Civilian casualties far fewer than reports suggested

Back to the Victim's Page

Tuesday, November 20, 2001
By Andrew Maykuth
Knight Ridder Newspapers

KABUL, Afghanistan - The bomb fell from the sky without warning in the middle of the night, engulfing Mirza Mohammed's house with flame.

KABUL, Afghanistan - The bomb fell from the sky without warning in the middle of the night, engulfing Mirza Mohammed's house with flame.

"When the bomb hit this place, the entire house collapsed and there was only dust and confusion," said Mohammed, 38, the eldest of five brothers whose families lived in separate rooms of the mud-brick dwelling their father built 20 years ago.

The apparent intended target of the American bomb in the first week of the U.S. air campaign in Afghanistan was Kabul International Airport, a few hundred yards away.

There is little left of Mohammed's house except an 8-foot-deep crater. He says it is a miracle that only two died and 25 were injured, 12 of whom are still hospitalized five weeks later.

Perhaps more of a miracle is his attitude.

"It doesn't matter that two people in my family died," said Mohammed. "I will give this house as a gift to the United States if we have a lasting peace. We want to thank W. Bush for helping get rid of the bearded Taliban. But if peace doesn't come, I'll be upset with him and the United States."

With the Taliban on the run, Mohammed and other victims of stray bomb strikes in Kabul expressed remarkably little bitterness this week. But their benevolence has a condition: The price for the lost lives and limbs is a durable peace. Almost all expressed hope that the United Nations would send an international security force until Afghanistan could create a broad-based government.

While the bombing campaign caused substantial numbers of unintended casualties, it appears to have killed fewer civilians in Kabul than either the Taliban or initial news reports suggested.

The Taliban claimed two weeks ago that up to 1,500 Afghan civilians had been killed. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, while expressing regret for civilian deaths, said the Taliban claims were "fiction." The British defense ministry said that no more than 300 had died nationwide.

In a spot check of 12 stray-bomb sites in Kabul in recent days, witnesses said 29 people had died. Another dozen were said to have been killed when a bomb fell Oct. 19 at Sarai Shamali, an informal market in north Kabul.

While far from a comprehensive assessment of stray bombs in Kabul, the casualties that eyewitnesses reported at most sites were fewer than commonly believed or that humanitarian agencies had reported.

A witness who saw the aftermath of an Oct. 21 bomb strike in the northern Kabul district of Khair Khana saw seven bodies removed. At the time, a hospital doctor said 13 people died in the strike. Care International, which made an incomplete assessment while the Taliban was still in power, said 18 people died. Survivors of the blast said the true death toll was nine.

"It has been 30 days since this happened, and I don't feel like a human," said Gul Makai, 35, a widow who lost her son, Sardar Mohammed, 20, as he was preparing to go to market to sell fruit from a wheelbarrow. "He was the breadwinner for this family, and now we have nothing."

Care also said 12 people died at a wedding party that was struck by a bomb last month near the Macroryan housing complex. Witnesses said the actual count was five.

Even when the bombing campaign is over, it may be impossible to get an exact figure of what military officials used to call "collateral damage."

No international agencies kept an independent count of civilian casualties because the Taliban would interpret such work as gathering military intelligence, said Pascal DuPort, deputy head of the International Committee for the Red Cross in Afghanistan.

"People weren't taking bodies to hospitals or government, but burying them very quickly," said DuPort. "It's very difficult for anyone to know how many died and how many were wounded."

The American bombing campaign was far from perfect. The Red Cross warehouse was struck twice, based on mistaken intelligence reports that Taliban supplies were stored there. The U.S. government apologized for the bombs, which injured one guard.

An unknown number of unexploded bombs still lie around Kabul. In the neighborhood of Ben-e-Hassar, where American bombers hammered Taliban positions on top of a rocky hill, parts of several bombs caromed nearly a mile. Two feet of the front section of one bomb came to rest against a house, the inch-thick steel casing still containing gray, puttylike explosives. Children were scooping out gobs of the material and using it to start fires.

"It's dangerous," said Najibullah, 40, a teacher. "Can you get it removed?"

Anger about the stray bombs is suppressed now that the northern alliance controls Kabul. Abdul Mobeen, 36, a shop owner whose leg was injured by shrapnel in the Oct. 19 bomb in Sarai Shamali, said people were hostile toward Americans at the time the stray bombs fell.

"Tell your pilots they should hit their targets," Mobeen said Monday as he lay in Wazir Akbar Khan hospital, still recovering.

Kabul residents said the bombs were more accurate in the first week after the air campaign began Oct. 7, when the targets were most obvious: large military bases, the airport, radar and communications installations. As the Taliban sought safety in residential neighborhoods, the bombs began to go astray, they said.

"Some of us thought they were mistakes," said Shakir Pardis, 38, a teacher whose middle-class house in the Sharie Nad district was destroyed by a bomb strike Oct. 17 at his front door. "Others thought maybe the pilot lost somebody in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon and deliberately bombed civilian targets to take revenge, and then just said it was a mistake."

But some residents were surprised at the depth of American intelligence. U.S. aircraft fired laser-guided rockets at specific houses in crowded neighborhoods that residents were only vaguely aware contained Arab and Pakistani militants sympathetic to Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"We were amazed at the accuracy," said Mohammed Alem, a carpenter from the Qasabale-Kargere housing complex near the airport, where the tarmac and surrounding grounds are littered with aircraft fuselages that lie scattered like broken pencils. Two stray bombs fell in a field in front of the housing complex, but they caused no casualties, contrary to casualty reports in the city.

There was little expectation of personal compensation - this is a city where 50,000 people died during factional fighting from 1992 to 1996.

Pardis, whose grandfather built the house that the bomb destroyed, said his pregnant wife survived being completely buried in the rubble. But she has become fitful and mentally unstable since the blast.

"If I could afford to rebuild this house, I'd say it was worth it to get rid of the Taliban," said Pardis. "Now I just have no house."

But there was an expectation of collective compensation - that the international community would not ignore Afghanistan as it did a decade ago after Afghan Islamic warriors defeated the Soviet Union and then destroyed what was left of the country while they struggled for supremacy among themselves.

In the Khair Khana neighborhood, populated primarily by ethnic Tajiks - who might be sympathetic to the Tajik-dominated northern alliance, which swept into Kabul last week - there was hardly anyone who expressed confidence that the alliance could govern the country alone.

"If things are left in the hands of these leaders, then we won't get peace," said Tawoos, 30, a carpenter who lives near the site where the nine people were killed. Like many Afghans, he uses only one name.

Tawoos and some other neighbors went to the Taliban government last month after the Khair Khana bomb knocked out electric power to six houses. They were turned down by people who seemed to know their end as a government was near.

"The Taliban said, `Wait for the Americans. They're coming soon, and they'll fix it.'"

© Knight Ridder Newspaper