After U.S. Strikes, Afghans Describe 'Tractor Trailers Full of Pieces of Human Bodies'

By Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports. Posted May 7, 2009.

While the Pentagon spins its story, the International Committee of the Red Cross has stated bluntly that U.S. airstrikes hit civilian houses and revealed that an ICRC counterpart in the Red Crescent was among the dead. "We know that those killed included an Afghan Red Crescent volunteer and 13 members of his family who had been sheltering from fighting in a house that was bombed in an air strike," said the ICRC’s head of delegation in Kabul, Reto Stocker. “We are deeply concerned by these events. Tribal elders in the villages called the ICRC during the fighting to report civilian casualties and ask for help. As soon as we heard of the attacks we contacted all sides to warn them that there were civilians and injured people in the area.”

Read the entire ICRC statement here.

The Times, meanwhile, interviewed local people who contradict the unnamed U.S. Defense officials’ version of events:

Villagers reached by telephone said many were killed by aerial bombing. Muhammad Jan, a farmer, said fighting had broken out in his village, Shiwan, and another, Granai, in the Bala Baluk district. An hour after it stopped, the planes came, he said.

In Granai, he said, women and children had sought shelter in orchards and houses. "Six houses were bombed and destroyed completely, and people in the houses still remain under the rubble," he said, "and now I am working with other villagers trying to excavate the dead bodies."

He said that villagers, crazed with grief, were collecting mangled bodies in blankets and shawls and piling them on three tractors. People were still missing, he said.

Mr. Agha, who lives in Granai, said the bombing started at 5 p.m. on Monday and lasted until late into the night. "People were rushing to go to their relatives’ houses, where they believed they would be safe, but they were hit on the way," he said.

In her earlier statement regarding the bombing, Clinton told Hamid Karzai "there will be a joint investigation by your government and ours."

But before that investigation began, the Pentagon was already using its unnamed officials to blame the Taliban. It also bears remembering that the U.S. track record of thoroughly "investigating" U.S. massacres is pathetic. The UN said there was convincing evidence that last year's U.S. attack on the village of Azizabad in western Afghanistan killed 90 civilians, but the military only acknowledged 30 civilian deaths.

Standing between Hamid Karzai and Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari on Wednesday, Obama said the U.S. would "make every effort" to avoid civilian deaths in both countries (which are regularly bombed by the U.S.). But as he was making those remarks, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was arriving in Kabul on Wednesday "to make sure that preparations were moving forward for the troop increase and that soldiers and Marines were getting the equipment they needed."

Jessica Barry, a spokesperson for the ICRC said, "With more troops coming in, there is a risk that civilians will be more and more vulnerable."

See more stories tagged with: pentagon, afghanistan, robert gates, barack obama, taliban, hilary clinton, u.s. military, hamid karzai, david mckiernan, farah, afghan airstrikes, asif ali zardari, rohul amin, mohammad naim farahi, jim miklaszewski

Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His writing and reporting is available at RebelReports.com.

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