Like most Afghan civilians killed by U.S. bombs, Sardar Mohammed never knew what hit him.
The impoverished fruit peddler had just left his home on the morning of Oct. 21 to start his rounds through the dusty streets of Kabul when a two-story house next door suddenly exploded. Mohammed, 20, went down hard, a shard of shrapnel lodged in his brain. He never got up.
“He opened his eyes once when we turned him over on the street,” said Hashmatulla, the merchant’s teenage brother, who was injured by falling debris. “He looked at the sky, and then he died.”
The skies over Afghanistan have been dangerous for more than six weeks–the duration thus far of Operation Enduring Freedom, the massive, U.S.-led air campaign designed to punish accused terrorist Osama bin Laden and his Taliban protectors. Just how dangerous has been in dispute, with the Taliban asserting that more than 1,600 civilians have been killed by wayward bombs, and the United States and its allies insisting the death toll is far lower.
Now, with journalists and humanitarian workers gaining access to bombed areas for the first time, a picture is emerging of an aerial campaign remarkable for its pinpoint accuracy–the Taliban claims of carnage almost certainly are exaggerated–but whose innocent victims, while apparently few, offer some of the most heartbreaking stories of the war.
Visits to 12 of the best-known bombing sites in Kabul where U.S. and British pilots are said to have erred, for example, yielded an unofficial death count of 29 civilians, a surprisingly small figure given the scores of rockets, missiles and bombs that fell on military targets nearby.
Children among victims
Still, those killed apparently included children and some of the world’s most wretched refugees. And mere numbers hardly convey the horror of high explosives tumbling silently down from the sky, to explode among houses whose soft mud bricks can be crumbled easily between the fingertips.
“We don’t understand how this happened,” said Mohammed Shakir Pardis, a long-unpaid school teacher whose house was demolished during a daytime air raid on Oct. 17.
Walking through the wreckage of a home he can never afford to rebuild, Pardis pointed out where his pregnant wife, Najiba, had been buried by rubble. They pulled her out alive, but hallucinating.
“The pilot who did this must have had close relatives in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon,” he said. “Maybe he wanted revenge on civilians.”
Once peace comes to Afghanistan, the total civilian toll from errant U.S. bombs will take months or even years to calculate, if it is ever truly known.
Large regions of the country that have been targeted by B-52s and smaller fighter-bombers are remote and remain off-limits to outside observers. And even the most famous mistake, the Oct. 10 bombing of the southern village of Karam, where scores of people are reported to have been buried in their collapsed huts, remains to be confirmed.
Meanwhile, fresh incidents are still surfacing. On Monday, British media said a wayward B-52 strike near the Taliban stronghold of Kunduz may have killed more than 100 civilians.
No independent organization has surveyed collateral bomb damage in Kabul one week after Northern Alliance rebels occupied the city. But a knowledgeable source estimated the total civilian dead could number in the scores.
“The Taliban showed me a list of 49 houses destroyed,” said Dad Mohammed, an office manager with the humanitarian group CARE who stayed in Kabul through the bombing. “That may be exaggerated.”
What can’t be exaggerated is the pathos of Kabul’s dead, or the numbing terror and crazy luck of its survivors.
The U.S. bomb or missile that cut down street vendor Mohammed in the gritty Khair Khana neighborhood also wiped out a family of eight, killing an old man, three women and four children, local residents said. The attacking aircraft apparently was aiming for the Taliban’s 315th Division military base about one-half mile away.
`My son is gone’
“Who should I blame? Everything that comes is the will of God,” said Gul Makai, Mohammed’s mother and one of Afghanistan’s countless war widows. “All I know is that my son is gone, and I don’t feel like a human being anymore.”
A dazed, haggard woman who didn’t bother to veil herself as most Afghan women do, she described a pattern of increasingly erratic U.S. strikes that was repeated by many of Kabul’s bombing victims:
For the first week after the Oct. 7 launch of Operation Enduring Freedom, the coalition air raids seemed to be accurate, elating many Afghans who chafed under the Taliban’s puritanical rule. But then the misses began, sending shudders of fear across the city.
“It was when the Taliban began hiding among the civilians,” said Ghlam Dastaghir, 46, a wakir, or traditional elder, living in a sprawling apartment complex hit on Oct. 17 by a U.S. bomb that gouged a 20-foot-wide crater near his doorstep. “I think the Americans were running out of easy targets.”
The blast at the complex killed a 6-year-old girl named Nadella, said Dastaghir. Her mother has become catatonic. She has refused to speak for weeks.
At least two other heavy bombs, dropped at the same mid-morning hour on the same day, exploded nearby, suggesting a mistake by a single plane. One bomb punched a swimming pool-size hole in a street, forcing cars to drive around it. Another, more deadly, pulverized mud houses about a mile away in the Cement Khana neighborhood. Five refugees who had moved there days earlier to escape front-line fighting perished.
The dead, four women and a man, were too destitute to attend a wedding party being held several hundred yards away, neighbors said. Their poverty doomed them.
“If we had all been home there would have been a massacre,” said Jamal Nasir, looking out over where his house once had stood, now a flat, empty lot some 40 yards across blasted out of the middle of a warren of mud-walled compounds and narrow alleys.
The power of the U.S. ordnance unleashed in and around Kabul was surprising, especially given the proximity of civilians to some of the targets.
A U.S. television crew that rented a house in downtown Kabul on Tuesday discovered an unexploded, 500-pound Mark-8 bomb embedded in one of the locked rooms. They quickly vacated the premises.
On the south side of the city, residents showed reporters the craters of even larger bombs on a hillside only 60 yards from houses and a busy road. The bombs appear to have been aimed at a hilltop anti-aircraft emplacement. One of the unexploded bombs stuck out of the hill, a long, sinister tube thicker than a 55-gallon drum.
The massive steel tip of another warhead had bounced or been blown hundreds of yards away. Afghan children were carving TNT out of its innards and lighting the explosive crumbs on fire for amusement.
Amazingly, only one civilian had been killed in that Oct. 15 attack. A 12-year-old boy, Abdul Sabor, was crippled by the shrapnel.
“It is clear the U.S. didn’t deliberately target civilians, but its intelligence was flawed,” said Peter Bouckaert, a researcher with Human Rights Watch who just completed a fact-finding mission in the region to investigate the scale of the civilian damage.
Regret for losses
“If it is important for the government not to have a hostile population,” Bouckaert said, “then it needs to supply some public explanations and apologies.”
A spokesman for the coalition’s information service in Islamabad, Pakistan, acknowledged that “a small number of bombs had gone astray.” But he insisted that every measure had been taken to minimize civilian casualties in the air assaults on Afghanistan.
“We have expressed our regret for any loss of life or property,” he said, asking not to be identified. On the issue of compensation, he said no relief funds are planned.
“I assume these cases will be addressed with a vigorous reconstruction program in Afghanistan once the Taliban are gone,” he said.
At the moment, most of the victims in Kabul are asking for nothing of the sort.
As pieces of high-tech American bombs add to a 20-year-old layer of war detritus that litters this half-destroyed city, most Afghans are talking about only one form of payback.
“We don’t hate the Americans for doing this,” said schoolteacher Pardis, who lost his home to the bombing. “I would destroy my own house again if it brought peace. That’s the thing we all want here.”
