyard, spraying shrapnel, and killing 10 people, seven of them children.
Mr. Ahmadi’s daughter, Samia Ahmadi, 21, was in a room adjoining the courtyard when she was struck by the blast wave. “At first I thought it was the Taliban,” she said.
The Times could not independently verify whether an American missile strike killed Mr. Ahmadi and the others. Nor was it clear whether Mr. Ahmadi’s car was the Americans’ actual target.
The Pentagon acknowledged the possibility that Afghan civilians had been killed in the drone strike, but suggested that any civilian deaths had resulted from the detonation of explosives in the vehicle that was targeted.
“We’re not in a position to dispute it,” John F. Kirby, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said Monday about reports of civilian casualties. He repeated earlier Pentagon statements that the military was investigating a strike on a vehicle two miles from Hamid Karzai International Airport. But it was unclear whether this was the same as the incident involving Mr. Ahmadi’s vehicle.
In a news conference on Monday in Washington, Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, did not address the circumstances surrounding the drone strike except to say that it dealt ISIS Khorasan a crushing blow when the group was hoping to deliver one last attack before the U.S. withdrawal.
The giant American airlift that carried tens of thousands of Afghans to safety came to an end on Monday, the Pentagon announced, but left tens of thousands more behind. And as the last planes departed, taking the last American troops with them, the American military presence in Afghanistan vanished after 20 harrowing years.
The attack on Sunday was carried out in a tense atmosphere, following the suicide bombing at the airport that killed at least 170 civilians and 13 U.S. service members.
With the Biden administration coming under withering criticism for its planning and execution of the evacuation of tens of thousands of American citizens and Afghans, the pressure to avoid a second attack was intense. The U.S. military said Saturday that it had killed the planner of that bombing in a different drone strike on Friday night.
Family members who witnessed the explosion said that Mr. Ahmadi and several of the children were killed inside his car; others were fatally wounded in rooms alongside the courtyard. The family’s SUV, parked next to the Corolla in the tight confines of the courtyard, was set on fire, while smoke filled the house.
Ms. Ahmadi, the driver’s daughter, staggered outside, choking, and saw the dismembered bodies of her siblings and relatives. “I saw the whole scene,” she said.
An Afghan health official confirmed that local hospitals received several bodies transferred by ambulance from the house, including those of three children. Later on Monday afternoon, a funeral was held in Kabul with the victims’ 10 coffins, several of them closed because the bodies were so disfigured.
Among the victims was her cousin and fiancé, Ahmad Naser, 30, a former army officer and contractor with the U.S. military who had come from Herat, in western Afghanistan, in hopes of being evacuated from Kabul.
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