International
The innocent victims of this war
By Hasan Suroor
LONDON, DEC. 9. Breathless claims about the success of the Afghan war have been clouded by reports of seething anger over the loss of civilian lives in U.S. bombing - an anger compounded by what the victims regard as ``insensitive'' American reaction to their grief.
It is being called the ``untold story'' of the war whose victims, it is believed, had nothing to do with the Taliban or Osama bin Laden. And many of them were far removed from the conflict zone when B52s came raining down on their villages, wiping out their entire families in some cases. A Sunday Times reporter, who visited one such village after a U.S. official claimed that what had been bombed was a ``military target,'' said: ``After a bumpy two-and-a-half hour drive on a rough dirt road, I found nothing in the ruins of Kama Ado that could conceivably link it, or its impoverished inhabitants to Al- Qaeda or terrorism.''
Kama Ado, where more than 100 people are reported to have been killed in U.S. bombing, has been described in the British media as Afghanistan's ``My Lai''. The entire village, located miles away from Osama's suspected hideout, was destroyed in U.S. attacks killing villagers even as they were eating their early morning meal before the start of the Ramzan fast. Among those killed, according to reports, was a baby girl, born the previous day. ``The death toll at Kama Ado was perhaps the highest inflicted in a single bombing raid since the American campaign started on October 7. Yet the military's reaction to questions about it is that nothing unintentional happened,'' wrote a British journalist after visiting the village. Villagers said they were still bewildered why they were targeted. ``I cannot understand why they would do such a terrible thing to us,'' wondered a man who lost several members of his family, including his parents and an infant son. It was a farming village with none of the ``concrete structures'' that a U.S. army spokesman claimed were the real target.
``There was nothing military in the village except for three rocket-propelled grenades in the remains of one home,'' said Mr. Jon Swain of The Sunday Times, pointing out that this was not uncommon in Afghanistan as after years of war, almost every village had one or two such weapons to protect it in the absence of a police force. The report confirmed the shocking story of Kama Ado, first exposed by The Independent. Once a sleepy farming village, it has now turned into a huge cemetery dotted with freshly dug graves. ``We put as many as four to five bodies in each grave, but most were just body parts scooped up,'' one bereaved farmer told visiting journalists.
Two other villages which shared Kama Ado's fate, though not on the same scale, are Balut and Akal which together accounted for 50 civilian deaths, according to one report. Local Northern Alliance commanders are said to be angry that volunteers sent by them to fight the Taliban have ended up dead in ``accidental'' American bombing instead. There is anger that far from being contrite Americans actually justify their mistakes. ``They are using old maps, they are shooting at the villages. This is a war, but they must take care about these things,'' Haji Mohammed Zaman, a U.S.-backed Alliance commander told a British newspaper after losing his men to ``accidental'' U.S. attacks.
British officials have repeatedly cautioned against accepting the Taliban claims on face value, but commentators pointed out that the stories coming out from Kama Ado and other villages are from independent British sources. ``These are not Taliban claims, but eyewitness accounts of people who have actually suffered,'' one commentator said. He pointed out that while the exact figure of the dead might be disputed, the fact that these villages were not in the conflict zone remained undisputed. There were calls for pressure to bring on Washington to acknowledge that mistakes had occurred, and to stop ``insulting'' the victims with suggestions that they were lying.
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