http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/apr2009/afgh-a15.shtmlUS airstrike kills six civilians in Afghanistan
By Bill Van Auken
15 April 2009
US attack helicopters killed six civilians Monday in Afghanistan’s mountainous eastern Kunar province near the Pakistan border. The attack follows by less than a week a raid by US troops in nearby Khost province that killed five innocent civilians, four of them relatives of an Afghan army officer.
While US military officials claimed that all those killed in Monday’s attack were “enemy fighters” and that the target had been picked based on “multiple intelligence sources,” Afghan officials on the ground told a very different story.
The governor of the Watapor district in Kunar Province, Zalmay Yousfzai, reported that the helicopters demolished one house and inflicted heavy damage on several others. In addition to the six civilians killed in the raid, another 14 were wounded, four of them seriously, he said.
The district police chief also affirmed that all of those killed and wounded were civilians. Among the dead were a three-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy. The wounded included a one-year-old.
The Agence France-Presse news agency interviewed two of the wounded at the local hospital, including a 14-year-old boy who said that four members of his family had died in the US air strike.
“We were asleep, and all of a sudden the roof collapsed,” the boy, who identified himself as Zakirullah, told AFP. “I don’t remember anything. I got to know here that my father, my mother, my brother and my younger sister have all been killed, and I am wounded.”
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