Wednesday, March 9, 2011

NATO helicopters slaughtered innocent children in Afghanistan

This is a week old, but it's the first time I read about it in detail:
Nine boys collecting firewood to heat their homes in the eastern Afghanistan mountains were killed by NATO helicopter gunners who mistook them for insurgents, according to a statement on Wednesday by NATO, which apologized for the mistake.

The boys, who were 9 to 15 years old, were attacked on Tuesday in what amounted to one of the war’s worst cases of mistaken killings by foreign-led forces. The victims included two sets of brothers. A 10th boy survived. ...

“As soon as we heard about the attack on the village’s children, all the village men rushed to the mountains to find out what really happened,” said Ashabuddin, a shopkeeper from Manogai, a nearby village, whose nephew Khalid was among those killed.

“Finally we found the dead bodies. Some of the dead bodies were really badly chopped up by the rockets,” he said. “The head of a child was missing. Others were missing limbs. We tried to find the body pieces and put them together.” ...

President Hamid Karzai, who was in London for an official visit, condemned the attack “in the strongest terms possible.” ...

More than 200 people gathered in Nanglam on Wednesday to protest the boys’ deaths, witnesses said. Waving white flags, they shouted “Death, death to America!” and “Death to Obama and his colleagues and associates!”
Shooting innocent children—what a great way to "win the hearts and minds" of the Afghan people.

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