Another US massacre in Afghanistan
8 November 2008
Abdul Jalil, a cousin of the woman getting married, told AFP: “They surrounded the village. From 2 p.m. until 12 at night they kept the village under fire from helicopters, jet fighters and troops on the ground.”
The village cleric, Mullah Mohammad Asim, claimed that air strikes had targeted six to seven houses, including the complex where the wedding party was taking place. “They pounded and fired into the village from afternoon until midnight,” he said.
The family of the bride, who was wounded in the attack, was decimated. Her father, Roozbeen Khan, said: “I lost two sons, two grandsons, a nephew, my mother and a cousin… My wounded son was in my arms, right here, bleeding. He died last night.” While the groom was not injured, his father, mother and sister were reportedly killed.
Mullah Mohammad Asim described what took place when US ground forces finally entered the village: “At midnight the Americans came and they took the men out of the houses and handcuffed them. But when they saw the death and the destruction, they removed the handcuffs and told us to take the wounded to hospital.”
The slaughter of civilians in Afghanistan has become an almost daily occurrence. Without sufficient troops to control the country and desperate to avoid casualties of their own, US and NATO forces rely heavily on air power to combat the growing Taliban insurgency. Air strikes or helicopter gunship attacks are called in against any suspected insurgent concentration. In scores of cases, the alleged “Taliban” have turned out to be villagers attempting to go about their lives amid a foreign occupation and a resistance war. Wedding parties—which often involve celebratory gun fire into the air—have frequently been wrongly assessed as “insurgent activity”.
(see full article)
