Another war crime in Afghanistan: US massacres nine children in air strike [View All]

[Karmadillo]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/mar2011/afgh-m04.shtml

Another war crime in Afghanistan: US massacres nine children in air strike
By Joseph Kishore
4 March 2011

On Tuesday, March 1, the US military massacred nine children in an airstrike in Afghanistan’s northeastern Kunar province. The attack, which prompted mass protests, is only the latest atrocity in the region, coming less than two weeks after another attack left as many as 65 civilians dead.

The nine children killed Tuesday were collecting firewood in the Pech Valley area of Afghanistan. They were targeted by helicopter gunships sent from a nearby base run by the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). A video report from Al Jazeera shows the burial of the nine children, all under fourteen. NATO forces claimed that they were responding to rocket attacks.

This latest incident is part of a regular campaign of terror directed at the Afghan people. Countless numbers of civilians have been killed. Often there is no direct evidence of these war crimes, with most casualties simply labeled by the US military and an obedient media as “insurgents” or “Taliban.”

As video footage of the latest attack emerged, US officials, including President Barack Obama, issued statements apologizing for the incidents. Their comments merely underscored the indifference of the colonial occupiers. General David Petraeus, the ISAF commander, declared, “Regrettably, there appears to have been an error in the hand-off between identifying the location of the insurgents and the attack helicopters that carried out the subsequent operations.”

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