[R-G] Afghans riot over air-strike atrocity

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/afghans-riot-over-airstrike-atrocity-1681070.html

Afghans riot over air-strike atrocity

Witnesses say deaths of 147 people in three villages came after a  
sustained bombardment by American aircraft. Patrick Cockburn, in  
Herat, reports

Friday, 8 May 2009

Shouting "Death to America" and "Death to the Government", thousands  
of Afghan villagers hurled stones at police yesterday as they vented  
their fury at American air strikes that local officials claim killed  
147 civilians.

The riot started when people from three villages struck by US bombers  
in the early hours of Tuesday, brought 15 newly-discovered bodies in a  
truck to the house of the provincial governor. As the crowd pressed  
forward in Farah, police opened fire, wounding four protesters.  
Traders in the rest of Farah city, the capital of the province of the  
same name where the bombing took place, closed their shops, vowing  
they would not reopen them until there is an investigation.

A local official Abdul Basir Khan said yesterday that he had collected  
the names of 147 people who had died, making it the worst such  
incident since the US intervened in Afghanistan started in 2001. A  
phone call from the governor of Farah province, Rohul Amin, in which  
he said that 130 people had died, was played over the loudspeaker in  
the Afghan parliament in Kabul, sparking demands for more control over  
US operations.

The protest in Farah City is the latest sign of a strong Afghan  
reaction against US air attacks in which explosions inflict massive  
damage on mud-brick houses that provide little protection against bomb  
blasts. A claim by American officials, which was repeated by the US  
Defence Secretary Robert Gates yesterday in Kabul, that the Taliban  
might have killed people with grenades because they did not pay an  
opium tax is not supported by any eyewitnesses and is disproved by  
pictures of deep bomb craters, one of which is filled with water. Mr  
Gates expressed regret for the incident but did not go so far as to  
accept blame.

The US admits that it did conduct an air strike at the time and place,  
but it is becoming clear, going by the account of survivors, that the  
air raid was not a brief attack by several aircraft acting on mistaken  
intelligence, but a sustained bombardment in which three villages were  
pounded to pieces. Farouq Faizy, an Afghan radio reporter who was one  
of the first to reach the district of Bala Baluk, says villagers told  
him that bombs suddenly, "began to fall at 8pm on Monday and went on  
until 10pm though some believe there were still bombs falling later".  
A prolonged bombing attack would explain why there are so many dead,  
but only 14 wounded received at Farah City hospital.

The attack was on three villages – Gerani, Gangabad and Koujaha – just  
off the main road. It is a poppy growing area of poor farmers and  
there were several fields of poppies near the villages. The Taliban  
are traditionally strong here and the police and soldiers waiting  
around the villages were said by eyewitnesses to be frightened. This  
would explain why Afghan army commanders might have been eager to call  
for US airstrikes, though they would have needed the agreement of  
American special operations officers.

Provincial officials, including the governor Rohul Amin, say that in  
the lead-up to the bombing there was heavy fighting between hundreds  
of Taliban and the Afghan Army and police. Going by Mr Faizy's account  
there had been, "a fight some seven or eight kilometres from the three  
villages in which two Afghan Army and a US Humvee were destroyed. A  
third Afghan Army vehicle was captured." Three police were killed and  
four wounded, as was one American and one Afghan army soldier. This  
was hardly a major military engagement, but the pro-government forces  
seem to have got the worst of it and their burned out vehicles still  
stand in the road.

The loss of life in Afghanistan from air strikes is often worse than  
in Iraq where houses are more modern and usually have basements. In  
the villages in Farah, people were living in compounds with mud brick  
walls which crumbled easily. Pictures of the aftermath of the attack  
show people standing beside the remains of a relative which often only  
looks like a muddy pile of torn meat. One elderly white bearded man,  
said by neighbours to have lost 30 members of his family, squats  
despairingly beside a body that has been torn into shreds. Among the  
few wounded to stay alive is a child with a badly burned face.

One reason why US bombing inflicts such heavy civilian casualties in  
Afghanistan and Iraq is that both are very poor countries in which  
houses are very crowded. When the US used air strikes and heavy  
artillery with little restraint in the siege of Fallujah in 2004 it  
caused serious loss of life. Wedding parties in both countries have  
often been mistaken for "terrorist" gatherings and bombed.

In Afghanistan opinion polls show that support for the Taliban and for  
armed attacks on foreign forces rises sharply after events like the  
bombing in Farah. President Hamid Karzai frequently criticises the US  
military for wantonly inflicting civilian casualties, attacks which  
his opponents say is an opportunistic effort to burnish his  
nationalist credentials.

The Taliban increasingly use tactics developed by insurgents in Iraq,  
notably suicide bombing on a mass scale and IEDs, or mines in the road  
detonated by a control wires or electronically. In Helmand province  
yesterday a suicide bomber killed 12 civilians in an attack on a  
foreign military convoy near the bazaar of the town of Gereshk. No  
foreign troops were killed by the explosion, though two were wounded.