WASHINGTON – The U.S. military admitted on Friday that a U.S. drone strike in late August in Kabul of Afghanistan killed as many as 10 civilians, including 7 children, Xinhua news agency reported.
“Having thoroughly reviewed the findings of the investigation and the supporting analysis by interagency partners, I am now convinced that as many as 10 civilians, including up to seven children, were tragically killed in that strike,” Kenneth McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, told reporters during a Pentagon press briefing.
“We now assess that it is unlikely that the vehicle and those who died were associated with Daesh-Khorasan, or were a direct threat to U.S. forces,” he added.
The general admitted the deadly strike was “a tragic mistake.” “As the combatant commander, I am fully responsible for this strike and this tragic outcome.”
The U.S. Central Command said on Aug. 29 that it launched a drone strike on a vehicle in Kabul, which it claimed had eliminated an “imminent” threat, posed by Daesh-Khorasan, an Afghanistan-based offshoot of the Islamic State, to the Hamid Karzai International Airport, where evacuations of U.S. service members and personnel were underway.
Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, had called it a “righteous strike” with procedures correctly followed.
Media reports later emerged that the U.S. military might have hit a wrong target in the strike with civilian casualties.
Separate investigations by The New York Times and The Washington Post identified the vehicle driver as Zemarai Ahmadi, a 43-year-old electrical engineer working for Nutrition and Education International, a U.S. aid group based in Pasadena, California.
“We now know that there was no connection between Mr. Ahmadi and Daesh-Khorasan,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said in a statement on Friday. “His activities on that day were completely harmless and not at all related to the imminent threat we believed we faced, and that Mr. Ahmadi was just as innocent a victim as were the others tragically killed.”
“We apologise, and we will endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake,” he added.
The Pentagon chief also noted he had asked a further review of the investigation just completed by U.S. Central Command to determine whether “accountability measures” need to be taken and strike authorities and procedures to be changed in the future.
