Rahmat Gul/Associated Press - Mohammed Tahir Safi, who led an investigation into deaths in Kapisa Province, showed a photo Monday of one of the victims.

February 15, 2012

8 Young Afghans Killed in Strike, NATO Acknowledges


KABUL, Afghanistan — NATO acknowledged on Wednesday that it killed eight young Afghans in an airstrike in eastern Afghanistan last week and vowed to try to help the isolated home village of those who were killed.

The airstrike on Feb. 8 involved a remote, mountainous area of Najrab district in Kapisa Province. Investigations by the Afghan government and NATO led to somewhat different conclusions about what had led to the bombings.

The Afghan government described those killed as civilians and children. NATO officers insisted that while those who had been killed were young men, perhaps even boys, they were armed and that based on the observations of soldiers on the ground and aircraft camera footage, they appeared to pose a threat to forces operating in the area. The divergent accounts leave open the question of whether this was a case of civilian casualties, but make clear that teenagers died.

Nonetheless, in announcing the results of its investigation into the deaths, NATO officers described it as a "very sad event" and expressed their "sincere condolences."

"We accept that eight young Afghans died that day," said Air Commodore Mike Wigston, who led the investigation team and is director of air operations for the NATO joint command here.

"The decision to bomb this group was made because they were seen as adult-sized and moving in a tactical fashion, and the commander was worried they were in a good position to attack" nearby NATO forces, Commodore Wigston said.

Local Afghans and NATO officers agreed that in the hours before the attack, NATO and Afghan forces were searching for weapons caches in the area, but then the versions diverge.

Afghan relatives of those who died and Mohammed Tahir Safi, an adviser to President Hamid Karzai and the leader of the Afghan investigation team, said that those killed were young boys who had taken their sheep and goats to graze outside the village. They were cold and gathered under a rock and lighted a small fire to warm themselves. That was the place where they were struck by bombs. Photographs of the dead shown by Mr. Safi at a news conference this week included some of badly bloodied young boys and a couple of young men who might have been older. The father of one of the boys who was killed said that his son was 12 and that two nephews who were killed were younger.

Brig. Gen. Lewis Boone, the NATO spokesman here, said that the site of the bombing was a boulder, but that NATO troops "observed with binoculars and other optical equipment" several groups of "adult sized" men leaving the village.

They "appeared to be carrying weapons and heading for nearby mountains," General Boone said. "They were moving in open terrain in a tactical fashion and clearly keeping a distance from each other."

"We saw no other people, livestock or buildings in the vicinity," he added.

"Their purposeful movements and the weapons they appeared to be carrying led the ground commander to believe they were an imminent threat to the persons in the valley."

An airstrike was called in and two bombs were dropped, the general said.

Several questions remain unanswered. It is unclear whether NATO pilots were able to see clearly the size of the people they were bombing in the camera footage, and it is also unclear what happened to the weapons the boys were believed to be carrying.

Commodore Wigston said NATO had sent the camera footage to a forensics lab.

"We have had conflicting statements on the ages," he said. "Our view is that initial assessment suggests they that they are closer to 15 to 16 with one older."

The bodies were buried almost immediately in keeping with Muslim tradition, so it was not possible to examine them, he said.

As for the weapons they were thought to be carrying, by the time the NATO assessment team arrived, there was little left after the bombing other than "some fragments" that might be consistent with weapons the youths would have had, Commodore Wigston said.

Nonetheless, both NATO officers said that Gen. John R. Allen, the NATO commander here, took the episode seriously and had visited the governor of Kapisa Province. General Boone and Commodore Wigston said that NATO was committed to helping improve the lives of the people in Gayawa, the youths’ village, which has no school or clinic or even a road.

"I spoke to the elders and I saw for myself the conditions the people live in," Commodore Wigston said. "That is why we made our offer to make life better. A road to the outside world would be a very important part of that.

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