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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram from Last Friday, just as we were wrapping up our show and getting ready to start our weekends, I watched this investigative video from New York Times that suggested a drone strike executed in Kabul on August 29th may have hit the wrong target. It was extremely compelling journalism. I wanted to talk to the reporters behind the video. And yesterday I did. Matthew Akins, a Times writer based in Kabul.
--:-- Matthew Akins: We were about to publish our episode with Matthew today when General Kenneth F. McKenzie confirmed that this attack was indeed a tragic and fatal mistake. Having thoroughly reviewed the findings of the investigation and the supporting analysis by interagency partners, I am now convinced that as many as 10 civilians, including up to seven children were tragically killed in that strike.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On the show today, our conversation with Matthew that we had before the military admitted their mistake. What the hell happened on August 29th? Part one, the strike.
--:-- Matthew Akins: So I actually heard the explosion from the strike on the evening of August 29th. And the first report was that it was a rocket. You know, someone had launched a rocket at the airport probably and it missed its target and landed on the house. We could see video on social media of a house burning in a crowded residential neighborhood. But later on it came out that that had actually been a drone strike by the United States.
--:-- Matthew Akins: Yesterday, U.S. military forces conducted an over-the-horizon counterterrorism operation against an ISIS-K planner and facilitator. So the next morning, I woke up quite early and jumped on my motorcycle. I was driving and photographer with the Times, Jim Hoylerbrook was on the back.
--:-- Matthew Akins: That's how we like to get around here because of traffic and it's more low profile. So we rode out to the area where the strike had taken place. And we asked some local residents who pointed us in the direction of the house. And as we got there in these narrow little streets, alleyways, basically, we saw a crowd of residents had gathered neighbors at the gate of the house.
--:-- Matthew Akins: We went inside, introduced ourselves as journalists, of course, and there we could see the wreckage of this car that had been hit by a hellfire missile. There was a twisted mass of steel and kind of blackened material around it, though I did notice pretty much right away that the walls of this courtyard were still intact, which became important later.
--:-- Matthew Akins: And there was actually still human remains at the site. You know, there were body parts and blood and flesh spattered on the walls and ceilings. And so as we were taking this in, we started talking to the family members, asking who the witnesses were, and they were very upset because they told us that 10 members of their family had been killed, including seven children.
--:-- Matthew Akins: So it was immediately apparent to us that there had been civilian casualties in this strike. So the house belonged to Zemarai Ahmadi, who was the target of the strike. It was his car that had been hit inside this courtyard as he was coming home.
--:-- Matthew Akins: And his brother told me that what had happened was that normally the kids in this house, because he lived with his three brothers who all had families, there's a lot of children in this home, they ran out in the street to greet him coming home. They were excited. They'd get in the car. One would sit behind the wheel, maybe in his lap, and they would help him back the car into this tight little courtyard.
--:-- Matthew Akins: And he said the motor was still running. He was sitting in an adjacent room, and he heard the sound of his brother coming in, a very familiar sound. The motor was still running when there was a blast. And the windows blew out. He got to his feet and asked his wife, where are the children and then went outside and saw, you know, a dead nephew and badly wounded in the face and torso by shrapnel.
--:-- Matthew Akins: And he saw another kid who was dead and a lot of fire and smoke. And that's when the neighbors came and pulled him out of there. There had already been reports on social media. And I think some local Afghan journalists had reported that there had been children killed and civilian casualties.
--:-- Matthew Akins: So we were definitely aware that that was what might have happened. But when I got there and saw for myself, you know, that this was this family's home and that they were in agony, you know, grief stricken, and that all their neighbors were gathered around sort of angrily saying that, how could the U.S. have done this to this family?
--:-- Matthew Akins: It made it real and it made it very obvious that there have been civilian casualties. So what we now know is that the 10 people who died in the strike were Zamirai Ahmadi, you know, who was 43 years old, and then three of his children, Zamir, who's 20, Faisal, 16, Farzad, 10 years old, Mr. Ahmadi's cousin, Nasser, who's 30, three of his brother's children, Arwin, seven, Benjamin, six, and Hayat, who's two years old, and two three-year-old girls, Malika and Somaya.
--:-- Matthew Akins: We got back on the bike headed home and started working on the story you know trying to get it out And there was many other stories written that day by different media organizations You know this was a fairly accessible site in Kabul even though obviously it was under Taliban control and a war zone in a sense And I think it kind of dropped off the news for a bit.
--:-- Matthew Akins: There was a lot happening in Afghanistan during that time. But we definitely felt like this needed to follow up. So we and we had told the family that I would keep investigating. So we did. While I was at the scene of the strike, I was shown a business card that belonged to Zemurai, the man who had been targeted in the strike, showing that he was an engineer for Nutrition and Education International, a California-based charity that was using soybean production to fight malnutrition in Afghanistan.
--:-- Matthew Akins: So I wrote in the office of this company, which was closed. You know, after their colleague had been killed, they shut it down. But his boss, who had actually seen at the site of the strike, came in and sat with me and another co-worker. And they also wanted to clear their colleague's name because they were certain that this guy who had worked for the company since 2006 and was, you know, the nicest guy to them was not a terrorist.
--:-- Matthew Akins: So I went in and sat down with him and we looked at the camera footage and kind of collated the different scenes that would show what he was up to that day and ultimately appear in the video that we published in the Times. And, you know, we started seeing him show up in the morning with his colleagues, get out. You could see him go into the office, wave to the cleaner, then, you know, come out again.
--:-- Matthew Akins: And he went for a drive with some other colleagues on a pre-planned visit to basically arrange to deliver some food to refugees who had camped out in a park. And crucially, what we saw was him fill up some containers with water. You can actually see the water streaming from the hose. And he put those in the trunk of his car.
--:-- Matthew Akins: These are actually containers that I had taken a picture of at the site shredded these plastic jerry cans sort of you could use for fuel or for for water and you know that are also commonly used for improvised explosives in Afghanistan at this point. Tell me are you sure this is the wrong person are you unsure are you thinking this could be someone involved with ISIS-K what's going through your head as you're doing this investigation.
--:-- Matthew Akins: I mean one of the things you try to do as an investigative journalist is always doubt your story. You know, what's the saying? If your mother tells you she loves you, fact check it, right? And so even though speaking with his colleagues and family members who really loved him and were grief stricken, I was open to the possibility that he had some connection with ISIS.
--:-- Matthew Akins: I'm still open to that possibility. We don't know if he maybe had some call someday, but associated with the wrong people, whatever. That's a possibility, but it doesn't really justify taking a strike in a crowded area when there were no explosives in the car.
--:-- Matthew Akins: I wasn't sure what I would see that day. I wasn't sure what it would prove or disprove. But when I saw the water jugs, I was like, wow, this is significant. You know, this is something being loaded into the trunk of the car that maybe to a drone could look like a bomb, but it's actually just water.
--:-- Matthew Akins: We see him with the hose with running water. And as his colleagues explained to me, he would do this from time to time. He would take home water to his family because since the collapse of the government, the deliveries, the water truck deliveries in his neighborhood stopped.
--:-- Matthew Akins: And, you know, like I said, it's a big family. So he was bringing home water from the office. And I think the timing of him coming and going was also very important. Later on, it allowed us to kind of piece together where he actually was, where the military said he was, or where the compound that they identified, for example, as being a place where potential explosives were loaded on board.
--:-- Matthew Akins: Well, based on the timing, he was definitely at the NEI office. So that was the compound. He was at the NEI office. We put together a timeline of his day by interviewing everybody who was in the car with him that day that we know of, and I spoke to all of them.
--:-- Matthew Akins: I spoke to more than a dozen of his coworkers and family members. So we established that he had actually gotten a call from his boss at quarter to nine. His boss, and I can see this also on the camera, had showed up to work and forgotten his laptop.
--:-- Matthew Akins: So the boss calls me, he's like, hey, are you at home? okay, good, can you get my laptop on your way to work? Picked up the laptop, and, you know, I got the location of that house, and it turned out that that house is two blocks away from where there would be a rocket attack the next day, the day after the strike by ISIS, using a similar vehicle.
--:-- Matthew Akins: So that could possibly account for how the U.S. got interested in Zemri in the first place and maybe got their wires crossed was that there was ISIS activity in this neighborhood there was definitely a threat against the airport I mean there had already been a devastating suicide attack a few days earlier so that also was very suggestive but it was I think just quite important for us to have a kind of exhaustive as possible timeline of his day so again just interview everyone who he met.
--:-- Matthew Akins: Part three, what the hell happened here? I went back, you know, four days later, and after the strike, and I took more photos and videos of the scene. There was also some fragments that they had found of the Hellfire missile. So we passed all this up to the visual investigations team.
--:-- Matthew Akins: They were meanwhile hard at work. They spoke to a bunch of experts in airstrikes and munitions. You know, one was a former British Army officer, again, who were all unanimous in saying there was no evidence of a second bigger blast. You know, they pointed to the fact that the walls nearby were intact.
--:-- Matthew Akins: There was intact vegetation in the courtyard. The car next to it hadn't been shifted. A single crater, a single dent in the gate indicating a single blast wave. So there was not a second bigger bomb based on this evidence, it's possible that what the drone saw, what the U.S. military saw, was just the fuel tank of that vehicle or the vehicle next to it going up in a fireball, because there was definitely evidence of a fire that had burned there and melted a bunch of plastic and stuff like that.
--:-- Matthew Akins: So that was the perhaps most important conclusion of our investigation, which was that there was not evidence of a secondary larger explosion. And that contradicted what the military had repeatedly said. At the time, and I think this is still valid, we had very good intelligence that ISIS-K was preparing a specific type vehicle at a specific type location.
--:-- Matthew Akins: We monitored that through various means, and all of the engagement criteria were being met. We went through the same level of rigor that we've done for years. So the military basically doubled down in the days that followed Because there were secondary explosions there a reasonable conclusion to be made that there was explosives in that vehicle
--:-- Matthew Akins: The third thing is we know from a variety of other means that at least one of those people that were killed was an ISIS facilitator. So were there others killed? Yes, there are others killed. Who they are, we don't know. We'll try to sort through all that. But we believe that the procedures at this point, I don't want to influence the outcome of an investigation. But at this point, we think that the procedures were correctly followed.
--:-- Matthew Akins: I know it's a righteous strike. And this was after our story had run about the civilian casualties, including seven children. Decision making for this kind of strike, the authority to pull the trigger had been delegated to a lower level of command than normal over the course of the airport evacuation, I think because of the urgency of the situation.
--:-- Matthew Akins: So that meant that the strike was probably subject to less vetting than normal and less levels of approval than normal. I don't know what's in the classified materials that they have, the intelligence. And I don't know whether or not Zemurai made the wrong phone call that day, whether he was secretly an ISIS sympathizer, though it seems odd because he wanted to go to America.
--:-- Matthew Akins: This is someone who had an active refugee resettlement case. He was being sponsored by this California-based company. He and his whole family desperately hoped to be evacuated to the United States. So I don't understand the motivation for a terrorist attack. But if we're asking whether this strike was, as Millie put it, a righteous strike, whether it followed the proper rules of engagement, we can say that there was no evidence of a larger bomb in this car.
--:-- Matthew Akins: So how could it have posed an imminent threat, especially when it was at a house away from the airport where he was actually parking for the night? And so then if that's the case, what's the justification for taking an airstrike in a crowded civilian area, residential area, where there's a very high likelihood of collateral damage? And as it happened, seven children were killed.
--:-- Matthew Akins: In that sense, I think we can be fairly confident that this strike was a mistake. and it's a mistake that was denied by the military and that was night and day to the official account. And I think it's only because of reporting that we and other media organizations were able to do on the ground because this happened in Kabul that the military's account is being challenged.
--:-- Matthew Akins: And that's the thing is that, you know, most of the time it's not. Thank you.
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--:-- Matthew Akins: Matthew, we did an episode recently on the cost of 9-11, where we were sure to point out that, you know, something like 3,000 people died on September 11, 2001, but nearly a million, if not many more, have died in the subsequent War on Terror.
--:-- Matthew Akins: How often does stuff like what you described in the first half of the show happen in United States drone warfare? Well, I think it happens far more often than we know. And the reason I say that is because only a fraction of these incidents can really be investigated.
--:-- Matthew Akins: They typically happen in areas that are remote and difficult, even dangerous to access. So in most cases, we just have the official version. And yet we have many incidents that have been documented of civilian casualties.
--:-- Matthew Akins: So it would stand to reason that there are more. These strikes have been going on now for almost two decades. And it's very rare that we can put the faces and names on any of the innocent victims.
--:-- Matthew Akins: Tell me about another incident that didn't go under the radar, one that was documented. Well, in 2015, which seems like a lifetime ago, Kunduz city fell to the Taliban. That was the first provincial capital.
--:-- Matthew Akins: NATO trained Afghan police and army say they're doing what they can to thwart the attack. Both sides, they say, taking casualties. And the Afghan troops backed by U.S. special forces took it back fairly quickly.
--:-- Matthew Akins: But in the course of this house-to-house fighting, the U.S. Special Forces on the ground called it an airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital. An AC-130 gunship, which is a very powerful special operations aircraft, wiped out this hospital on October 3rd, about 2 in the morning.
--:-- Matthew Akins: Earlier today, the international medical aid group Doctors Without Borders accused U.S. forces of deliberately bombing that hospital in Kunduz City. And at least 42 people were killed in the attack, many of them medical staff from Doctors Without Borders and patients.
--:-- Matthew Akins: So it was a horrific incident. In this case, it was immediately apparent that a terrible mistake had been made. and the US military promised it would investigate.
--:-- Matthew Akins: Soon after the strike, I went to Kunduz and I ended up writing a story about it for the New York Times Magazine. What did you find out?
--:-- Matthew Akins: Well the US military ended up saying that it was an accident A hospital was mistakenly struck We would never intentionally target a protected medical facility The head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, General John Campbell, told Congress this week that Afghan troops had requested the air cover because they were facing a Taliban attack.
--:-- Matthew Akins: They released a heavily redacted version of their report, and it wasn't until seven months later that this came out. saying that we made a series of errors. You know, there were some technical errors with the gunship's, you know, navigation and targeting system.
--:-- Matthew Akins: There were failures to report certain things. There was errors on the ground, but it was a mistake. We didn't mean to hit this hospital. This happened in part because the authority for the strike had been delegated to a lower level of command, which is the same thing that we're told happened with his drone strike now.
--:-- Matthew Akins: In the case of Kunduz, it was because the strike was carried out under self-defense rules. When U.S. forces are an imminent danger on the ground, you know, they have the ability to call in airstrikes to protect themselves, you know, that aren't subject to the normal levels of vetting and oversight.
--:-- Matthew Akins: Because, you know, there have been many egregious incidents of civilian casualties from airstrikes in Afghanistan, where U.S. warplanes have wiped out wedding parties or convoys of civilians. And this was seen as not only something that was awful, but it was something that was turning the population against the U.S. occupation.
--:-- Matthew Akins: And so there were these rules for oversight that were implemented. But these were waived in the cases of urgent self-defense, and that's what happened in Kunduz.
--:-- Matthew Akins: How much does the U.S. military just accept this level of civilian death when it's conducting these airstrikes? How much is it seen as, well, we're saving boots on the ground, so it's worth it?
--:-- Matthew Akins: Well, the military would say that no other military takes the same amount of steps to prevent civilian casualties. But does any other military conduct as many airstrikes in foreign countries as we do? Exactly. No other military conducts this many drone strikes overseas.
--:-- Matthew Akins: So we definitely have a responsibility to be the best at avoiding civilian casualties. But the idea that civilian casualties are avoidable, I think that if you carry out these kinds of airstrikes, eventually civilians are going to die. And therefore, in a sense, their deaths are intended.
--:-- Matthew Akins: The bombing outside the airport in Kabul was so brutal, so inhuman. It was easy to see the U.S. strike some ISIS-K fighter and prevent another attack and feel a sense of relief to maybe even feel good about it. I mean, the word General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, used was righteous.
--:-- Matthew Akins: And now, of course, this feels very different. How are people reacting to your reporting? Well, what's interesting is the contrast in responses between the two stories.
--:-- Matthew Akins: You know, the first one that we did, where it was sort of the civilians say that, you know, children died, which is a story that commonly comes out. There was a lot of people saying, well, you know, it's their fault for, because their dad was a terrorist, or, you know, this is what happens.
--:-- Matthew Akins: He probably had explosives in the car, and that's why they died. That's what the military is saying. But when this investigation came out, I didn't really see that kind of response. I think that it just became obvious to people that there was no larger explosives in the car.
--:-- Matthew Akins: So the civilians, the children, were killed by a U.S. missile. And also that this guy just didn't really seem like a terrorist. I think a lot of people believed his colleagues and family and not the military.
--:-- Matthew Akins: Do you think that makes a difference? Because it's not like the United States is going to stop using drone strikes tomorrow, right?
--:-- Matthew Akins: I think it may make a difference in this case, but the fact of the matter is these kind of airstrikes continue because we don't know much about the people who were killed. You know, they're people coming from poor, war-torn countries.
--:-- Matthew Akins: And their lives really don't matter in the order of things, you know, not compared to American lives, not in a system where we have such vast inequality of wealth and power between different countries.
--:-- Matthew Akins: This is a wealthy country bombing a poor country. This is the richest country in the world bombing one of the poorest countries in the world. And so it can matter to an investigation like that.
--:-- Matthew Akins: And I think, you know, not just these investigations, but the efforts of activists, human rights organizations, legal groups, you know, lawmakers, ordinary citizens, and especially Afghans and Iraqis and other people themselves who are trying to tell their story.
--:-- Matthew Akins: I think all that matters, all that makes a difference. But at the end of the day, there's just a huge imbalance of power that allows for these wars and this lopsided killing to continue.
--:-- Matthew Akins: I think some people, when they see this information, they do care. I think hopefully your listeners right now care. But I think a lot more people probably were excited about the start of the football season.
--:-- Matthew Akins: It's an uphill battle, but we are killing people, so we need to know something about them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I offer my profound condolences to the family and friends of those who were killed. This strike was taken in the earnest belief that it would prevent an imminent threat to our forces and the evacuees at the airport. But it was a mistake, and I offer my sincere apology.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Matthew Akins is a writer for the New York Times based in Kabul, Afghanistan. You can watch the video investigation he made with his colleagues at nytimes.com. It's titled, Did a U.S. Drone Strike in Afghanistan Kill the Wrong Person?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our episode today was produced by Victoria Chamberlain, edited by Matthew Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. The rest of the Today Explained team includes Will Reed, Hadi Mawagdi, Miles Bryan, and Halima Shah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our supervising producer is Amina Al-Sadi. Vox's Veep of Audio is Liz Kelly Nelson. Our deputy is Jillian Weinberger. We had extra help this week from Paul Mounsey.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We used music by Breakmaster Cylinder and some from Noam Hassenfeld. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.
