Targeting a suspected ISIS-K suicide bomber than allegedly posed an imminent threat to the airport, US Central Command organized an airstrike of the US armed forces in Kabul on Sunday, killing nine people of a single family in the process, including six children the youngest of which was two years old, CNN reports.
The drone strike blasted a vehicle with explosives in Kabul that the militants of the Islamic State Khorasan intended to use in a terror attack, destroying at the same time another two vehicles and partially demolishing a residential building.
According to the CBS report, the size of the secondary explosion suggests that it didn’t just kill a suicide bomber riding in the car but destroyed a fully-loaded car bomb though it’s still unclear if the vehicle was intended to be a car bomb or if the suicide bomber was just using it for transport.
US central command spokesman Capt. Bill Urban acknowledged later there are reports of civil casualties as a result of the drone strike, noting that they’re still assessing the results of this strike and that it’s still unclear what may have happened with the US military continuing the investigation.
A brother of one of the dead told a local journalist that drone attack destroyed a family home of ordinary people with no affiliation whatsoever with ISIS or Daesh.
The attack in Kabul’s Khaje Bughra neighborhood was the second drone strike by US forces targeting the ISIS-K terror group in the last three days. Previously on Saturday, US Army Maj. Gen. William Taylor confirmed that a US airstrike in the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan killed two Daesh-K leaders and injured another one though he has not disclosed the identities of the targets.
Meanwhile, state-run Chinese broadcaster CGTN quoted Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid condemning the US airstrikes in Kabul. He noted that the US should have reported to them any potential threat instead of conducting an arbitrary attack that has resulted in civilian casualties, and emphasized that arbitrary attacks are illegal in other countries.
Abdulhaq Wasiq, a member of the Taliban’s political office, has said earlier that the US is exaggerating the presence of the IS in Afghanistan and condemned the strikes saying they’re against the Doha agreement they’ve signed with the Americans according to which the US is not allowed to interfere in Afghanistan affairs after their withdrawal.
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