Ten family members, including children, dead after US strike in Kabul

Article DoSeptember 12, 2021

477 3 minutes read

Ten members of one family — including seven children — are dead after a US drone strike targeting a vehicle in a residential neighborhood of Kabul, a relative of the dead told CNN.

The US carried out what it called a defensive airstrike in Kabul, targeting a suspected ISIS-K suicide bomber who posed an “imminent” threat to the airport, US Central Command said Sunday.

The Pentagon has said the strike resulted in secondary explosions, and those explosions may have been what killed the civilians.

The youngest victims of Sunday’s airstrike were two 2-year-old girls, according to family members.

Several children were among those killed following a US drone strike in Kabul: Pictured, at top from left: Farzad, age 9, Faisal, age 10, Zemaray, age 40, Zamir, age 20 Bottom, from left: Naseer, age 30, Binyamen, age 3, Armin, age 4, Sumaya, age 2.

Relatives found the remains of one of the girls, Malika, in the rubble near their home on Monday. A family member told CNN that it was unclear whether Malika had been inside the vehicle or in the compound when the strike hit.

They were “an ordinary family,” a brother of the one of those killed said. “We are not ISIS or Daesh and this was a family home — where my brothers lived with their families.”

Relatives of the victims spent Monday at a Kabul hospital identifying remains and separating them into coffins. The 2-year-old girls, Malika and Sumaya, were among the names marked on the coffins.

At a funeral held later in the day, family members shouted “Death to America.”

Army Maj. Gen. William Taylor of the Joint Staff told a press briefing Monday: “We are aware of reports of civilians casualties. We take these reports extremely seriously.”

On Monday, Pentagon spokesman John F. Kirby said the US works hard to avoid civilian casualties. “We’re investigating this. I’m not going to get ahead of it. But if we have significant — verifiable information that we did take innocent life here, then we will be transparent about that, too. Nobody wants to see that happen,” he said.

“But you know what else we didn’t want to see happen. We didn’t want to see happen what we believe to be a very real, a very specific and a very imminent threat to the Hamid Karzai International Airport and to our troops operating at the airport as well as civilians around it and in it and that is another thing that we were very concerned about.”

Neighbors and witnesses at the scene of the drone strike in Kabul told CNN that several people were killed, including children.

“All the neighbors tried to help and brought water to put out the fire and I saw that there were five or six people dead,” a neighbor told CNN. “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.”

Another neighbor told CNN that they estimated that there might have been up to 20 people killed in the strike, “not much is left of their house and nothing can be recognized, they are in pieces.”

Another witness told CNN that after the strike, neighbors and onlookers “removed six dead bodies” and believes that there are “children who are still missing.”

The US military said in their statement on Sunday that “significant secondary explosions from the vehicle indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive material,” and “may have caused additional casualties.”