Shereena Qazi / Al Jazeera & Emran Feroz / Al Jazeera – 2016-04-11 21:02:50
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/04/families-afghans-killed-drone-raids-seek-probe-160409165810832.html
Families of Afghans Killed in US Drone Raids Seek Probe
Relatives and tribal elders deny US and Afghan officials’ claims the air strikes hit Taliban-associated fighters
Shereena Qazi / Al Jazeera
(April 9, 2016) — Relatives and tribal elders in southeastern Afghanistan are demanding an investigation into the killing of 17 people by US drones this week, claiming that the air strikes hit civilians, not members of armed groups.
US army officials said on Thursday that two air strikes in Paktika province, near the Pakistani border, had only targeted fighters, without any evidence of civilian casualties.
Afghan officials confirmed to Al Jazeera that 17 people had been killed in Wednesday’s strikes in Gomal district, but added they all had links to the Taliban. Yet, local leaders and relatives insisted on Saturday that all of those killed were innocent civilians.
“We demand an investigation into the brutal killings of these innocent people,” Nimatullah Baburi, a deputy of the Paktika provincial council, told Al Jazeera. “I know them personally and their families too. They are in no way affiliated with the Taliban,” he added. “Those men were doing low-paid jobs to feed their families. All of them were civilians”.
Bahadur Noorullah Khan, a clerk working in the district office, was one of the 17 people killed in the raids. He left behind a wife and two children.
“Who is going to feed them?” Khan’s wife asked. “Bahadur was the sole breadwinner of our family, now where am I going to go with my children?” He was innocent. He was never involved with militants. This case should be investigated.”
Another man killed in the air strikes was 37-year-old Hussain, who like many Afghans goes by one name. “This man got married a year ago,” his friend Mohammed Hassan told Al Jazeera. “Innocent people die every day in our country. No one asks about them … These drone strikes have taken lives of innocent people since the beginning of time.”
However, Aminullah Shariq, the governor of Paktika province, told Al Jazeera on Saturday only Taliban-affiliated people were killed in the attack.
“We’ve been in touch with the Americans and after all the investigations and inquiries, we’ve come to the conclusion that all people killed in the strike were linked to the Taliban,” he said. “We will continue to support the US in their operation as both of us have the same aim: to defeat the militants.”
His comments came after Brigadier General Charles Cleveland, spokesman for the US military in Afghanistan, said in a statement on Thursday: “We can confirm that the US conducted two counterterrorism strikes in Paktika on Wednesday afternoon. “There was no evidence to indicate that there were any civilian casualties at all.”
‘Nameless and Faceless’
Emran Feroz, an activist and founder of Drone Memorial, a website documenting civilian drone-strike victims, said Afghan officials are not doing enough to protect civilians.
“The new government of [President] Ashraf Ghani doesn’t even criticise the attacks,” Feroz told Al Jazeera. “We witness that the Afghan police and army say that the victims were Taliban, or al-Qaeda militants. It’s not clear why they insist on this but it’s always the same scenario after drone strikes, which is why most of the civilian victims of the strikes remain nameless and faceless.”
The US has intensified drone operations in the country since Islamic States of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known ISIS) loyalists started appearing in Afghanistan.
According to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Afghanistan is the “most drone-bombed country in the world” with at least 1,368 people killed since 2015.
Most Kiilled by US Drones Were Not Targeted: Report
The US assassination program increasingly relies on drone strikes based on flimsy evidence, secret documents claim
Al Jazeera
(October 16, 2015) — A cache of secret military documents about the US military’s assassination programme in Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen show the extent to which US President Barack Obama has employed drone strikes and what it calls “target killings”.
Provided by an unnamed “whistle-blower”, the documents were published by the online publication The Intercept on Thursday as an eight-part investigation called “The Drone Papers.” In one five-month period, according to the documents, 90 percent of those killed by drone strikes in the three countries were not the intended targets.
The Drone Papers also detail the decision-making process that leads to drone strikes, which are ultimately signed off on by the president.
“From his first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obama’s weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his administration has deemed — through secretive processes, without indictment or trial — worthy of execution,” Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept wrote in the one segment.
One of the papers — a document circulated by the Pentagon’s Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance unit in 2013 — suggests that the US often carries drone strikes based on thin evidence.
“This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong,” the unnamed source told The Intercept.
“Baseball cards” refer to detailed profiles of potential targets. According to the document, President Obama took an average of 58 days to approve drone strikes, allotting another 60 days for them to be carried out.
The leaked documents were not provided by Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistle-blower who released information about the agency’s mass surveillance of civilians.
Asked about The Intercept‘s report, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest said on Thursday that Obama has been “as transparent as possible” about counterterrorism operations.
“And the fact is, all those counterterrorism operations go to great lengths to limit civilian casualties,” Earnest said. “The United States certainly goes as far as any other government in factoring in the need to prevent civilian casualties when carrying out counterterrorism operations.
“That certainly stands in pretty stark contrast to organisations like the Taliban that explicitly carry out operations against innocent civilians as part of a coordinated strategy to foment violence and unrest.”
Portrait of an Afghan Drone Victim
Who are the often-nameless victims of drone strikes in Afghanistan?
Emran Feroz / Al Jazeera
(March 9, 2016) — The food stand was completely destroyed. So, too, was the body of its owner, 21-year-old Sadiq Rahim Jan. “My brother was torn to pieces. Almost nothing was left of him,” says Islam Rahim Jan. It was July 2012 and his death plunged his family into despair and poverty.
Sadiq was the family’s main breadwinner. His income as the owner of the only food stand in the village of Gardda Zarrai, in the eastern Afghan province of Paktia, provided for his parents and four siblings.
Nobody knows why he was targeted in a drone strike. But since 2001, US drone attacks have become a near regular feature of life — and cause of death — in Afghanistan, particularly in the country’s south and east.
According to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Afghanistan is the “most drone-bombed country in the world”. Between 2001 and 2013, at least 1,670 drone strikes took place in the country. But accurate data about the impact of those strikes, particularly casualty figures, does not exist. There are a number of reasons for this.
On the one hand, the media seems to largely ignore drone warfare and its victims. On the other, there is little political will for transparency, be it in Washington or Kabul. In 2013, a United Nations report on drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen pointed out that the “clandestine nature of US drone strikes hinders evaluation of their impact on civilians”.
So the names and stories of many of the victims remain unknown to all but their families. Compounding this invisibility is the fact that the limited media coverage is often inaccurate.
When Sadiq was killed, several national media outlets reported that a “Taliban commander” had been killed by a drone strike in Gardda Zarrai.
“It’s really hard to pin down in these sorts of cases whether this is deliberate misinformation by someone with a malicious motive, or if it’s an honest mistake,” says Jack Serle of the bureau, who has spent years studying drone strikes.
“In my experience, police and army officials and provincial government officials are generally the main journalistic sources for this kind of information. But it is not often clear where they get their information [from],” says Serle. “In the past, these kinds of people have told me they get intelligence from the NDS, the Afghan intelligence service, who gets it from the US. But that’s not always going to be the case.”
Sadiq’s family say they were outraged when Radio Azadi, an Afghan branch of the US government’s external broadcast services, and other national news platforms connected their son to a group with which they say he had no affiliation. In fact, they say, Sadiq had never been involved with any armed group.
But in the days and weeks after Sadiq was killed, they say, not a single journalist visited their village to collect facts or talk to the people who knew him. The family turned to the local police and army. But, although they expressed their regret over Sadiq’s death, they told his family not to take any further action.
“In fact, they just want to silence my family because such war crimes show the Afghan government and the United States in a bad light,” says Farhad Khan, Sadiq’s cousin who lives in Germany and now tries to provide financial support to the family. Until today, Sadiq’s family have not received any explanation as to why their son was killed or why he was subsequently classified as a member of the Taliban.
“He welcomed me like a brother [when I would visit Afghanistan],” Farhad remembers, adding that they became best friends. “The whole village, from young to old, respected and loved Sadiq. He was a charming and charismatic person who believed in peace, love and freedom,” Farhad says. “For that reason, it feels so wrong for all these people that he is just remembered as a terrorist by the rest of the world.”
Photographing the Victims
It was cases like Sadiq’s — the nameless, faceless drone victims described as members of the Taliban with no supporting evidence — that made Noor Behram, a photojournalist from North Waziristan, the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, set out to explore the scenes of drone strikes.
“I started with my investigation in 2007, when it was reported that an aerial attack killed al-Qaeda-linked militants,” Behram says. “But I found torn women’s clothing, which was evidence that civilians were killed too.”
From that time on, he has visited the site of drone strikes as soon after an attack as possible. Travelling on a motorbike, he photographs the scene and victims and speaks to witnesses.
He noticed that all that seemed to be required for the Pakistani and international media to describe a male victim as a member of the Taliban was that he had long hair and a beard — a common look among many Pashtun men on either side of the border.
“After conversations with editors and journalists, I understood that if a drone strike killed an innocent adult male civilian, such as a fruit seller or food vendor, the victim’s long hair and beard would be enough to stereotype him as a militant.”
Sadiq had long hair and a beard. But even that isn’t always a requirement.
A Four-year-old Victim
In April 2013, Naqibullah took his son, four-year-old Amir, to the city of Asadabad, in the eastern province of Kunar, for medical treatment. Naqibullah told his brother, 25-year-old Abdul Wahid, to take his son back to their village while he stayed in the city.
When he telephoned home to find out if they had returned safely, he was told they had not. “Locals told me that my brother and my son had been killed by a drone strike,” Naqibullah remembers. “I couldn’t bear the news. I lost all sense in this moment,” he says. “Suddenly, all the pictures of my son and my brother came to my mind while my tears could not stop.”
According to Naqibullah, government officials insisted that his son and brother were Taliban fighters. They said the onus was on him to prove otherwise. Today, Naqibullah cares for Abdul Wahid’s children. He says one of them, Hilal, is always asking about this father.
Unreported
According to a recent report by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), more than 11,000 civilians were killed or wounded in the country in 2015.
While armed groups and the Afghan military are thought to have been responsible for 98 percent of these incidences, 2 percent of civilian casualties were attributed to international forces, mainly in the form of air strikes.
However, the report points out that civilian casualties caused by international military forces and the Afghan air force increased by 83 percent in 2015, causing 296 civilian casualties, of which 149 were deaths. Fifty-seven percent of those were caused by international forces. According to UNAMA, the main reason for the increase was the attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz on October 3.
The US government data does not distinguish between classic aerial attacks and drone strikes. For that reason, it isn’t clear how many drone strikes really took place in Afghanistan. B
ut with three different sources required to confirm a single casualty, the families of many of those killed say their relatives have not even made it into that count. “You will not find my cousin and other victims like him in these reports,” says Sadiq’s cousin, Farhad.
Critics of the UN report say that without journalists or human rights activists present in the country’s most war-torn areas, killings often go unreported and unsubstantiated, never making it into formal records.
“Most war-torn areas of Afghanistan, especially where drone strikes take place regularly, are not visited by journalists or activists. They are considered as too dangerous, as dead zones,” says Waheed Mozhdah, a political analyst based in Kabul. Besides, records of civilian casualties only begin from 2009, eight years after the war started.
In fact, the very first recorded incident of a strike by a weaponised drone took place on October 7, 2001, when US forces targeted the late Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar in Kandahar. Omar was not killed on that day — but many ordinary civilians, just like Sadiq, have been in the years since.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
