By Declan Leary
This past Sunday, August 29, the United States military conducted an airstrike to eliminate an imminent threat to Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, where the chaotic evacuation of Afghans and Americans was limping into its 21st day. An American drone blew up a vehicle in a residential neighborhood, as well as a good deal of its surroundings—which U.S. Central Command said was due to “substantial and powerful subsequent explosions” suggesting “a large amount of explosive material inside” the target vehicle.
Whatever threat may have existed was eliminated. So were 10 innocent Afghan civilians. Their names were Zemaray, Naseer, Zameer, Faisal, Farzad, Armin, Benyamin, Sumaya, Ayat, and Malika. Seven of them were children between 2 and 10 years old. According to relatives of the two families who spoke to Al Jazeera, none of them had any connection to ISIS-K, whose operatives American authorities claim to have been targeting. As yet, there is no evidence to the contrary—nor any confirmation that any ISIS-K operative was taken out by the strike—save Pentagon assurances that a clear and present danger was thwarted swiftly and cleanly by a heroic U.S. drone. Also according to Al Jazeera’s sources, those killed in the drone strike had just finished packing up their belongings, preparing to be evacuated to the United States. Of 12-year-old Farzad, one neighbor said: “We could only find his legs.”
None of them should be dead right now.
U.S. decision makers were on high alert after a suicide bombing last week at the airport, whose security they had delegated to the newly empowered Taliban. That attack killed at least 182—169 Afghan civilians, and 13 members of the United States military who were supposed to have come home three months ago under the agreement forged by President Trump. Their names were David Espinoza, Nicole Gee, Darin Hoover, Ryan Knauss, Hunter Lopez, Rylee McCollum, Dylan Merola, Kareem Nikoui, Daegan Page, Johanny Rosario Pichardo, Humberto Sanchez, Jared Schmitz, and Max Soviak.
None of them should be dead right now.
Of course, on the grand scale, the conditions for these two mass killings should never have been in place. The U.S. should have left Afghanistan 19 years ago, when most of those Marines, soldier, and Navy corpsman were still in diapers and those Afghan children were not yet born. At the very least we should have left in May, when the safe withdrawal of Americans from the site of our longest misadventure was, finally, supposed to have occurred. There was absolutely no reason, in August of 2021, for the United States of America to be blowing up houses and cars in Kabul, much less for members of the U.S. Armed Forces to be on the ground there, vulnerable to suicide attacks from Islamic militants who would have posed no threat to them had they been (as they ought to have) 7,000 miles away. The mere fact of our presence is damning enough.
But the senselessness of these deaths goes beyond that. Seven children killed in a supposedly precise drone strike that may
Via:: American Conservative

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