US military admits it killed 10 civilians and targeted wrong vehicle in Kabul airstrike
(CNN) — A United States military investigation into a deadly Kabul drone strike in August has found that it killed 10 civilians and the driver and the vehicle targeted was likely not a threat associated with ISIS-K, Gen. Frank McKenzie, the top general of U.S. Central Command announced at the Pentagon on Friday.
McKenzie told reporters at the Pentagon that the strike was a “mistake” and offered an apology.
“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,” McKenzie said.
McKenzie added that he is “fully responsible for this strike and this tragic outcome.”
The Pentagon had maintained that at least one ISIS-K facilitator and three civilians were killed in what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley had previously called a “righteous strike” on the compound on Aug. 29. The investigation released Friday found that all of those killed in the residential compound were civilians.
In the lead up to the strike, drone operators surveilled the courtyard for up to 4 to 5 minutes. In that time, a male driver left the vehicle. One child was parking the vehicle and other children were present in the car and the courtyard — as CNN had been told by the Ahmadi family.
The military based the strike on a reasonable certainty standard to launch the strike on the vehicle. Tragically, it was the wrong vehicle, a U.S. military official familiar with the investigation told CNN earlier on Friday, adding that no reasonable certainty is not 100% certainty.
Previously, U.S. Central Command pointed to “significant secondary explosions” as evidence of a “substantial amount of explosive material” in the vehicle. On Friday, the U.S. military source said that after reviewing footage from infra-red sensors, they would no longer characterize this as an explosion — instead, it was more of a flare up.
The U.S. official said that in the time leading up to the strike, the U.S. had at least 60 different intelligence reports about threat streams toward U.S. forces at Hamid Karzai International Airport.