ISIS and Afghan Taliban

[Montmorency]

What an era. spmetla, do you have any insight on the drone strike aimed at eliminating an 'imminent ISIK-K threat" shortly before the final exfiltration? News reports indicate this attack, whose target seems to have been engineer Zemarai Ahmadi, also killed 8 children and a former ANA/interpreter from the same family. If the target was appropriate, a suicide bomber as claimed, that's still an, um, incredible ratio.

Yes - its "self defence" to fire a missile from a drone in someone else's country inside their capital city if you think they might be approaching the airport you've currently occupying. And you can even then say you take civilian deaths seriously after killing loads of civilians.

The mess due to the abrupt withdrawal is a mess and although was never going to be clean this was worse than it could have been; this was - if not done by the USA - state sponsored killing.

Seems pretty conclusive: We killed an innocent man, an actual model citizen who was trying to flee to the United States, along with a bunch of bystanders, despite minimal cited intelligence. Hip hooray for America, the terrorists won when we came and they won as we left.





Oh, and by the way, remember this?

The more reserved frustrations of an Afghan general.

I Commanded Afghan Troops This Year. We Were Betrayed.
Aug. 25, 2021
By Sami Sadat
General Sadat is a commander in the Afghan National Army.

Well...

Later, I spoke on the phone with an Afghan Army helicopter pilot who had just relieved the one who attacked the outpost. He told me, “I asked the crew why they did this, and they said, ‘We knew they were civilians, but Camp Bastion’ ”—a former British base that had been handed over to the Afghans—“ ‘gave orders to kill them all.’ ” As we spoke, Afghan Army helicopters were firing upon the crowded central market in Gereshk, killing scores of civilians. An official with an international organization based in Helmand said, “When the government forces lose an area, they are taking revenge on the civilians.” The helicopter pilot acknowledged this, adding, “We are doing it on the order of Sami Sadat.”

I showed the interview to Mohammed Wali, a pushcart vender in a village near Lashkar Gah. A few days after the Yakh Chal massacre, government militias in his area surrendered to the Taliban. General Sadat’s Blackhawks began attacking houses, seemingly at random. They fired on Wali’s house, and his daughter was struck in the head by shrapnel and died. His brother rushed into the yard, holding the girl’s limp body up at the helicopters, shouting, “We’re civilians!” The choppers killed him and Wali’s son. His wife lost her leg, and another daughter is in a coma. As Wali watched the CNN clip, he sobbed. “Why are they doing this?” he asked. “Are they mocking us?”

This was all up to days before the fall of the government.

General Sami Sadat headed one of the seven corps of the Afghan Army. Unlike the Amir Dado generation of strongmen, who were provincial and illiterate, Sadat obtained a master’s degree in strategic management and leadership from a school in the U.K. and studied at the NATO Military Academy, in Munich. He held his military position while also being the C.E.O. of Blue Sea Logistics, a Kabul-based corporation that supplied anti-Taliban forces with everything from helicopter parts to armored tactical vehicles. During my visit to Helmand, Blackhawks under his command were committing massacres almost daily: twelve Afghans were killed while scavenging scrap metal at a former base outside Sangin; forty were killed in an almost identical incident at the Army’s abandoned Camp Walid; twenty people, most of them women and children, were killed by air strikes on the Gereshk bazaar; Afghan soldiers who were being held prisoner by the Taliban at a power station were targeted and killed by their own comrades in an air strike.

Thanks for all the war crimes. At least we can examine them in glorious HD these days.