Kabul drone strike killed 10 civilians in ‘tragic mistake’: US

A drone strike in Kabul last month killed as many as 10 civilians, including seven children, the US military said on Friday, apologizing for what it called a “tragic mistake”.

The Pentagon had said the August 29 strike targeted an Islamic State suicide bomber who posed an imminent threat to US-led troops at the airport as they completed the last stages of their withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Even as reports of civilian casualties emerged, the top US general had described the attack as “righteous”.

The head of US Central Command, Marine Corps General Frank McKenzie, said that at the time he had been confident it averted an imminent threat to the forces at the airport.

“Our investigation now concludes that the strike was a tragic mistake,” McKenzie told reporters.

He said he now believed it unlikely that those killed were members of the local Islamic State affiliate, ISIS-Khorasan, or posed a threat to US troops. The Pentagon was considering reparations, McKenzie said.

The killing of civilians, in a strike carried out by a drone based outside Afghanistan, has raised questions about the future of U.S. counter-terrorism strikes in the country, where intelligence gathering has been all but choked off since last month’s withdrawal.

And the confirmation of civilian deaths provides further fuel to critics of the chaotic US withdrawal and evacuation of Afghan allies, which has generated the biggest crisis yet for the Biden administration.

In a statement, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the drone strike had killed a Ahmadi who worked for a non-profit called Nutrition and Education International.

“We now know that there was no connection between 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,” Austin said in the statement.

“We apologize, and we will endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake.”

While it is rare for senior Pentagon officials, including the defense secretary, to apologize personally for civilians killed in military strikes, the US military does publish reports on civilians killed in operations around the world.

Reports had emerged almost immediately that the drone strike in a neighborhood west of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport had killed civilians including children. Video from the scene showed the wreckage of a car strewn around the courtyard of a building.

A spokesman for Afghanistan’s new Taliban rulers, Zabihullah Mujahid, said at the time that the attack killed seven people, and that the Taliban was investigating.