Afghan says apology for airstrike falls short
U.S. is urged to punish those at fault
KABUL, Afghanistan — A survivor of an errant U.S. drone strike that killed 10 members of his family demanded Saturday that those responsible be punished and said Washington’s apology was not enough.
The family also seeks financial compensation and relocation to the U.S. or another country deemed safe, said Emal Ahmadi, whose 3-year-old daughter Malika was among those killed in the Aug. 29 strike.
On that day, a U.S. Hellfire missile struck the car that Ahmadi’s brother Zemerai had just pulled into the driveway of the family compound as children ran to greet him. In all, 10 civilians, including seven children, were killed in the strike.
Images on Afghan television and social media showed some relatives holding up photos of the lost children to reporters, including of a child as young as 2. Another image showed several of the somber-faced relatives seated on the dusty, rocky hillside where the family members were buried.
On Friday, U.S. Marine
Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, called the strike a “tragic mistake” and said innocent civilians were indeed killed.
The U.S. military initially defended the strike, saying it had targeted an Islamic State “facilitator” and disrupted the militants’ ability to carry out attacks during the chaotic final stage of the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan late last month.
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the attack “righteous” and insisted there had been secondary explosions, implying that explosives had been in the vehicle.
Discrepancies between the military’s portrayal of the strike and findings on the ground quickly emerged. The Associated Press and other news organizations reported that the driver of the targeted vehicle was a longtime employee at a U.S. humanitarian organization who helped provide basic food items to impoverished Afghans. There were no signs of a large secondary blast, despite the Pentagon’s assertion that the vehicle contained explosives.
“We now know that there was no connection between Mr. Ahmadi and ISIS-Khorasan, that his activities on that day were completely harmless and not at all related to the imminent threat we believed we faced, and that Ahmadi was just as innocent a victim as were the others tragically killed,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement.
The drone strike followed a suicide bombing by the Islamic State — a rival of the Taliban — that killed 169 Afghans and 13 U.S. military personnel at one of the gates to the Kabul airport in late August. At that time, large numbers of Afghans, desperate to flee the Taliban, had crowded the airport gates in hopes of getting on evacuation flights.
On social media, Afghans expressed anger and frustration, but little surprise, at the Pentagon’s mistake, and they demanded compensation for the family.
McKenzie apologized for the error and said the U.S. is considering making reparation payments to the family of the victims.
Emal Ahmadi said Saturday that he wants the U.S. to investigate who fired the drone and punish those responsible.
“That is not enough for us to say sorry,” said Ahmadi, who heard of the U.S. apology from friends in America. “The USA should find the person who did this.”
Ahmadi said he was relieved that an apology was offered and that the family members he lost were recognized as innocent victims, but that this won’t bring them back. He said he was frustrated that the family never received a call from U.S. officials, despite repeated requests.
ACCOUNTS CONTRADICTED
In the days before the Pentagon’s apology, accounts from the family, documents from colleagues that were seen by the AP, and the scene at the family home — where Zemerai Ahmadi’s car was struck by the missile — all contradicted the accounts by the U.S. military.
Instead, they painted the picture of a family of people who had worked for Americans and were trying to gain visas to the U.S., fearing for their lives under the Taliban.
Zemerai Ahmadi was the family’s breadwinner and had looked after his three brothers, including Emal, and their children. Far from being an enemy of the United States, Ahmadi was hoping to emigrate there.
“Now I am the one who is responsible for all my family, and I am jobless,” said Emal Ahmadi. The situation “is not good,” Ahmadi said of life under the Taliban.
The aid organization that Zemerai Ahmadi worked for over the past 15 years, Nutrition and Education International, or NEI, was based in Pasadena, Calif. It was founded by a nutrition scientist who had observed firsthand the malnutrition in Afghanistan’s Balkh province while lecturing there in 2003, according to the organization’s website. He started the nonprofit to encourage Afghan farmers to grow soybeans.
The organization helped establish processing facilities — Ahmadi worked on setting up 11 of them — so the beans could be made ready for cooking. Staff members then distributed the harvest to needy families.
On its website, the organization has a tribute to Ahmadi noting that “Zemari was well respected by his colleagues and compassionate towards the poor and needy.”
International aid groups and the United Nations have warned of a looming humanitarian crisis that could drive most Afghans below the poverty level.
McKenzie said 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 the Kabul airport. The car was believed to have been carrying explosives in its trunk, he said.
But Emal Ahmadi wondered how the family’s home could have been mistaken for an Islamic State hideout.
“The USA can see from everywhere,” he said of U.S. drone capabilities. “They can see that there were innocent children near the car and in the car. Whoever did this should be punished.”
“It isn’t right,” he added. Over the past 20 years, the U.S. has repeatedly targeted the wrong people in its effort to go after terrorists. While it has killed many who were connected in one way or another to organizations that threatened the U.S., there is a well-documented record of strikes that killed innocent people from almost the very first months of its presence in Afghanistan, starting in December 2001 and ending with the death of Zemerai Ahmadi and members of his family.
In the years in between, the U.S. killed dozens of civilians at a wedding and more than 100 civilians, many of them children, in Farah province in 2009. In 2016, the military mistakenly bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz province, killing 42 doctors, patients and medical staff members.
TALIBAN RESTRICTIONS
Also in Afghanistan, the nation’s new Taliban rulers set up a “Ministry for Preaching and Guidance and the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” in the building that once housed the Women’s Affairs Ministry.
Staff members of the World Bank’s $100 million Women’s Economic Empowerment and Rural Development Program, which was operated out of the Women’s Affairs Ministry, were forcibly escorted off the grounds, said program member Sharif Akhtar, who was among those being removed.
It was the latest sign that the Taliban are restricting women’s rights as they settle into government, just a month after they overran the capital, Kabul. During their previous rule of Afghanistan in the 1990s, the Taliban had denied girls and women the right to education and barred them from public life.
Mabouba Suraj, who leads the Afghan Women’s Network, said she was astounded by the flurry of orders released by the Taliban-run government to restrict women and girls.
On Friday, the Taliban-run Education Ministry called boys from grades six to 12 back to school, starting on Saturday, along with their male teachers. There was no mention of girls in those grades returning to school. Previously, the Taliban’s minister of higher education had said girls would be given equal access to education, albeit in gender-segregated settings.
“It is becoming really, really troublesome. … Is this the stage where the girls are going to be forgotten?” Suraj said. “I know they don’t believe in giving explanations, but explanations are very important.”
Statements from the Taliban leadership often reflect a willingness to engage with the world and talk of open public spaces for women and girls and of protecting Afghanistan’s minority groups. But orders to the group’s rank and file on the ground are contradictory. Instead of what was promised, restrictions, particularly on women, have been implemented.
Suraj speculated that the contradictory statements perhaps reflect divisions within the Taliban as they seek to consolidate their power, with the more pragmatic within the movement losing out to hard-liners among them, at least for now.
UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay on Saturday added her voice to the growing concern over the Taliban’s limitations on girls after only boys were told to go back to school.
“Should this ban be maintained, it would constitute an important violation of the fundamental right to education for girls and women,” Azoulay said in a statement upon her arrival in New York for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly.
FATAL BLASTS
Separately, three explosions targeted Taliban vehicles in the eastern provincial capital of Jalalabad on Saturday, killing three people and wounding 20, witnesses said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Islamic State militants based in the area are enemies of the Taliban.
Also on Saturday, an international flight by Pakistan’s national carrier left Kabul’s airport with 322 passengers on board and a flight by Iran’s Mahan Air departed with 187 passengers on board, an airport official said.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the media, said the two international flights departed in the morning. The identities and nationalities of those on board were not immediately known.
The flights were the latest to depart Kabul in the past week as technical teams from Qatar and Turkey have worked to get the airport up to standard for international commercial aircraft.
A Qatar Airways flight on Friday took more Americans out of Afghanistan, the third such airlift by the Mideast carrier since the Taliban takeover and the frantic U.S. troop pullout from the country last month. The State Department said Saturday that there were 28 U.S. citizens and seven permanent residents on the flight from Kabul, and it thanked Qatari authorities for their help.
NATO MEETING
Milley, the Joint Chiefs chairman, is meeting in Greece with NATO counterparts this weekend, hoping to forge more basing, intelligence-sharing and other agreements to prevent terrorist organizations from regrouping and threatening America and the region.
He said the meeting of NATO defense chiefs will focus in part on the way ahead now that all alliance troops have pulled out of Afghanistan and the Taliban are in control.
Milley, Austin and American intelligence officials have warned that al-Qaida or the Islamic State could regenerate in Afghanistan and pose a threat to the U.S. in one to two years.
The U.S. military has said it can conduct counterterrorism surveillance and, if necessary, strikes in Afghanistan from “over the horizon” — meaning from assets based in other countries. But they have made it clear that surveillance flights from bases in the Persian Gulf are long and provide limited time in the air over Afghanistan. So they have talked about seeking basing agreements, overflight rights and increased intelligence-sharing with nations closer to Afghanistan, including some neighbors.
In recent months, however, U.S. officials have reported little progress in any negotiations on basing agreements.
Milley said he will be talking to his military counterparts “to see what the possibilities are and then bring them back” to U.S. defense and diplomatic leaders for additional discussions. Then, he said, officials will see what they can turn into a reality.
“We are going to talk about over-the-horizon capabilities, and where allies think appropriate that they can make a contribution, we’re certainly open to that,” Milley told reporters traveling with him to Greece. “There are opportunities where alliance members may choose to work closely with us on these overthe-horizon capabilities.”
Also in Afghanistan, the nation’s new Taliban rulers set up a “Ministry for Preaching and Guidance and the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” in the building that once housed the Women’s Affairs Ministry.