Several children killed in US drone strike on IS in Afghanistan: Reports
US navy Captain Bill Urban, a military
spokesperson, said the strike was carried out in “self-defence” and that
the military was investigating whether there were civilian casualties
but that “we have no indications at this time.”
Several Afghans, including children, were killed in a drone strike in
Afghanistan's Kabul on Sunday that the US said killed an Islamic State
suicide car bomber suspected of preparing to attack the airport in the
capital city, according to reports. CNN reported citing relatives and a
local journalist that nine members of one family, including six
children, were killed in the strike targeting a vehicle in a residential
neighbourhood of Kabul. The youngest child was a two-year-old girl, the
brother of one of the dead told a local journalist working with CNN.
"All
the neighbours tried to help and brought water to put out the fire and I
saw that there were five or six people dead. 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,” Ahad, who said he was a
neighbour of the family, told CNN.
The Associated Press reported citing an unnamed official in Afghanistan that three children were killed in the drone strike on Sunday.
Also watch | Afghan children killed in US drone strike? | Rocket attack bid at Kabul airport
After the CNN report, the United States said it is investigating
whether civilians may have been killed in the airstrike and that it
would be “deeply saddened by any potential loss of innocent life". "We
are aware of reports of civilian casualties following our strike on a
vehicle in Kabul today. We are still assessing the results of this
strike, which we know disrupted an imminent ISIS-K threat to the
airport,” Captain Bill Urban, a Central Command (CENTCOM) spokesperson,
said in a statement.
He was using an acronym for the Afghanistan
branch of the Islamic State group, which carried out a suicide attack at
the airport on Thursday.
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.
Samia Ahmadi, whose father and fiancé died in the blast, said the U.S. mistakenly targeted her father’s car.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
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.
Image
Mr.
Ahmadi’s mangled car in the courtyard of their home in Kabul on Monday.
U.S. officials say they struck an ISIS-K vehicle. His family says it
was the car he used to deliver food to refugee camps. Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
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.
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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