Fleeing U.S. Bombs, Villagers Found No Place to Hide

Missiles Killed 21 in Two Families, Survivors Say

By Molly Moore

Washington Post Foreign Service

Wednesday, February 13, 2002; Page A01

THORAI, Afghanistan, Feb. 12 -- On a dark dirt road in southern Afghanistan one night last October, 27 frightened villagers -- most of them young children -- sat huddled in a trailer, fleeing a U.S. bombing raid on a nearby town.

They heard two planes racing toward them.

"I saw a flash in the sky," said Radigul, 23, who recalled clutching her 18-month-old son as her four other youngsters pressed against her. "We were so afraid. We thought, 'They are going to hit us now.' There was no time to get off."

In an instant, a missile sliced through the front end of the trailer. Witnesses said the explosion that followed scattered the arms, hands and feet of children across the road.

Thirty minutes later, as rescuers struggled to carry the last of the injured and dead into a nearby house, two rockets slammed into the room where most had been taken, survivors said. Some bodies were thrown into a nearby stream, the rest buried under heaps of rock and dirt.

Interviews with a dozen villagers in this farming hamlet just outside the provincial capital of Tarin Kot paint a consistent picture of 30 chaotic minutes on the night of Oct. 21, when U.S. airplanes hit their intended targets with extraordinary precision. But instead of striking escaping Taliban or al Qaeda fighters, the missiles killed 21 members of two families -- 17 of them infants and other children, according to survivors.

Today, the room where the last rockets hit is nothing more than a heap of rocks and dirt in the midst of an otherwise undamaged house. Its mud walls are intact, sheep and cattle are penned safely in the courtyard, and debris from the attack has been carefully gathered by the house's owner. A few hundred yards up the road, the trailer that was hit still bears a 20-inch hole ripped by a missile.

A spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla., said today that photographs taken after the Oct. 21 attack show that the only target in the area was a Taliban command and control center and that all of the precision-guided bombs that were dropped hit the target. The spokesman, Army Lt. Col. Jim Yonts, said there is no record of munitions being dropped on a nearby police compound or on a trailer in Thorai.

"The site that we struck was in the Tarin Kot area," Yonts said. "Tarin Kot is a city. The facility that we struck was a suspected Taliban command and control facility. It was a compound outside the city. It was a compound that we believed held Taliban leadership.

"We struck that compound with precision-guided munitions, and I can tell you every one of our munitions hit the target," he added. "From the pre-strike imagery and the post-strike imagery, we can confirm that the facility that we struck was the only thing that we hit -- no other damage was done to anything else."

The account by the villagers of Thorai, a community of mud-walled farmhouses where families eke out livelihoods from the bone-dry earth, recalls other incidents in the U.S.-led military operation in Afghanistan, a war in which precision-guided missiles and bombs have almost always hit their targets but sometimes have killed the wrong people.

The number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan remains to be independently determined. The Taliban, the country's former rulers, put the number in the thousands, but anecdotal evidence indicates this estimate is inflated. At the same time, the Pentagon has played down reports of innocent Afghans being killed, insisting that the vast majority of airstrikes hit Taliban and al Qaeda targets.

"The Americans say they can see anything on the ground," said Fazal Rabi, 30, who said he lost 12 family members in the attacks, including two sons and a daughter. "These were children. We are not Mullah [Mohammad] Omar or Osama bin Laden, we are poor farmers."

At about 8 p.m. on Oct. 21, two weeks into the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan, U.S. warplanes bombed a Taliban military base in Tarin Kot. After dropping five bombs on the Taliban compound, the planes began attacking a police station across town.

In the village of Thorai, just over a half-mile from the police station across neat squares of wheat fields and fruit orchards, Rabi's family had begun to panic as the explosions seemed to be drawing nearer to their farmhouse, he recalled today.

"Please take us away," Rabi said his family pleaded.

"They'll only bomb the Taliban," Rabi assured them.

But Rabi relented and led his wife, five children and 10 other members of his extended family across their fields, down mud-walled lanes and along a farm road. They piled onto a metal trailer hitched to a small tractor, he said.

"We were trying to escape," said Rabi's wife, Radigul. "We thought we were going to safety."

Qudratullah, 22, recalled being jarred awake at about the same time by an explosion on the family compound a few fields over from Rabi's house. A rocket or small bomb, he said, had smashed into the carrot field.

Qudratullah said he led 11 family members, mostly women and children, toward the farm road. They spotted the trailer and were invited aboard. Qudratullah, like most of the men whose families fled their homes, returned to guard the farm compound.

A few hundred yards down the road, the tractor stopped and a boy dashed across the tilled fields to collect more relatives, witnesses said. At about that moment, the approaching airplanes droned overhead.

"The planes, they came so low," said Radigul. "We turned out the lights of the tractor so the plane couldn't see us."

One of the two planes fired a missile, Radigul said, and it hit precisely where most of her children and other youngsters were clustered, in the front of the trailer.

Across the fields, Rabi, who was on his way back to guard his house, heard the explosion and looked back in horror.

"Where the tractor was, I saw a big fire," Rabi said. "I ran to the tractor. The first thing I saw were a child's feet lying in the road. I looked at the trailer and I saw injured, I saw dead."

Salam Jan, 45, was awakened by the noise and clambered to the roof of his house, barely 100 feet away. "People were crying and shouting," he said. "I ran to help them." With his shawl, he said, he tried to beat out the fire on the trailer.

Other relatives raced to the scene. They scrambled to move most of the victims into Jan's house, but with the darkness, the blood and the screaming, some recalled, they often couldn't tell who was dead and who was alive.

Rabi said he found his wife unconscious and bleeding. His infant son and one daughter were also hurt. He could find no sign of his two other sons, age 3 and 7, or his 6-year-old daughter.

As several rescuers were debating whether to take victims into Tarin Kot for medical treatment, Jan said, he saw two planes approaching over his apple orchard. "Run! Run!" he shouted.

The planes unleased a pair of rockets, according to the witnesses, and the guest room housing many of the survivors collapsed in a massive pile of rocks, mud walls and rubble.

The next morning, daylight revealed a gruesome scene. Villagers said they found the missing children strewed across the road and nearby field. "Some feet were missing, some arms were missing, one body was torn in half," said Qudratullah.

Behind Jan's house, 45-year-old Mauladad said, there were "bodies lying everywhere. I hardly recognized my sister and nephew. I found my sister in the stream."

He and others began digging through the rubble with shovels and their bare hands.

They collected the bodies and body parts, wrapped them in shawls and blankets, and buried them on a hilltop overlooking the spot where the trailer had been hit. They buried 10 of the children in two graves.

When townspeople inspected the military base and police station that the U.S. warplanes first hit, they discovered that the few Taliban fighters who were at each location had fled unharmed.

Asked about reports of civilian deaths near Tarin Kot shortly after the incident, Pentagon officials dismissed the accounts as Taliban propaganda. On Oct. 24, the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, said: "On those two villages . . . I don't know exactly what you're talking about. But every instance of those kind of allegations, we can usually spot bomb craters near things. And when we make a mistake, we tell you when we make a mistake."