[R-G] Villagers in Afghanistan Describe Chaos of U.S. Strikes

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/students/pop/articles/15farah.html

Villagers in Afghanistan Describe Chaos of U.S. Strikes
  	
By CARLOTTA GALL and TAIMOOR SHAH

FARAH, Afghanistan — The number of civilians killed by the American  
airstrikes in Farah Province last week may never be fully known. But  
villagers, including two girls recovering from burn wounds, described  
devastation that officials and human rights workers are calling the  
worst episode of civilian casualties in eight years of war in  
Afghanistan.

“We were very nervous and afraid and my mother said, ‘Come quickly, we  
will go somewhere and we will be safe,’ ” said Tillah, 12, recounting  
from a hospital bed how women and children fled the bombing by taking  
refuge in a large compound, which was then hit.

The bombs were so powerful that people were ripped to shreds.  
Survivors said they collected only pieces of bodies. Several villagers  
said that they could not distinguish all of the dead and that they  
never found some of their relatives.

Government officials have accepted handwritten lists compiled by the  
villagers of 147 dead civilians. An independent Afghan human rights  
group said it had accounts from interviews of 117 dead. American  
officials say that even 100 is an exaggeration but have yet to issue  
their own count.

The calamity in the village of Granai, some 18 miles from here,  
illustrates in the grimmest terms the test for the Obama  
administration as it deploys more than 20,000 additional troops here  
and appoints a new commander, Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, in  
search of a fresh approach to combat the tenacious Taliban insurgency.

It is bombings like this one that have turned many Afghans against the  
American-backed government and the foreign military presence. The  
events in Granai have raised sharp questions once again about the  
appropriateness and effectiveness of aerial bombardment in a guerrilla  
war in which the insurgents deliberately blend into the civilian  
population to fight and flee.

Taliban insurgents are well aware of the weakness and are making the  
most of it, American and Afghan officials say. Farah, a vast province  
in the west, contains only a smattering of foreign special forces and  
trainers who work among Afghan police and army units. Exploiting the  
thin spread of forces, the insurgents sought to seize control of  
Granai and provoke a fierce battle over the heads of the civilian  
population, Afghan and American officials say.

After hours of fighting and taking a number of casualties, the  
American forces called in their heaviest weapon, airstrikes, on at  
least three targets in the village.

The rapid mass burial of the victims and the continuing presence of  
insurgents in the area have hampered investigations. Journalists were  
advised against visiting Granai. Villagers were interviewed here in  
Farah, the provincial capital, where they came to collect compensation  
payments, and in the neighboring province of Herat, where some were  
taken for treatment.

Much of the villagers’ descriptions matched accounts given by the  
United States military spokesman, Col. Greg Julian, and the provincial  
police chief, Col. Abdul Ghafar Watandar. But they differed on one  
important point: whether the Taliban had already left Granai before  
the bombing began.

There was particular anger among the villagers that the bombing came  
after, they say, the Taliban had already left at dusk, and the  
fighting had subsided, so much so that men had gone to evening prayers  
at 7 p.m. and returned and were sitting down with their families for  
dinner.

The police chief said that sporadic fighting continued into the night  
and that the Taliban were probably in the village until 1 a.m.

Whatever the case, American planes bombed after 8 p.m. in several  
waves when most of the villagers thought the fighting was over; and  
whatever the actual number of casualties, it is clear from the  
villagers’ accounts that dozens of women and children were killed  
after taking cover.

One group went to a spacious compound owned by a man named Said Naeem,  
on the north side of the village, where the two girls were wounded.  
Only one woman and six children in the compound survived, one of their  
fathers said.

Another group gathered in the house of the village imam, or religious  
leader, Mullah Manan. That, too, was bombed, causing an equally large  
number of casualties, villagers said. Colonel Julian, the American  
military spokesman, said that the airstrikes hit houses from which the  
Taliban were firing. The enormous explosions left such devastation  
that villagers struggled to describe it. “There was someone’s legs,  
someone’s shoulders, someone’s hands,” said Said Jamal, an old white- 
bearded man with rheumy eyes, who lost two sons and a daughter. “The  
dead were so many.”

A joint government and United States military delegation visited  
Granai last week but came back sharply divided in their conclusions.  
The Afghan government said that 140 civilians were killed and 25  
wounded, and that 12 houses were destroyed.

The United States military said the Afghan numbers were far too high.  
This week, a senior military investigator, Brig. Gen. Raymond A.  
Thomas III of the United States Army, arrived to conduct an in-depth  
inquiry for the region’s overall military commander, Gen. David H.  
Petraeus.

An independent Afghan organization, Afghanistan Rights Monitor, said  
Wednesday that at least 117 civilians were killed — including 26 women  
and 61 children — drawing on interviews with 21 villagers and  
relatives of the dead. The group criticized both the Taliban for  
fighting among civilians, and the United States military for using  
excessive force.

The police chief, Colonel Watandar, confirmed much of the villagers’  
accounts of the fighting. A large group of Taliban fighters, numbering  
about 400, they estimated, entered the village and took up positions  
at dawn on May 4. By midmorning, the Taliban began attacks on police  
posts on the main road, just yards from the village, they said.

The fighting raged all day. The police called in more police officers,  
Afghan Army units and an American quick reaction force from the town  
of Farah as reinforcements.

By midafternoon, the exchanges escalated sharply and moved deeper into  
the village. Taliban fighters were firing from the houses, and at one  
point a Marine unit called in airstrikes to allow Marines to go  
forward and rescue a wounded Afghan soldier, said Colonel Julian, the  
United States military spokesman. After that, Taliban fire dropped  
significantly, he said.

A villager named Multan said that one house along the southern edge of  
the village was hit by a bomb and that one Taliban fighter was killed  
there. But villagers did not report any civilian casualties until the  
American planes bombed that night.

Tillah, the 12-year-old girl, whose face bears the scars of a  
scorching blast, still twisted in pain from the burning in her leg at  
the provincial hospital in Herat, where she and other survivors were  
taken to a special burn unit. Her two sisters, Freshta, 5, and Nuria,  
7, were barely visible under the bandages swathing their heads and  
limbs.

The three girls were visiting their aunt’s house with their mother  
when a plane bombed the nearby mosque, around 8 p.m., Tillah said.  
That is when they fled to Said Naeem’s seven-room home.

“When we reached there we felt safe and I fell asleep,” Tillah said.  
She said she heard the buzzing noise of a plane, but then only  
remembers coming to when someone pulled her from the rubble the next  
morning.

A second girl, Nazo, 9, beside her in another hospital bed, said she  
saw two red flashes in the courtyard that kicked up dust seconds  
before the explosion.

“I heard a loud explosion and the compound was burning and the roof  
fell in,” she said. Seven members of the family with her died, and  
four were wounded, her father, Said Malham, said.

“Why do they target the Taliban inside the village?” he asked wearily.  
“Why don’t they bomb them when they are outside the village?”

“The foreigners are guilty,” he continued. “Why don’t they bomb their  
targets, but instead they come and bomb our houses?”