Ten family members, including children, dead after US strike in Kabul
(CNN)Ten members of one family -- including seven children -- are dead after a US drone strike targeting a vehicle in a residential neighborhood of Kabul, a relative of the dead told CNN.
The US carried out what it called a defensive airstrike
in Kabul, targeting a suspected ISIS-K suicide bomber who posed an
"imminent" threat to the airport, US Central Command said Sunday.
The Pentagon has said the strike resulted in secondary explosions, and those explosions may have been what killed the civilians.
The youngest victims of Sunday's airstrike were two 2-year-old girls, according to family members.
Several children were among those killed following a US drone strike in Kabul:
Pictured, at top from left: Farzad, age 9, Faisal, age 10, Zemaray, age 40, Zamir, age 20
Bottom, from left: Naseer, age 30, Binyamen, age 3, Armin, age 4, Sumaya, age 2.
Relatives
found the remains of one of the girls, Malika, in the rubble near their
home on Monday. A family member told CNN that it was unclear whether
Malika had been inside the vehicle or in the compound when the strike
hit.
They
were "an ordinary family," a brother of the one of those killed said.
"We are not ISIS or Daesh and this was a family home -- where my
brothers lived with their families."
Relatives
of the victims spent Monday at a Kabul hospital identifying remains and
separating them into coffins. The 2-year-old girls, Malika and Sumaya,
were among the names marked on the coffins.
At a funeral held later in the day, family members shouted "Death to America."
Army
Maj. Gen. William Taylor of the Joint Staff told a press briefing
Monday: "We are aware of reports of civilians casualties. We take these
reports extremely seriously."
On
Monday, Pentagon spokesman John F. Kirby said the US works hard to
avoid civilian casualties. "We're investigating this. I'm not going to
get ahead of it. But if we have significant -- verifiable information
that we did take innocent life here, then we will be transparent about
that, too. Nobody wants to see that happen," he said.
"But
you know what else we didn't want to see happen. We didn't want to see
happen what we believe to be a very real, a very specific and a very
imminent threat to the Hamid Karzai International Airport and to our
troops operating at the airport as well as civilians around it and in it
and that is another thing that we were very concerned about."
Neighbors and witnesses at the scene of the drone strike in Kabul told CNN that several people were killed, including children.
"All
the neighbors tried to help and brought water to put out the fire and I
saw that there were five or six people dead," a neighbor told CNN. "The
father of the family and another young boy and there were two children.
They were dead. They were in pieces. There were [also] two wounded."
Another
neighbor told CNN that they estimated that there might have been up to
20 people killed in the strike, "not much is left of their house and
nothing can be recognized, they are in pieces."
Another
witness told CNN that after the strike, neighbors and onlookers
"removed six dead bodies" and believes that there are "children who are
still missing."
The
US military said in their statement on Sunday that "significant
secondary explosions from the vehicle indicated the presence of a
substantial amount of explosive material," and "may have caused
additional casualties."
"We
would be deeply saddened by any potential loss of innocent life," Capt.
Bill Urban, spokesman for US Central Command, said in a statement.
US
forces have been racing to complete their evacuation operation before
Tuesday's deadline and under the threat of a new terror attack on Hamid
Karzai International Airport in Kabul. A suicide bombing outside the
airport gates on Thursday killed 13 US service members and at least 170 others.
Sunday's
drone strike on a vehicle is the second by US forces targeting the
ISIS-K terror group in the space of three days. A US official confirmed
the location of the strike as being in Kabul's Khaje Bughra
neighborhood.
"US
military forces conducted a self-defense unmanned over-the-horizon
airstrike today on a vehicle in Kabul, eliminating an imminent ISIS-K
threat to Hamid Karzai International Airport," the CENTCOM statement
read.
The
Taliban, which is now in control of Afghanistan, condemned the strike
later Sunday, saying the US had violated the country's sovereignty.
Bilal
Kareemi, a Taliban spokesperson, told CNN that it was "not right to
conduct operations on others' soil" and that the US should have informed
the Taliban. "Whenever the US conducts such operations, we condemn
them," he said.
How the strike happened
The
vehicle that was targeted by the US in Sunday's airstrike on Kabul was
next to a building and contained one suicide bomber, a US official told
CNN.
It remains unclear if the vehicle was intended to be a car bomb, or if the suicide bomber was using it for transport.
"It was loaded up and ready to go," the official tells CNN.
A
Pentagon official told CNN that according to initial reports, the
target was a vehicle believed to be containing multiple suicide bombers.
The threat could also have been a car bomb or someone with a suicide
vest, he said, citing initial reports.
One
man told a journalist working with CNN who visited the compound that "a
rocket hit and six people were in there who have been killed. There was
a car inside." The journalist was not allowed to enter the compound.
Another man said that he heard the sound of a rocket and gained access to the scene from a neighbor's house.
"First we managed to remove a 3- to 4-year old child. The fire and smoke had engulfed the whole area," he said.
He
added that "three people were inside the car" and three others were
outside the car. The injured, who included children, were taken to the
hospital, he said.
Smoke rises after an explosion in Kabul, Afghanistan on Sunday.
US
President Joe Biden said Saturday that military commanders had advised
that "another terrorist attack on Kabul's airport was "highly likely in
the next 24-36 hours," and the US Embassy in Kabul warned all US
citizens to leave the airport area immediately.
Approximately
1,200 people were evacuated from the capital in the last 24 hours,
almost entirely on US military flights, according to the White House on
Monday. That figure is down from a high point last week when 21,000
people were evacuated in a 24-hour period.
It
brings the total to approximately 116,700 people evacuated from
Afghanistan since August 14, and 122,300 people since late July.
Biden traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on
Sunday to mourn with the families of the 13 US service members killed
in Thursday's attack as their bodies were brought back to US soil.
US
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said in a statement that the 13 would
be remembered as heroes. "These men and women made the ultimate
sacrifice so that others could live," he said.
ISIS
in Khorasan, known as ISIS-K, has claimed that an ISIS militant carried
out the suicide attack, but provided no evidence to support the claim.
US officials have said the group was likely behind the bombing.
On
Saturday, the Pentagon said two "high profile" ISIS targets had been
killed and another injured in a US drone strike late Friday in
Jalalabad, in Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province, in a retaliatory
strike for Thursday's attack.
This story has been updated with additional information from the Pentagon about the airstrike.
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