The United States has launched 14,000 ‘surgical’ strikes with its drone program in the last 20 years
In the heat of war everything is dark and confused, except the pain of the victims. In the end, it was not just the Islamic State that wrote the bloody epitaph of the Afghanistan War, but an American drone, which made the final point. With him, the pattern of US imperialism was repeated in the region and the errors that have caused those wars to be lost and, above all, the trust of the peoples to whom they want to bring democracy.
Two days after the brutal attack on the Hamid Karzai airport, which left 183 dead, including 13 US servicemen, the intelligence warned of another imminent car bomb attack. There were hours until the last American plane took off from Afghanistan and the tension was cut by the knife. But the white Toyota Corolla on which the American missile was primed to abort another attack was not the one that the next day would fire rockets at the troops without causing casualties, but the one driven by Zamari Ahmadi, a 40-year-old Afghan engineer who had been working for 13 years. for the Californian NGO Nutrition & Education International. Four days earlier, she had asked the State Department for the evacuation and political asylum of her employees and family members.
His 25-year-old nephew, about to marry, also died with Zaid, who approached the car window when he got home. All the children had come out to greet him. His eldest son, 12, asked him to let him park. Seconds later the drone that had watched him for the past eight hours dropped a high-precision missile on them. Three adults and seven children, the youngest two and three years old, were killed in the blast.
“The Americans say they are members of the Islamic State,” his brother cried in the morgue, surrounded by small charred corpses. “Look at these! Do you think these children were jihadists of the Islamic State? ”
Journalistic investigation
The presence of journalists in Kabul, covering the chaotic end of twenty years of war, allowed the truth to come out. For three weeks the Pentagon insisted that the attack had been “a success” because it prevented another attack. The “secondary explosions” that he claimed to have seen confirmed that the car was “loaded with explosives.” And although he had no evidence of dead civilians, he was not responsible for who might accompany “the terrorists.”
It was an investigation by ‘The New York Times’, with videos of the security cameras that frozen Ahmadi’s last hours, which demonstrated the gross error and opened a space for doubt in the military leadership. This was followed by an unusual act of contrition on the part of Commander General Kenneth McKenzie: “It was a mistake, I offer my sincere apologies,” he settled.
They came with the promise of an “independent” investigation by the air forces. The result was presented two weeks ago by Lieutenant General Sami Said, without sharing the report, which is classified as confidential. The little it revealed yields chilling details about the operation of the drone program, which in the last twenty years have launched more than 14,000 “surgical” strikes on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, leaving more than 2,200 dead (454 of them children). , according to data from the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Almost as many as US soldiers killed in Afghanistan.
Behind the MQ-9 Reaper that followed Ahmadi on his last day of life, also called ‘Predator B’, was a team of “between 5 and 10 people,” Said said. They were coordinated “by chat”, from which it is deduced that they were in different locations and most did not have access to what the cameras of the pilotless plane saw. One of the children can be seen in the videos two minutes before the attack, but his executioners did not notice or at least did not mention it in the chat. “I have not seen any misconduct or criminal negligence,” concluded the investigator. “What I found is that the disconnections were the accumulation of failures in a process in which there were many people involved,” he apologized. According to him, that does not violate the laws of war.
Hours of surveillance
“This is how the ball started rolling,” he explained. “By contrasting intelligence with real-time information, the white Toyota Corolla became a ‘suspicious vehicle’, and over time, such a suspicious vehicle that it reached the target grade.”
Earlier in the day they were just looking for a white Toyota Corolla southwest of the airport. Ahmed’s was a random one, but after eight hours of observing his movements from the stealthy drone, a group of nervous soldiers became convinced that they were betraying an imminent terrorist activity.
He had entered that morning with his car into an “unknown facility” (that of the Californian NGO) located in the same area where the intelligence had detected the preparation of an attack. They saw him pick up a computer “briefcase”, like the one used by the kamikazes in the airport bombing. Later, he visited a Taliban security checkpoint, and they even saw how he put the carafes in the car (loaded with water to take home) with the help of other “accomplices” whom he later left at their homes, with effusive hugs. , before retiring to carry out the attack. They had to stop it before it was too late.
When they saw him park in the alley of his house, they only identified “an adult” leaning on the window and decided that this was the best time to destroy the “target”. It was three kilometers from the airport and although traffic was extremely slow, the rest of the way would pass through more populated areas. With the push of a button, everything was over for him and the children who came to greet him.
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