WASHINGTON — Newly declassified surveillance footage provides additional details about the final minutes and aftermath of a botched drone strike in Kabul in August, when the American military mistakenly killed 10 innocent people — including seven children — in a tragic blunder that punctuated the end of the 20-year war in Afghanistan.The disclosure of the videos is the first time any footage from the strike has been seen publicly. They encompass about 25 minutes of silent video from two drones — a military official said both were MQ-9 Reapers — showing the minutes before, during and after the strike.While the videos will continue to be scrutinized for any new details about how the episode unfolded, they show the dangers of making hair-trigger, life-or-death decisions based on imagery that can be fuzzy, hard to interpret in real time and prone to confirmation bias. The risk of error was further heightened by striking in a densely populated neighborhood.In this case, the military was operating under extreme pressure to head off another attack on troops and civilians in the middle of the chaotic withdrawal. It has said it believed it was tracking an ISIS-K terrorist who might imminently detonate a bomb near the Kabul airport. Three days earlier, a suicide bombing at the airport had killed at least 182 people, including 13 American troops.The New York Times obtained the footage of the Aug. 29 strike through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against United States Central Command, which oversaw military operations in Afghanistan. The disclosure — a rare step by the U.S. military in the case of an airstrike that causes civilian casualties — is likely to add fuel to a debate about the rules for drone warfare and protections for civilians.The videos — one of which is in grainy imagery apparently from a camera designed to detect heat — show a car arriving at and backing into a courtyard on a residential street. Blurry figures are moving around the courtyard, and children are walking on the street outside the walls in the moments before a fireball from a Hellfire missile engulfs the interior. Neighbors can then be seen desperately dumping water onto the courtyard from rooftops.Video{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","@id":"https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000008165897/drone-strike-kabul.html","description":"A second drone captured high-resolution footage of the strike on Aug. 29, 2021 from another angle. The U.S. military mistakenly killed the Afghan aid worker Zemari Ahmadi and nine of his family members with a Hellfire missile.","url":"https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000008165897/drone-strike-kabul.html","name":"High-Resolution Drone Video Shows Closer Angle of Kabul Strike","thumbnailUrl":["https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/02/18/us/politics/clip-2/clip-2-videoSixteenByNine1050.jpg","https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/02/18/us/politics/clip-2/clip-2-superJumbo.jpg","https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/02/18/us/politics/clip-2/clip-2-square640.jpg"],"embedUrl":"https://www.nytimes.com/video/players/offsite/index.html?videoId=100000008165897","uploadDate":"2022-01-19T18:09:18.000Z","duration":"PT4M0.974S"}
A second drone captured high-resolution footage of the strike on Aug. 29, 2021 from another angle. The U.S. military mistakenly killed the Afghan aid worker Zemari Ahmadi and nine of his family members with a Hellfire missile.CreditCredit...Department of DefenseThe scenes unfolding on the video are murky in some respects, although in retrospect it is clear that what evidence they provided was misinterpreted by those who decided to fire.American operators on Aug. 29 had been tracking the driver of a white Toyota Corolla for about eight hours before targeting him in the mistaken belief that he was an ISIS-K member moving bombs. But the man was instead Zemari Ahmadi, a worker employed by Nutrition and Education International, a California-based aid organization.A Pentagon official in November described blurry images of at least one child about two minutes before the missile was launched, but said that recognizing the presence of a child in the blast zone was obvious only with hindsight understanding and “the luxury of time.”The footage from one of the drones briefly shows what appears to be a blurry shorter figure in white next to a taller figure in black inside the courtyard as the car is backing in, about two and a half minutes before the explosion. Shuddering on the other drone’s footage, about 21 seconds before the explosion, suggests that might be the time when it launched a missileBy: Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, Azmat Khan, Evan Hill and Christoph Koettl
Title: Newly Declassified Video Shows U.S. Killing of 10 Civilians in Drone Strike
Sourced From: www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/us/politics/afghanistan-drone-strike-video.html
Published Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2022 18:18:36 +0000
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