Deadliest US Airstrike Kills more than 150 in Afghanistan

On the eve of a tripartite summit in Washington which the Obama administration has organized with the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan, reports from Afghanistan indicate that US air strikes in western Farah province have killed and wounded scores of civilians, many of them women and children.

Villagers from the remote Bala Baluk district near the Iranian border put the death toll as high as 150, according to local government officials quoted in the media.

According to accounts from the region, US forces who had moved into the area called in air strikes. A bomb struck mud-brick houses in the village of Gerani, where civilians had taken refuge from the fighting.

Reto Stocker, the ICRC's head of delegation in Kabul, Afghanistan, said in a statement. "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 airstrike (CNN report)."

A provincial council member in Farah province, Abdul Basir Khan is quoted in the media (Associated Press) to have said that villagers had brought truckloads of mangled corpses of bombing victims to the provincial capital to prove that women and children had been slaughtered in the US attack. The official said that villagers had gathered in front of the local government office, crying and shouting.

"It was difficult to count [the bodies] because they were in very bad shape,” said Khan, adding, “Some had no legs.” Villagers told him that 150 people had been killed, he said.

“These houses that were full of children and women and elders were bombed by planes,” Mohammad Mieem Qadderdan, a former top regional official who had witnessed the carnage, told the media. “It is very difficult to say how many were killed because nobody can count the number. People are digging through rubble with shovels and hands (AP).”

Qadderdan said that the death toll was “worse than Azizabad,” referring to a US air strike last year that killed at least 90 Afghan civilians, two-thirds of them children, in the western province of Herat. He estimated the death toll in this latest air strike at “more than 100” and said that ten houses had been destroyed.

In the Azizabad incident, US warplanes targeted a large crowd that had gathered near a local airfield to commemorate the 40th day since the death of a local leader. The US military initially claimed that all those killed had been participating in a meeting of Taliban militants. Reports and photographic evidence from the scene, however, exposed this claim as a lie. The civilian death toll was confirmed by the Afghan government, the United Nations and human rights groups.

Will someone say to him (Obama) that his flawed strategy on Afghanistan and Pakistan is brewing more hatred and resentment amongst the local population.

Enough is enough! Bring home all the US forces from Afghanistan and seek help from Islamic countries to stabilise the situation on the ground.