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Afghans Blame U.S. Bomb Holocaust on False Intelligence
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| Victim
of U.S. “errant bombing”.
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KABUL, July 6 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – Implicitly pleading guilty of killing civilians, the U.S. general leading the coalition campaign in Afghanistan said Saturday nearly 50 people may have been killed in a bombing raid on a wedding party. Whereas stunned and enraged, residents of the village hit in a deadly U.S. air raid ask why U.S. forces kill sympathetic Afghans on the basis of flimsy intelligence.
Lieutenant-General Dan McNeill said that a more thorough investigation was needed into Sunday's bombing in Uruzgan province as the U.S. investigators were not shown any graves during a fact-finding mission, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).
"I believe there's 48 dead and 117 wounded," McNeill told a joint press conference with Afghan Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. He emphasized that the figures were those of Afghan investigators.
"I believe that a more formal investigation will expose a lot more facts and expose a lot more of what occurred and why it occurred."
The joint Afghan-U.S. fact-finding mission, which returned to Kabul on Saturday, July 6, 2002, was dispatched to Uruzgan province's Dehrawad district to probe the bombing which the U.S. claims was prompted by hostile anti-aircraft guns in the area.
The United States insisted that coalition aircraft attacked six targets near the village where pre-wedding celebrations were held only after they were fired on.
McNeill maintained that American aircraft came under direct fire but conceded that innocent civilians may have been killed.
“There is ample indication of direct fire against aircraft reported both from the ground and the air," the general said, confirming that a B-52 fighter and AC-130 gunship were involved in the incident.
"We have had in the process of this fact-finding some Afghan citizens saying there was fire from the ground although they offered they were celebratory types of fire.
"We do not attack our allies. Indeed, if innocent civilians died, it had to be an accident. It is not our policy to target people."
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| U.S.
Afghan citizens protest civilian deaths in Afghanistan |
McNeil said the inquiry would probably take a few weeks to complete.
But he insisted that there would be no attempt to sweep the matter under the rug.
On Friday, July 5, U.S. President George W Bush telephoned Afghan President Hamid Karzai to express his sympathy for the loss of life in Monday's bombing raids by U.S. warplanes.
Bush spoke to Karzai for about five minutes, describing the death of Afghan civilians as a tragic loss and passing on his sympathies to the families of those who died.
Bush then began a weekend break with his family, leaving officials to pass on the details of the phone call.
The word "apology" was not used in Washington because for now there remain differing accounts of what happened on Monday morning, reported BBC’s online news service.
Meanwhile, grieving residents in the Dehrawad area accused the United States of attacking their villages on the basis of flimsy intelligence.
"All of us in this village have been supporting Hamid Karzai in the process against the Taliban," said farmer Abdul Qadir, 30, in reference to the new Afghan president and the U.S.-led campaign that toppled the Taliban regime last year.
"And we're given this treatment in return: dead bodies," he said in Kakrakai village, AFP reported.
Qadir said his nephew was one of scores killed when U.S. airplanes fired on a home where he was celebrating an approaching wedding with more than 100 guests last week.
"He is buried in the main graveyard. Most of the people buried their kin in that graveyard," he told AFP when asked where his nephew was buried.
Survivors of the air raid, recovering in Kandahar's Mirwais Hospital, said late Thursday that the dead were buried under the rubble of homes demolished in at least three villages. Several patients told of losing members of their family.
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