Villagers Tell of U.S. Bombing

On an October night two weeks after the U.S. bombing campaign started, 27 members of two extended families crowded onto a trailer hitched to a red tractor to ride to safety in the mountains. But warplanes attacked three times in 40 minutes, survivors and witnesses say, killing 17 children and four adults.

The first strike hit the trailer. Most survivors were taken to the guest house of a nearby home, nearly a dozen witnesses said. Half an hour later, two bombs slammed into the guest house, killing all the survivors inside, they said. Ten minutes after that, a plane dropped a final bomb on the trailer outside.

Of the original 27 passengers, only six survived: four who had been injured but were placed in a different room at the home, and two who were being cared for at a different house.

As the fighting in Afghanistan ebbs, details of U.S. successes and failures are slowly emerging. The bombing in this tiny village in south-central Afghanistan demonstrates the limits of spy satellites, unmanned observation planes and on-the-ground intelligence in a murky conflict in which Afghan forces regularly changed sides and enemies traveled on anything from donkeys to pickup trucks to tractors.

U.S. military officials say precision-guided munitions were dropped in the area Oct. 21, the day the Afghans say the attack occurred. But the Americans say they have no evidence that civilians were hit.

The victims’ relatives say most of the trailer’s passengers were children. Three of the six survivors are women, two are young girls, and one is a 1 1/2-year-old boy with a sliver of shrapnel in his foot.

“They say they can see everyone from the sky,” said one man, 22-year-old Qudratullah. “They said they wouldn’t kill civilians.”

Qudratullah lost a brother, a sister, a sister-in-law, two nieces and four nephews in the attack. The fact that he’s not certain where some of them are buried is an indication of the confusion of that night, which has yet to end for the families.

A quarter of a mile from where the tractor was hit, across a hard, unplanted wheat field, hundreds of strands of brightly colored ribbon, embroidered banners and the blast-scarred clothing of the dead wave in the wind at the cemetery.

Perhaps six children are buried under one pile of stones, relatives say, and four more under another. Many bodies were in pieces, they say, and because the villagers were worried that the planes would return, they interred them all by noon the next day.

But the planes never came back, people say. They don’t know why this collection of mud houses and desiccated farm fields was hit.

“We are alone here,” said Hayatullah, Qudratullah’s father and the patriarch of one of the village families, standing outside his mud farmhouse. “There is no house next to me, no Taliban, no Al Qaeda. . . . They hit civilians. They destroyed our lives. We miss our family.”

The bombs began falling about 8 p.m., first on a Taliban military compound less than two miles west, in Tarin Kowt, a day’s drive north of Kandahar and the capital of Oruzgan province.

The birthplace of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, Oruzgan had long been a Taliban stronghold, with many members of the regime’s leadership hailing from Tarin Kowt.

In late October, Tarin Kowt was a hot target for U.S. pilots. Army Lt. Col. Jim Yonts, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, said American forces attacked a compound near Tarin Kowt on Oct. 21 that had been identified by intelligence analysts as a Taliban command-and-control complex.

“Our indicators, through imagery post- and pre-strike, [do] not support the claim that families and children were killed,” Yonts said. “We don’t have any indications that this happened.”

Yonts said intelligence analysts had been tracking movements at the facility for several days before the strike. He said all the munitions destroyed their intended targets.

“This was a target that we identified early on,” Yonts said. “We tracked it and came back in and struck it.”

But Afghan troops loyal to the new government, who now occupy the compound, said Tuesday that most of the Taliban soldiers at the base had fled by the time the Americans attacked, knowing it would be targeted.

The 10 or 12 who stayed behind are believed to have escaped unharmed, despite the fact that bombs hit a mosque, a munitions storage area and barracks.

The families in Thorai, one led by Hayatullah, the other by a farmer named Abdul Qudus Khan, heard the bombs but worried little at first. Both homes are in the middle of fields, inaccessible even by car. There was nothing here to bomb, they reasoned.

But Fazal Rabi, 30, one of Khan’s sons, decided to get the family tractor and move women and children farther west into the mountains just in case. Rabi, who would stay to keep watch on his house, would lose a daughter, two sons, his mother, two sisters, two nieces, three brothers and a sister-in-law.

By the time Rabi had loaded his family members onto the trailer, Hayatullah and his son Qudratullah had decided to move most of their family members too. A bomb had just exploded 12 feet from Qudratullah’s bedroom, caving in much of the wall and blasting apart apricot trees with hunks of shrapnel that still litter the place.

Members of Hayatullah’s family climbed aboard the trailer and together the group began heading toward the mountains. Qudratullah, his father and some other men stayed behind.

When they were less than half a mile down the road, they heard the planes coming in from the west, from Tarin Kowt.

“I saw a flash in the sky,” said Radigul, 23, Rabi’s wife. “The planes came in so low. We turned out the lights on the tractor.”

The blackout didn’t help. The first blast hit the front of the trailer, where three of her children were sitting. When she woke--blind in her right eye and her right arm crippled--her children had already been in their shared graves for three days.

Salam Jan, who lives nearby, ran out to help. The men from both families also ran in the direction of the explosion, fearing the worst. Qudratullah shouted, “Ghani! Ghani!” as he ran. His older brother, Abdul Ghani, had been driving the tractor. Ghani had been blown well forward, but he was alive.

As fast as they could, villagers carried the dead and wounded in shawls and blankets into Jan’s guest house. When it filled up, they put four people in another room and two in a nearby house. They were the only six of the original 27 to survive.

As villagers treated the wounded and searched for more remains, two planes came in again, this time from the north. People at Jan’s house saw two streaks of light. This time, the guest house appeared to take a direct hit.

In a potato sack, Jan keeps pieces of the bomb, some plastic, some lightweight metal, some jagged iron. More are littered outside his house. The words “NO LIFT” can be seen on two pieces that appear to be part of the fins from a bomb.

Ten minutes after the guest house was hit, the final strike came, leaving a crater 10 feet in diameter, half in the road and half in Jan’s yard.

Several hundred people came to help dig graves in the hard earth and to pray. Most intact bodies were put in separate graves, while body parts were placed in one of the mass graves.

Infertile women now come to pray at the site, asking for a child. Brothers and husbands and daughters and wives tie ribbons and strings to the tall wooden poles that act as headstones.

Qudratullah can’t fathom why the U.S.--if it can tell who’s Taliban and who’s not from outer space and detect guns in buildings, as he’s heard--would bomb a tractor towing a trailer packed with women and children.

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Times staff writer Esther Schrader in Washington contributed to this report.