DOD Admits Kabul Drone Strike Killed “As Many As 10 Civilians, Including Up To 7 Children”

The Department of Defense has admitted the Kabul drone strike in the final days of the US evacuation killed “As Many As 10 Civilians, Including Up To 7 Children” according to CENTCOM Commander Maj Gen McKenzie.
Washington Post:

The Defense Department, which previously defended the Aug. 29 operation as a “righteous strike,” saying it tracked a white sedan for hours after it left a suspected Islamic State-Khorasan safe house and that officials believed the car was loaded with explosives for an imminent attack. In fact, the driver, Zamarai Ahmadi, was a longtime aid worker for a U.S.-based group and was hauling water cans for his family, according to officials and video obtained by The Washington Post and others.

The chain of missteps ending with the missile strike that killed Ahmadi, seven children and two other adults, came days after a suicide attack at the Kabul airport claimed the lives of at least 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops, inviting a sense of urgency that may have been misplaced. It also highlights flaws in the Biden administration’s strategy for targeting threats that emerge in Afghanistan from long distance, a plan analysts have criticized as being vulnerable to inadequate intelligence and overconfidence among commanders reading ordinary behaviors as evidence of malicious intent.

“Having thoroughly reviewed the findings of the investigation … I am now convinced that as many as 10 civilians, including up to seven children, were tragically killed in that strike,” Marine Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, the head of U.S. Central Command, told reporters Friday. “It is unlikely that the vehicle and those who died were associated with ISIS-K or were a direct threat to U.S. forces.”

The strike bookended the U.S.-led war with what has come to symbolize Western intervention in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa: airstrikes that kill civilians, followed by initial Pentagon denials that it may have made mistakes.

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The acknowledgment comes after three news organizations, including The Washington Post, published investigations of the incident that each cast doubt on the Pentagon’s claims, including whether Ahmadi carried any explosives and whether his actions implied a man who delivered meals to displaced people was secretly moonlighting as a suicidal insurgent.

A key part of evidence presented by The Pentagon — that the Hellfire missile explosion triggered “significant secondary explosions,” indicated the car contained a “substantial amount of explosive material,” according to a statement issued hours after the strike.

But experts, including Castner, combed through videos and photos of the blast site and could not identify any evidence of a large explosion. A physicist who assessed imagery from the site for The Post estimated the explosion’s force of about 22 pounds of explosives at the high end — within the range of a Hellfire missile’s payload.

The described secondary blast, experts said, was likely the result of fuel vapors igniting.

The investigation concurred with that assessment, the defense official said, with the likeliest scenario being a fuel canister near the car that went up in flames. The Pentagon is no longer describing that reaction as an explosion.

But, the official said, there is a remote possibility there were explosives in the car.

“Personally,” the official said, “I don’t think there was.”