GUEST BLOGGER: Civilians Flee to Kandahar City After ISAF Aerial Bombing

Posted By: Rebecca W., Erica in Afghanistan

It was 2am when the aerial bombardment started. Ahmed described to me, in an interview in the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) office in Kandahar, how he and has family huddled together behind a wall. “We said that if we were going to die, we would die together.” The bombing by ISAF troops continued for two hours. Nine of Ahmed’s neighbors died and eleven civilians were injured, including three of Ahmed’s family members: his mother and his two brothers.

Ahmed

When the bombing finally ended, Ahmed grabbed his family members, found a bus and sent them to Kandahar city. He and his neighbors then tried to get the badly injured and dying to a hospital. In one of the houses, five family members were dead. The head of this household pulled his son from the rubble. His son was crying, saying “I’m cold, I’m so cold.” Ahmed found a blanket and put it over the boy, but he died not long afterwards.

The coalition troops had been told that the Taliban were hiding in Ahmed’s village. This is why the bombing had targeted near these civilian homes. But Ahmed told me that when the land troops came after the air strike, they found no Taliban and only civilians. The foreign troops therefore promised to compensate Ahmed and his neighbors. But they said that they would pay only for the dead and not for the livestock and land that had been lost.

GUEST BLOGGER: Fatal Trip to the Hairdressers in Kandahar City

Posted By: Rebecca W., working with CIVIC’s Erica in Afghanistan

At 3pm on July 22, 2006, Amanullah sent his ten-year old son to get a much-needed haircut. As usual, the father and son had been working since the morning selling ice-cream from their cart. This day, however, changed that routine forever. As his son reached the hairdressers, a suicide bomber exploded a car-full of explosives that were directed at a convoy of Canadian troops. Eight civilians, including Amanullah’s son, were killed.

Amanullah immediately ran over to help his son. A second suicide bomb then exploded and shrapnel became embedded in Amanullah’s feet, legs and arms. Since that day, Amanullah has found it almost impossible to support his family of six women and small children. He no longer has an assistant to help him with the ice-cream cart and his injuries make it difficult for him to undertake the hard physical labor required to make and sell ice-cream.

Amanullah lost his son to a suicide bomber targeting Canadian troops

GUEST BLOGGER: Grieving a Son in Kandahar – Part 1

Posted By: Rebecca W., working with CIVIC’s Erica in Afghanistan

Ahmed Sultani is a small 70-year old man with a soft-spoken voice and lines etched deeply into his tanned face. On July 22, 2006, his 18-year old son, Zalmai, was killed by a suicide bomber who had been targeting Canadian troops in the centre of Kandahar city. In this attack, twelve civilians were killed and twenty-eight were injured. Ahmed told me how his neighbors came to his house in a village outside Kandahar to tell him that his son was dead. The women of the house started screaming and wailing in grief. Ahmed rushed down to the city and found his son “on the ground and he was torn up and burned and we took him. Half his body was missing.”

I asked him what he missed most about his son and his eyes filled with tears. “Every time I think about him, my heart goes to pieces. I cry hard. I miss everything about him. He was a good son. He was married and he had one son and then another baby was on the way when he was killed. Now he has another son but he never saw this son.”

GUEST BLOGGER: Kandahar Field-Visit, Suicide Bomber Attack and the Daily Threat for Civilians

Posted By: Rebecca W., working with CIVIC’s Erica in Afghanistan

[Written 7/19/08] Driving from Kandahar Air Field into the city, the difficult security situation in Kandahar and the severe challenges facing civilians become immediately apparent. Squashed in the back of an armored vehicle and wearing a bullet-proof vest, I saw the wreckage caused by a suicide bomber who’d exploded himself only an hour earlier. It was a tense environment – and the civilian population has to deal with it day after day. There is at least one suicide bomb attack every week here.  In February, a suicide bomber killed 80 people at an event just outside the city. I asked my Afghan driver who was born and raised in Kandahar how he and his family coped in this environment. He sighed, shook his head and told me how the women always make an extra effort to kiss their fathers, husbands, sons and brothers goodbye. “The women never know if their men will return,” he said. “Just stepping outside is a risk. But we have to go out. We cannot be trapped inside like animals.” Gesturing towards the site of the suicide bombing, he added: “Why did he blow himself up here? There are no soldiers here. Just poor people trying to make enough money to feed their families. Tonight in my city there are even more mothers and wives left to grieve.”

Herat and a meeting with survivors…

Posted By: Erica

We arrived in Herat today — the largest city in Western region of Afghanistan, not far from the Iranian border — where we met with the Regional Command West (RCWest), the regional headquarters for ISAF. RCWest has been trying to use money from the Post-Operations Humanitarian Relief Fund [read our recent press release] to get emergency relief to different areas of the province that are suffering the effects of recent and ongoing operations. We also met with the Italian Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), which head up medium- to long-term development and reconstruction projects for the province. It was striking how dedicated and involved these CIMIC (Civil Military Coordinators) were in finding ways for the international forces to bring emergency relief, stabilization and reconstruction support to the Western region.

In complete and tragic contrast, though, I then ended my day by meeting several survivors of the July 17 US bomb strike on the Zerkoh community of Shindand province. The site of the bombing is still too insecure to know the final damage toll – residents I interviewed said that military forces still prevented them from returning to see the damage to their homes and communities. Initial estimates, though, suggest as many as 50 civilians may have been killed. The same community was hit in April 2007 by US air strikes, killing an estimated 59 civilians, injuring 62, and destroying or severely damaging an estimated 110 houses.

Civilian losses like these in one stroke can undo all the good intentions of the CIMIC teams at RCWest or the PRTs. I asked one of the civilian survivors what his impression was of international forces after the recent bombing of his community, “I used to think that [the international forces] would not use force on civilian people. Now I see that it has changed. They are killing all people; they don’t care if it is civilians or the bad guys. They think all Afghans are the same. They see it all from the same lens.”