October 30, 2001	Tuesday	Shaba'an 12, 1422

GANIKHEL (Afghanistan): He squatted in the dirt, barefoot, in grimy grey clothes and a golden cap. The noonday sun was fierce but Mezhzakhan was shivering uncontrollably. He had been shivering for 20 hours, ever since the clock stopped in his house, when the American bomb fell and killed his wife.

Mezhzakhan had never met an American, only seen their aircraft as specks in the sky overhead. But he had heard over the radio that they were on his side, and against the Taliban.

Now, with his wife Koko Gol buried on Sunday, with his two children, his mother and his brother injured in hospital, he was in shock, desolate and inconsolable. Asked if he felt hostile towards the US, he said: “Why not? My wife is dead. The Americans destroyed our family. What should I do? They should bomb the enemy. Not us.”

The bomb struck when Koko Gol, 30, was in the house sewing clothes for her brother-in-law’s wedding in two day’s time when she was killed. Her husband was a short distance away, tending the sheep. “I heard the explosion and ran towards the house,” said Mezhzakhan. “I ran home and I saw everyone under the clay, under the collapsed roof. We began to pull out our dead and wounded.”

Among the injured were Mezhzakhan’s five-year-old son and two and a half-year-old daughter. They endured a 90-minute drive to the nearest thing to a proper hospital in the area, on unpaved roads up the Panjshir valley. Estimates of the number of injured varied, but there are reports of 11, from two families - both displaced from other nearby villages - living in the house.

The single bomb reduced the central part of the house to mounds of earthy lumps and dust. Among the rubble was a twisted metal fragment of the bomb casing and a swivelling fin from the bomb tail, the tell-tale sign that it was from a US aircraft and that it was guided, by a so-called precision weapon.

Koko Gol’s body was borne, decked in flowers, to the burial place in the village cemetery. After she was buried, a local elder, Kamaruddin, addressed a crowd of male peasants His words, to an anti-Taliban audience make uncomfortable listening for the west.

“A woman has been killed. She had wishes in life, but we must think of Allah, and how we are subordinate to his will,” he said. “The Americans come here, drop their bombs on Afghanistan and kill innocent people. We cannot condone this, although we ourselves are guilty. We were the ones to invite them here.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.