Today, Explained - Zemari Ahmadi

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

A US drone strike in Afghanistan was meant to take out an ISIS-K target. Reporting on the ground shows an aid worker and several children were killed. Matthieu Aikins, reporter at the New York Times, explains from Kabul. Today’s show was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Today Explained, I'm Sean Ramos for him. 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.

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. Moreover, we now assess that it is unlikely that the vehicle and those who died

were associated with ISIS-K or were a direct threat to U.S. forces. 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 1. The Strike.

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.

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 times Jim Hoylerbrook was on the back. 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. 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. And there was actually still human remains at the site.

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. So it was immediately apparent to us that there had been civilian casualties in this strike. So the house belonged to Zemari Ahmadi, who was the target of the strike. It was his car that had been hit inside his courtyard as he was coming home. 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 know, to greet him coming home. They're excited. They'd get in the car, you know, one would sit behind the wheel, maybe in his lap, and they would help him back the car into this tight little courtyard. 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. 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. 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. 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? It made it real and it made it very obvious that there had been civilian casualties. So what we now know is that the 10 people who died in the strike were Zemir Ahmadiyya, 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, Arween, 7, Benjamin, 6, and Hayat, who's two years old, and two three-year-old girls, Malika and Sumaya.

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.

There was a lot happening in Afghanistan during that time. But we definitely felt like this needed to follow up. And I told the family that I would keep investigating. So we did. Part two, the investigation. While I was at the scene of the strike, I was shown a business card that belonged to Zemirai, 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. So I wrote in the office of this company, which was closed. 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 nicest facilitator. 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, the times and you know we started seeing him show up in the morning with his colleagues get out you can see him going to the office wave to the cleaner

then you know come out again 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. These are actually containers that I had taken a picture of at the site, shredded these plastic jerry cans, sort of, that you could use for fuel or 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? 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 I was 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.

I'm still open to that possibility. We don't know if he maybe had some call some day, been 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. 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. 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. And 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. You know, later on, it allowed us to kind of piece together where he actually was, where the military said he was, or where they, you know, the compound that they identified, for example, as being a place where potential explosives were loaded on board. 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. And 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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. So that was the perhaps most important conclusion of our investigation, which was that there was not evidence of a secondary large 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. 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's a reasonable conclusion to be made that there was explosives in that vehicle.

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 and it was 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. 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 Zemirai 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. 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 the strike was, as Milley put it, a righteous strike, whether it followed the proper rules of engagement, you know, we can say that there was no evidence of a larger bomb in this car. 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. 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 the 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. And that's the thing, is that, you know, most of the time it's not. Thank you. Support for today explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com. Ramp.com. Ramp.com.

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if not many more, have died in the subsequent war on terror. 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. 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. 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. Tell me about another incident that didn't go under the radar, one that was documented. It's very rare that we can put the faces and names on any of the innocent victims. 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. 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. 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. 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. So it was a horrific incident. In this case, it was immediately apparent that a terrible mistake had been made, and the U.S. military promised it would investigate. 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? Well, the U.S. 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.

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. There were some technical errors with the gunship's navigation and targeting system. 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 this drone strike now. In the case of Kunduz, it was because the strike was carried out under self-defense rules. When U.S. forces are in 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. Because, you know, there have been many egregious incidents of civilian casualties from airstrikes in Afghanistan, you know, where U.S. warplanes have wiped out wedding parties or convoys of civilians. And, you know, this was seen as not only something that was awful, but it was something that was turning the population against the U.S. occupation. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 there was no larger explosives in the car.

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. Do you think that makes a difference? Because it's not like the United States is going to stop using drone strikes tomorrow, right? 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. They're people coming from poor, war-torn countries. And their lives really don't matter in the order of things, you know, not compared to American lives, not compared, you know, not in a system where we have such vast inequality of wealth and power between different countries. 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. 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, you know, Afghans and Iraqis and other people themselves who are trying to tell their story. 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. 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. It's an uphill battle, but we are killing people, so we need to know something about them. 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 in the evacuees at the airport. But it was a mistake, and I offer my sincere apology. 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? Our episode today was produced by Victoria Chamberlain, edited by Matthew Collette, engineered by Afim Shapiro, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. Thank you. From Paul Mounsey, we used music by Breakmaster Cylinder, and some from Noam Hassenfeld.

Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.