The Spirit of the Internet Weekly

Legacy of civilian casualties in ruins of shattered town

Justin Huggler, The Independent, 27 November 2001)

We were picking our way through the bombed-out ruins of Khanabad when we heard the explosion. When we got there, struggling through the collapsed remains of houses, an old man sat in his blood blinking and shaking his head in bewilderment. Beside him, a 15-year-old boy lay bleeding and unconscious.

They had trodden on one of the American cluster bombs that litter the fields and roadside around Khanabad.

The Americans killed more than 100 unarmed civilians in Khanabad in the last two weeks, relentlessly bombing heavily populated residential areas in the town, one of the last under Taliban control. The Independent first reported allegations of civilian deaths made by fleeing refugees a week ago. Yesterday, after the Taliban left, those claims were confirmed.

Whole suburbs – such as Charikari, where we were –had been destroyed, with giant holes and rubble where houses had stood. We found a man, Juma Khan, digging with a shovel in a crater where 15 members of his family had died. His wife and six of his children, his brother and all of his brother's children were killed when a bomb hit their house at 8am. “I was just sitting there. The next thing I knew, people were digging me out of the rubble,” Mr Khan said.

He saw them dig out his 11-year-old daughter, Gulshan, the only other survivor. She has severe head injuries. “I don't know who to blame,” said Mr Khan. He didn't even know it was the Americans who killed his family. “Maybe it was the Taliban,” he said. “But whoever bombed me is my enemy.”

Another man beckoned us towards a pile of rubble, the remains of his house. It wasn't until we had climbed onto it that he told us we were standing on an unexploded bomb. “I was knocked over by the blast,” he said. “When I came to, I staggered out of the house, but then I felt my legs give way and I fainted again.”

The Northern Alliance commander General Mohammed Daoud said only 13 people were killed in Khanabad when one bomb went astray. That claim is patently untrue.

The cluster bombs, innocuous-looking yellow tubes, littered the fields and roads around the town. “Are they dangerous?” a returning refugee asked us. The answer lay bleeding by the roadside: 15-year-old Habibullah with his stomach torn open, Nur Mohammed, the old man, moaning in agony.

The two, both returning refugees, were taken to hospital, but most of the doctors had fled.Habibullah was in serious condition, and when he reached a hospital in the next town the doctors there were not sure he would live. Nur Mohammed was treated by the only doctor in Khanabad, Gholam Rasul Talash. It was he who gave us the figure of 100 civilian deaths. It was entirely consistent with the number of bombed houses.

There was no clue as to why the Americans decided to bomb residential areas of Khanabad. Some refugees said that foreign Taliban fighters had been hiding inside the houses – but the people we met said that was not true. There was a Taliban barracks nearby, but it appeared to be unharmed.

Meanwhile, Mr Khan stood blinking in the sun. His wife and six of his children had been killed in an instant by an American bomb. “What do I do now?” he asked. “I just don't know.”

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