To reconstruct Ahmadi’s movements on Aug. The military had given lower-level commanders the authority to order airstrikes earlier in the evacuation, and they were bracing for what they feared was another imminent attack. troops and more than 170 Afghan civilians died in an Islamic State suicide attack at the airport. Only three days before Ahmadi was killed, 13 U.S. On most days, he drove one of the company’s white Toyota corollas, taking his colleagues to and from work and distributing the NGO’s food to Afghans displaced by the war. “NEI established a total of 11 soybean processing plants in Afghanistan.” It’s a California based NGO that fights malnutrition. For 14 years, he had worked for the Kabul office of Nutrition and Education International. Zemari Ahmadi was an electrical engineer by training. Using never-before seen security camera footage of Ahmadi, interviews with his family, co-workers and witnesses, we will piece together for the first time his movements in the hours before he was killed. And it’s possible that what the military saw Ahmadi loading into his car were water canisters he was bringing home to his family - not explosives. What was interpreted as the suspicious moves of a terrorist may have just been an average day in his life. Soon after, his Toyota was hit with a 20-pound Hellfire missile. “The procedures were correctly followed, and it was a righteous strike.” What the military apparently didn’t know was that Ahmadi was a longtime aid worker, who colleagues and family members said spent the hours before he died running office errands, and ended his day by pulling up to his house. troops guarding the evacuation at the Kabul airport. The Pentagon claimed that Ahmadi was a facilitator for the Islamic State, and that his car was packed with explosives, posing an imminent threat to U.S. It was parked in the courtyard of a home, and the explosion killed 10 people, including 43-year-old Zemari Ahmadi and seven children, according to his family. In one of the final acts of its 20-year war in Afghanistan, the United States fired a missile from a drone at a car in Kabul. 29 drone strike in Kabul that killed 10 civilians, including an aid worker and seven children. military admitted to a tragic mistake in an Aug. Drone Strike Killed the Wrong Person A week after a New York Times visual investigation, the U.S. Christopher Donahue, the ground force commander, and Rear Adm. An officer then shared that information with two top commanders in Afghanistan, Maj. Two to three hours after the attack, analysts who had reviewed the footage frame by frame assessed that three children had been killed. Within 20 minutes, multiple military officials and members of the strike team learned that analysts had seen possible civilian casualties in video feeds, according to their sworn statements for the investigation. 29, 2021, an American MQ-9 Reaper drone shot a Hellfire missile at a white Toyota Corolla in a neighborhood near the Kabul airport. Responding to a description of the document released to The Times, Hina Shamsi, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer representing families of victims, said the investigation “makes clear that military personnel saw what they wanted to see and not reality, which was an Afghan aid worker going about his daily life.” The Attack The Pentagon previously acknowledged that the strike was a “tragic mistake” that killed 10 civilians, and told The Times that a new action plan intended to protect civilians drew on lessons learned from the incident.Īmong those killed was Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime aid worker and the driver of the car. The investigation was completed a week and a half after the strike and was never released, but The New York Times has obtained 66 partially redacted pages of it through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against Central Command.Ĭentral Command declined to provide additional comment beyond statements it had previously made about the strike. Military analysts wrongly concluded, for example, that a package loaded into the car contained explosives because of its “careful handling and size,” and that the driver’s “erratic route” was evidence that he was trying to evade surveillance. The documents also provide detailed examples of how assumptions and biases led to the deadly blunder. Central Command investigation obtained by The New York Times show that military analysts reported within minutes of the strike that civilians may have been killed, and within three hours had assessed that at least three children were killed.
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