A military response to last month’s attack in Afghanistan, which resulted in the deaths of 13 American service members, did not kill Islamic State group-affiliated militants, but a U.S. ally who was on his way to work, according to a report.
The Defense Department claimed on Aug. 29 that it conducted a drone strike on a vehicle that had “disrupted an imminent ISIS-K threat” believed to have been behind a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport.
In fact, a familiar face told us how it happened. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, told reporters during a Sept. 1 Pentagon media briefing that the drone strike was “righteous.”
“You have intel that ISIS-K is plotting another attack. The military spots a vehicle that you believe is full of — carrying explosives and we take this car out with a drone strike. And reports now say that we may have — that 10 civilians — as many as 10 civilians may have been — may have been killed,” Milley was asked by a reporter.
“Because of the urgent threat environment at the time, did preliminary assessments indicate that we may have rushed, relaxed or waived altogether some of the normal checks and balances that we do before a strike like that?” the reporter followed up.
The “woke,” Marx-reading general responded with confidence, noting that “there are others killed.”
“Who they are, we don’t know. We’ll try to sort through all of 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,” he said.
According to a stunning New York Times report which cited footage from before and after the strike, Milley and the others in charge of the botched Afghanistan exit killed an innocent man named Zemari Ahmadi who was an ally to U.S. forces and had no explosives in his Toyota Corolla when he was killed.
He was reportedly carrying containers of water because his neighbors needed it. That water was assumed to have been explosives, and the bags he carried which were deemed suspicious actually contained laptops, according to the Times. He was also surrounded by family.
Ahmadi actually worked for a U.S. nonprofit called Nutrition and Education International, which feeds people who are malnourished. Experts on weapons told the Times that there is zero evidence his car had any explosives inside and that the damage to the car and surrounding area was from a single Hellfire missile.
Times reporter Evan Hill shared videos from throughout the day of the attack in a Twitter thread.
The military said it believed Zemari Ahmadi’s white Toyota Corolla, which it tracked by drone for eight hours that day, was packed with explosives. Security camera video we obtained showed him loading it with water containers for his home. I'll detail our findings in this thread. pic.twitter.com/1hEaFBmcDo
— Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021
At around the time Ahmadi was picking up his colleagues, the U.S. military said it observed a white sedan emerge from an Islamic State safehouse near Ahmadi’s home, 5km northwest of the airport. Intercepted communications from the safehouse gave the sedan instructions, they said. pic.twitter.com/v7OUg1uRQF
— Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021
At around the time Ahmadi was picking up his colleagues, the U.S. military said it observed a white sedan emerge from an Islamic State safehouse near Ahmadi’s home, 5km northwest of the airport. Intercepted communications from the safehouse gave the sedan instructions, they said. pic.twitter.com/v7OUg1uRQF
— Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021
The Times reported concluded that the military was suspicious of the man’s movements on the day he was killed, when in fact, he was known to pick people up, drop them off and then go on and do it again for others. No vetting of his movements was conducted.
If the report is accurate, President Joe Biden’s “woke” military leadership responded to a tragedy they created at the Kabul airport by killing an innocent man who was out running errands for people who were in need. Biden simply created another tragedy.
When speaking of the drone strike on Aug. 31, Biden actually took a victory lap.
“We struck ISIS-K remotely, days after they murdered 13 of our service members and dozens of innocent Afghans,” he said, according to a White House transcript of his remarks. “And to ISIS-K: We are not done with you yet.”
“As Commander-in-Chief, I firmly believe the best path to guard our safety and our security lies in a tough, unforgiving, targeted, precise strategy that goes after terror where it is today, not where it was two decades ago,” he concluded. “That’s what’s in our national interest.”
Just to lay out how this all happened, again, Biden ordered the military out of Afghanistan, he put civilians and the troops who had to go back to the country in danger and then he cost 13 of those troops their lives.
In retaliation, Biden’s inept leadership managed to reportedly kill a man who might have been the least dangerous person in Kabul — along with potentially nine members of his family who were seeking asylum in the U.S.
That’s leaving out the fact that he abandoned American citizens in the country days later.