How US “Good Guys” Wiped out an Afghan Family
By Jessica Purkiss and Mateen Arian
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
June 6, 2019
Amina was calling from the Afghan province of Wardak, where she brought up their children while he worked over the border in Iran to support them. She told him that soldiers were raiding their village. Some of them were speaking English. Amina was told to turn off her phone but Masih asked her not to – how would he know they were ok?
The call ended with Masih saying he would call again when things had calmed. But at 9 am, when he dialed his wife’s number, her phone was off. He tried again at 9.30am. Still off. Through the whole of that day and the next, he repeatedly called. But Amina’s phone remained off.
It took another day for him to learn the truth. Relatives avoided his calls or gave vague replies to his questions until finally, his brother broke the news. “He tried to avoid telling me the whole story, but I insisted that he tell me the truth,” Masih recalled in a wavering voice. “He told me to have patience in God – no one is left.”
An airstrike on Masih’s house had killed his wife and all his seven children, alongside four young cousins. His youngest child was just four years old.
In the following weeks, as grief consumed Masih, so did an intense need for answers. Who had killed his family and why?
His journey to find out would last more than eight months, pit him against military and government officials, and see him face obfuscation and denials. It would lead him to work alongside the Bureau and journalists from The New York Times, putting together a puzzle piece by piece. Ultimately it would lead to one definitive conclusion – the US military had dropped the fatal bomb.
His story is one window into the struggles faced by families across Afghanistan every day. Airstrikes are raining down on the country, with US and Afghan operations now killing more civilians than the insurgency for the first time in a decade. But getting confirmation of who has carried out a fatal strike is often impossible. An apology, or any form of public accountability, is even harder to obtain.
The US denied repeatedly that it had bombed Masih’s house, or even that any airstrike in his area had taken place. But using satellite imagery, photos, and open source content, we proved that denial false. Following our investigation, the military has now admitted that it did conduct a strike in that location, but it still denies it resulted in civilian deaths.
A happy life destroyed
“Prior to my house being bombed, I had a normal life. I was married, had four daughters and three sons,” Masih told our reporter in Kabul. “Our life was full of love.”
Masih was the head teacher in a local school run by a Swedish organisation before financial issues forced him to seek employment in construction in Iran in 2014. He still reminisces about his days in the village of Mullah Hafiz, where he split his time between farming, teaching, and his children. “We were so happy,” he says.
Exactly what happened on the day of the strike is not clear. Villagers say that overnight on September 22 2018, bombs were dropped in Mullah Hafiz, which lies in a Taliban-controlled area. The same night, they said, soldiers carried out a raid on the village as part of an operation on a Taliban prison, which was about 200 metres away from Masih’s house. One of the villagers said Taliban fighters had fired on the soldiers from some civilian homes.
A cousin of Masih’s told us he and other male relatives were taken away and detained, alongside some other villagers. At some point the next morning, a strike hit Masih’s house. When his relatives returned, they found the building flattened. In the rubble were the bodies of Amina, the seven children, and their four cousins, they say.
Masih’s children were aged between four and 14 years old; his wife Amina was 32. The cousins, all girls, were aged from 10 to 16.
From Lewrockwell.com, here.