KABUL, Feb 13: Grieving and injured victims of the ongoing US bombing campaign in Afghanistan gathered outside the American embassy in Kabul on Wednesday to demand compensation for their pain, misery and medical expenses.
Among those seeking help were 21-year-old Azizullah, whose left leg was sliced off by a piece of flying shrapnel, and 34-year-old Abdul Bashir, who lost “my beautiful daughter” when a bomb exploded near where she was playing in the street in October.
The group of about 20, many of them women, gathered outside the US embassy to press their claims and represent just a fraction of the thousands of Afghan civilians human rights groups estimate have been affected by the aerial bombardment.
Military officials quoted by the New York Times say that at least 18,000 bombs, missiles and other ordnance have been used in the Afghanistan campaign, more than 60 percent of them precision guided.
Despite that, many of the bombs have clearly dropped wide.
Orfa Abdulahmad was one victim and she tearfully told reporters how she lost eight members of her family when her home was hit by a wayward bomb soon after the air raids began.
And Azizullah, 21, a painter, also said he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time about midnight on Oct 20.
“I got up to go to the outside toilet when a bomb fell on a house a few doors away,” he said, adding that he believed US warplanes had been trying to hit nearby Kabul airport.
“There was a loud explosion and a piece of shrapnel from the bomb flew through the air and hit my leg.”
He said he would like the US government to buy him an artificial leg and to help compensate him for loss of earnings.
“Our house was destroyed. I have eight people in my family to support but I cannot work. I was not Al Qaeda nor Taliban. The US should help me.”
Bashir, 48, meanwhile, can’t stop talking about his beloved five-year-old daughter, Zaniulla, who was killed when a bomb aimed at a Taliban tank post on a nearby hill fell instead in front of an apartment block in northern Kabul on Oct 7.
Since then, he said his wife, Shakilla, had suffered nervous disorders while their two other children wake up screaming in the night.
The demands for compensation come amid a new outcry over the civilian toll of the bombing campaign.
Afghan officials have said a CIA missile strike last week in eastern Khost province killed three poor villagers, not Al Qaeda fighters, as the Pentagon has suggested.
The Pentagon has defended the strike near Zhawar Kili as “appropriate”, but admits it does not know who was killed.
The US government has set aside one million dollars to pay medical expenses of Afghans who have lost limbs in the bombing.—AFP