Granai airstrike

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The Granai airstrike, sometimes called the Granai massacre, refers to the killing of approximately 86 to 147 Afghan civilians by an airstrike by a US Air Force B-1 Bomber on May 4, 2009, in the village of Granai (sometimes spelled Garani or Gerani) in Farah Province, south of Herat, Afghanistan.[1][2][3][4][5]

The United States admitted significant errors were made in carrying out the airstrike, stating "the inability to discern the presence of civilians and avoid and/or minimize accompanying collateral damage resulted in the unintended consequence of civilian casualties".[6][7][8]

The Afghan government has said that around 140 civilians were killed, of whom 22 were adult males and 93 were children.[2][3] Afghanistan's top rights body has said 97 civilians were killed, most of them children.[2] Other estimates range from 86 to 147 civilians killed.[6][9] An earlier probe by the US military had said that 20–30 civilians were killed along with 60–65 insurgents.[2] A partially released American inquiry stated "no one will ever be able conclusively to determine the number of civilian casualties that occurred".[6] The Australian has said that the airstrike resulted in "one of the highest civilian death tolls from Western military action since foreign forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001".[10]

Airstrike video

A combat camera video of the airstrike was made by the bomber aircraft involved. When the Pentagon investigation on the incident was released in 2009, it did not include the video.[6][11] In 2010, Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower in the Pentagon Papers case, called for President Obama to release the video of the airstrike online.[12][13]

By May 2010, WikiLeaks had an encrypted copy of the video it had received from U.S. Army Private Chelsea Manning and was attempting to decrypt it.[14][15][16] In a March 2013 statement, Julian Assange disputed prior news reports claiming WikiLeaks had been unable to decrypt the file and alleged that the video "documented a massacre, a war crime."[17] Assange said WikiLeaks no longer had the video due to former spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg deleting it along with other files when he left WikiLeaks in September 2010.[17]

See also

References

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External links

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  • Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.. (Archived at WebCite)

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