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'US Central Command still assessing deadly drone strike in Kabul'
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IANS | 14 Sep, 2021
The US Central Command is "still assessing" the results of the deadly
August 29 drone strike in Kabul which was alleged to have killed
multiple Afghan civilians, the Pentagon said.
"I would say that
the assessment by the Central Command is ongoing, and I'm not going to
get ahead of that," Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday citing
Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby as saying to reporters here.
Kirby's
remarks were in response to a question over media investigations that
suggested the US military might have mistaken an aid worker for a
suicide bomber in the drone strike during its military withdrawal from
Afghanistan.
Kirby defended the assault, saying that it was "taken to prevent an imminent attack".
He
added that Central Command has so far had no plans to put investigators
on the ground, but promised that the Pentagon will be "as transparent
about the outcomes as we can".
The US Central Command said on
August 29 that it launched a drone strike on a vehicle in Kabul, which
it claimed had eliminated an "imminent" threat, posed by IS-K, an
Afghanistan-based offshoot of the Islamic State terror group, to the
Hamad Karzai International Airport, where evacuations of US service
members and personnel were underway.
"We are confident we successfully hit the target," the Central Command had said in a statement following the srone strike.
"Significant secondary explosions from the vehicle indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive material."
Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, had called it a "righteous strike" with procedures correctly followed.
But
separate investigations by The New York Times and The Washington Post
have identified the vehicle driver as Zemarai Ahmadi, a 43-year-old
electrical engineer working for Nutrition and Education International, a
US aid group based in Pasadena, California.
Their analyses have also called into question the Central Command's allegation of "secondary explosions" from the vehicle.
An
examination of the scene of the strike "found no evidence of a second,
more powerful explosion", with experts pointing to the lack of collapsed
walls or destroyed vegetation, according to the Times.
While the
US military has so far acknowledged that there might have been three
civilian casualties, Ahmadi's relatives said 10 members of their family,
including seven children, were killed in the drone strike.
The
Central Command announced on August 30 that it had completed the pullout
of US troops from Afghanistan, ending 20 years of military presence in
the country, after botched evacuations that drew fierce criticism from
both home and abroad.
The US had announced its "War on Terror"
and invaded Afghanistan in 2001, soon after militants associated with
the Al Qaeda hijacked passenger planes and carried out suicide attacks
against America, killing almost 3,000 people.
Over the years,
Washington has expanded warfare into several other countries, relying
heavily on drone strikes for targeted killings.
US drone and airstrikes have killed at least 22,000 civilians over the past two decades, according to watchdog Airwars.
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