Pentagon: Drone strike ‘tragic mistake’
The Pentagon admitted Friday that the drone strike that killed 10 Afghans in the final days of the evacuation from Kabul was a deadly error committed on civilians, not terrorists.
“The strike was a tragic mistake,” Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, told a Pentagon news conference. “I offer my profound condolences to the family and friends of those who were killed.”
McKenzie apologized for the error and said the United States is considering making reparation payments to the family of the victims.
“I am now convinced that as many as 10 civilians, including up to seven children, were tragically killed in that strike,” McKenzie said. “Moreover, we now assess that it is unlikely that the vehicle and those who died were associated with ISIS-K, or a direct threat to U.S. forces.”
The decision to strike a white Toyota Corolla sedan, after having tracked it for about eight hours, was made in an “earnest belief” — based on a standard of “reasonable certainty” — that it posed an imminent threat to American forces at Kabul airport. The car was believed to have been carrying explosives in its trunk, he said.
An investigation revealed that the car that American intelligence believed was an explosives-packed vehicle bomb was actually a sedan driven by an aid worker and filled with cases of water bottles.
The victims were mostly members of the
aid worker’s family and had no known connection to any terror groups.
The admission and apology marked a dramatic reversal from the Pentagon’s original story about the deadly Aug. 28 drone strike.
Officials at the time claimed it had airtight intelligence that the target of the missile strike was an ISIS-K terrorist and was planning to use the car bomb to attack U.S. troops and civilians at Kabul’s international airport.
News organizations later raised doubts about that version of events, reporting that the driver of the targeted vehicle was a longtime employee at an American humanitarian organization and citing an absence of evidence to support the Pentagon’s assertion that the vehicle contained explosives.
The strike took place at a time of extreme tension a day after 13 U.S. service members and scores of civilians were killed by a suicide bomb attack at an airport entrance.