'Honest mistake': Pentagon says Kabul drone attack that killed civilians was not illegal

The US officials have been going back and forth about the drone strike in Kabul that killed 10 Afghan civilians, and now the Pentagon has claimed that the strike was legal.

On August 29, the US had carried out a drone strike in a residential area of Kabul, a few days after Taliban took over Afghanistan on August 15. At that time, the US officials had claimed that it was targeted at ISIS-K militants. However, after WION and other media houses started bringing out evidence that the strike had actually killed civilians, and not militants, the authorities revealed that the suspicions were true.

Authorities accepted that the strike had killed seven children and three adults — including a man who used to work for a US aid group.

However, now the Pentagon has claimed that even though the strike killed civilians and not militants, it was not an illegal strike. "The investigation found no violation of law, including the law of war. Execution errors combined with confirmation bias and communication breakdowns led to regrettable civilian casualties," Lieutenant General Sami Said, the inspector general for the US Air Force, said in a report.

Describing it as an 'honest mistake', he said that "it's not criminal conduct, random conduct, negligence" as the people involved in making these decisions honestly believed that "they were targeting an imminent strike".

He also clarified that the team had genuinely believed that the house was empty and there were no children in the compound at that time, but they were proven wrong.

"The intended target of the strike, the vehicle, its contents and occupant, were genuinely assessed at the time as an imminent threat to US forces and mission at Hamid Karzai International Airport,"the report said.

He also clarified that it was the correlation of intelligence to a specific house that may have gone wrong. "What likely broke down was not the intelligence but the correlation of that intelligence to a specific house," Said explained.

Said also admitted that one big mistake on part of the team was not finding the right car. "We actually never ended up tracking the actual Toyota Corolla,” he said. “We just didn’t pick up the Toyota Corolla that we believe we should have picked up."