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ICFI/SEP/IWA-RFC: US pulls last of its troops from Afghanistan after chaotic evacuation [wsws.org]

The bloody legacy of the 20-year US intervention was underscored on the eve of the final evacuation with a “preemptive” drone strike carried out against what the US military had claimed was a car carrying a suicide bomber. It wiped out 10 Afghan civilians, nine of them from the same family. The victims included seven children aged 2 to 12 along with their father and brother—a 19-year-old student—and a neighbor....

The drone massacre constitutes one more in a countless number of such atrocities carried out in the 20-year neocolonial war and occupation that has ravaged Afghanistan....

Reports from Kabul paint a picture of horror at the site of the drone strike. Outraged neighbors of the slaughtered Ahmadi family told Al Jazeera of “human flesh stuck to the walls. Bones fallen into bushes. Walls stained with blood.” One neighbor said of one of the youngest children killed, “We only found his legs.”

The children killed in the attack included three two-year-olds and two three-year-olds.

The missile struck just as the children’s father returned from work and they ran out to his car to greet him.

The father, Zemarai, had worked for the aid agency Nutrition and Education International, resulting in the family’s receiving a US Special Immigrant Visa. They had packed their bags and were waiting for a call telling them to go to the Kabul airport. The other adult killed in the strike was a former member of the Afghan National Army.

Ramin Yousufi, a relative of the slaughtered family, told the BBC that the drone strike had brought “hell in our lives.”

“Why did they kill our family, our children?” he asked, sobbing. “Seven children burned up. We can’t identify them from their faces, their bodies.”