A United States military investigation into a deadly Kabul drone strike on a vehicle in August has found it killed 10 civilians and the driver and that the vehicle targeted was likely not a threat associated with ISIS-K, announced Gen. Frank McKenzie, the top general of US Central Command, at the Pentagon on Friday.
McKenzie told reporters that the strike – which he said killed seven children – was a “mistake” and offered an apology.
“This strike was taken in the earnest belief that it would prevent an imminent threat to our forces and the evacuees at the airport, but it was a mistake and I offer my sincere apology,” he said.
McKenzie added that he is “fully responsible for this strike and this tragic outcome.”
The Pentagon’s announcement will likely fuel more criticism of the Biden administration’s chaotic evacuation of Kabul and handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan more broadly. While McKenzie stressed Friday that future strikes will likely be held to a higher standard, confirmation of the civilian death toll also provides insight into the obstacles ahead for military and intelligence officials tasked with fulfilling President Joe Biden’s promise to make the terror group “pay” for its deadly suicide attack in Kabul.
The Pentagon had maintained that at least one ISIS-K facilitator and three civilians were killed in what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley had previously called a “righteous strike” on the compound on August 29. The investigation released Friday found that all of those killed in the residential compound were civilians.
In the lead up to the strike, drone operators surveilled the courtyard for up to 4 to 5 minutes. In that time, a male driver left the vehicle. One child was parking the vehicle and other children were present in the car and the courtyard – as CNN had been told by the Ahmadi family.
The military based the strike on a reasonable certainty standard to launch the strike on the vehicle. Tragically, it was the wrong vehicle, a US military official familiar with the investigation told CNN earlier Friday, adding that reasonable certainty is not 100% certainty.
“We didn’t take the strike because we thought we were wrong – we took the strike because we thought we had a good target,” McKenzie said. While he acknowledged that the strike “was a terrible mistake,” he said he would “not qualify the entire operation” as a failure.
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McKenzie added that he is “fully responsible for this strike and this tragic outcome.”
Okay so he’s going to be put on trial for 10 counts of murder at a war crimes tribunal then? And since his confession is a matter of public record it should be a simple trial. Yeah? Because that’s what happens to people who are responsible for the deliberate killing of 10 civilians in an occupied territory. Or are those just words, an incantation to make the media forget about this until next time?
Journalists with spines would ask this.
how many other drone strikes are like this, but we don’t know because we only had video proof for this one?
