A non-profit news organization and investigative bureau recently confirmed the killing of 11 Afghan children from the same family. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism just published the story, explaining how they came to this conclusion and presenting their procedure. In addition, they also exposed how the US/NATO-led occupational forces denied, lied, and changed their story to cover up this killing. Today the father of the massacred kids, Masih, still has no way of holding anyone accountable or finding justice.
The following is a thread of Tweets by the @TBJI explaining how they proved that the Pentagon killed this family and denied it:
On September 23, 2018, an airstrike on a house in an Afghan village killed 11 children from the same family. The US military denied carrying it out. That denial was false. Here’s how we know…
Masih Mubarez lost his wife, all seven of his children and four young relatives. Determined to find out who had killed his family, he took photos of their destroyed home and weapon fragments at the scene which he passed to our Afghan reporter.
This is one of the pictures Masih took of weapon fragments at the scene of his destroyed house. While most were nondescript, a few pieces had distinctive markings.
On one piece we could see a “CAGE code” – a unique identifier given to companies which supply government or defence agencies. This code linked the fragment to a US company called @woodward_inc, that makes components for a GPS missile guidance kit known as a JDAM.
Weapons experts then reviewed the photos, and saw something else – a distinctive square pattern of bolts that identified it as part of a JDAM. A JDAM is a device that attaches to a bomb to guide it more precisely.
In Afghanistan only two countries are carrying out airstrikes: Afghanistan and the US. But only the American aircraft are capable of using JDAMs. After 4 years of tracking airstrikes in Afghanistan, we were finally able to say for certain who had pushed the button on one.
Over the course of eight months, the US kept changing its story. At first @ResoluteSupport said there were no connections between its actions and allegations of civilian deaths in Mullah Hafiz. Four months later they said no strike had taken place in the district on that day.
But shortly before we were going to publish, the US finally admitted bombing Masih’s home. Five days later, in another statement, they claimed US soldiers had been fired on from inside the house and the strike was carried out in “self-defence”.
The US still denies any civilians were killed in the airstrike. Here is the full list of those who died:
Mohammad Fayaz, age 4
Fahima, age 5
Samina, age 7
Mohammad Ilyas, age 8
Mohammad Wiqad, age 10
Amina, age 10
Safia, age 12
Zarifa, age 12
Anisa, age 14
Nafisa, age 14
Rahmania, age 16
Amina, age 32
Masih still has no way of holding anyone accountable for the killing of his wife and children. “In Afghanistan the killing is non-stop,” he says. “People get killed and justice never gets served”.
This report was originally published in The Peace Report on 3 June 2019. Link: http://thepeacereport.com/us-nato-kill-11-afghan-children/
