US admits lethal blunders
Village is wiped out as 2,000lb of Allied explosives
miss Taliban target
Jason Burke in Peshawar
Sunday October 14, 2001
The Observer
observer.co.uk
Serious blunders by American warplanes may have killed at
least 100 civilians in Afghanistan, according to eye-witness
accounts obtained by The Observer .
Two US jets, they said, had bombed a village in eastern
Afghanistan, killing more than 100 people. And the Pentagon
yesterday admitted that a 2,000lb bomb missed its Taliban
military target at Kabul airport on Friday night, and apparently
struck a residential area.
The Taliban claim US and British military strikes have killed 300
or more civilians, including four workers who died earlier last
week when an errant cruise missile was believed to have hit a
building used by the United Nations for mine-clearing operations.
Until now Western politicians have been quick to dismiss the
claims as propaganda. Britain's International Development
Secretary, Clare Short, said 'there had not been so many civilian
casualties'. Now apparent confirmation of serious casualties
among non-combatants is beginning to emerge.
If the evidence is accurate, an attack on Karam village, 18 miles
west of Jalalabad, last Thursday was the most lethal blunder yet
by the Allied forces, and will seriously shake the increasingly
fragile coalition built by President Bush and Tony Blair.
Reports of between 50 and 150 deaths there provoked rage and
grief throughout Afghanistan and throughout the Muslim world.
Yesterday - as air strikes continued after a pause for Friday, the
Muslim holy day - the Taliban rejected Bush's offer of a 'second
chance' to hand over Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect for
the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington.
The supreme leader of Afghanistan's Taliban militia ruled out
handing over Bin Laden and appealed again to Muslims
everywhere to help defend his country, the Afghan Islamic Press
reported Saturday. 'We have not agreed with America to hand
over anyone,' Mullah Mohamed Omar said in a statement issued
in Kandahar. 'The only sin we have committed is we have
enforced Islamic laws in our country and we have provided peace
to the oppressed. But ordinary Muslims are being targeted.'
If confirmed, the destruction of Karam will harden support in
Afghanistan behind the Taliban. Previously it was hoped that
moderates within the movement, or wavering individual
commanders, could be split off from hardliners and persuaded to
defect.
'Any civilian casualties make the Afghan people, and therefore
the Taliban, look like victims,' said one Peshawar-based Afghan
military commander.
There were no reports yesterday of armed demonstrations
against Americans in Jalalabad, previously a city where support
for the Taliban was thin.
Aiman Malai, a shopkeeper in the eastern Afghan village of
Milka Khel, told The Observer that he was finishing his morning
prayers at 3.45am on Thursday when he saw two jets
approaching Karam from the north 'like two black darts shooting
through the air'.
From his hilltop village, Malai watched the two jets swoop low
over Karam, three miles away across a valley.
'They came low over it and then there was a huge explosion and
flames reaching high into the air. There was more explosive in
these bombs than the ones the Russians used.'
Lal Jand, 30, a farmer who was in Karam, said the planes
circled for two more attacks on the village. Jand, whose hand
was wounded, telephoned his uncle, Haji Awal Khan Nasr, later
after going to hospital for treatment. His wife and two of his sons
had been killed.
'My nephew told me the planes came in the first time and only a
few people were injured. Many of the men outside were able to
run away, but the planes came back two more times. All the
women and children were still in the houses. They had no
chance. I believe maybe more than 100 have died,' Nasr said
yesterday.
Nasr listed the men he knew had died. The oldest man in the
village, 60-year-old Haji Ghami, perished along with all but his
youngest son, Surgul, who was away, Nasr said.
'The Americans are educated people. They can see that these
are not terrorists.Why do they target them?'
On Friday, villagers 'were still digging bodies out of the rubble',
said Zadra Azam, the region's deputy governor. The village, its
population swollen by refugees, had been thought safe by many
local people. |
