Shattered hamlet mourns children

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/12/08/1070732141588.html

Villagers in Ghazni, southern Afghanistan, are asking why a US air strike killed nine of their children but missed its target, writes Carlotta Gall from Pitawi.

Their embroidered caps, shredded with shrapnel, lay beside a half-dozen small rubber galoshes and caked pools of blood.

Seven boys and two girls died in a village on Saturday morning in a US air strike, and their bodies were still lying in the dust when US soldiers arrived by helicopter to assess the attack three hours later, villagers and US soldiers at the scene said on Sunday.

A 25-year-old Afghan man was also killed, the villagers said, while the intended target, a Taliban suspect called Mullah Wazir, who lived here and bragged about attacking foreign aid workers, may have got away, contrary to official accounts that he, too, was among the dead. Villagers said the suspect and his family, whose house was unscathed, had not been seen for weeks.

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The use of deadly force was ordered by the commander-in-chief. The Smirk thinks he now has the authority to summarily kill "enemies of the state" whenever he wants. So in his haste to play God, the little dictator murders eight innocent people. Where's the outrage in the Press? Where's the outrage on DU?

and criminal.

1. The A-10 flys low. Real low. It's designed as a close ground support combat aircraft. Unlike the most of the military jets in the US arsenal, the pilots can see who they're shooting at. Question: How early did they go in,i.e., were they using night vision equipment? If so, they they went in knowing that they could never, even remotely, identify the "target".

2. "US A-10 attack jets, firing rockets and machine-guns". The A-10 does not have a "machine-gun". It is equipped with a GAU-8/A 30mm Gatling gun which fires depleted Uranium shells specifically designed to destroy heavy military equipment such as tanks. This is incorrect: "uncle of the two girls...was cut down beside them." A person hit by one of these shells would be "splattered", not "cut down".

3. "The rockets made 30 to 40 small craters around where the children had died." Even "small" rockets, 6.99mm Hydra-70s, pack a huge punch, and have a 25-50m kill radius. It sounds more like the A-10s hosed the area with 30mm cannon fire instead of firing rockets; I'd have expected more damage, otherwise.

4. If the mission was to "hit" a single lone male villager, why did the US military send in jets and not a squad of infantry? Even with excellent ground visiblity during a sunlit morning attack A-10 jet pilots would not be able to positively identify the "target", nor would they have the weaponry to single out the culprit even if they had made a positive ID. Using an GAU-8/A 30mm in a village is like swatting flies with a shotgun.

I can only surmise that this was a punitive mission meant to "send a message" to the peoples of the area, and as usual the innocent paid the price.



--on edit--
ah khant spehl