“This strike was taken in the earnest belief that it would prevent an imminent threat to our forces and the evacuees at the airport, but it was a mistake and I offer my sincere apology,” U.S. General Kenneth McKenzie, commander of the U.S. General Command, said Friday.
The U.S. had originally said that the strike had killed ISIS suicide bombers who had planned on attacking the international airport in Kabul.
In response, Omar wrote, “‘Sorry’ isn’t enough. Thousands have been killed in covert, unaccountable drone strikes over the past two decades. We should be demanding accountability for anyone involved in this and a full inquiry into this and the entire drone program.”
“We owe it to the families of victims to acknowledge these crimes, compensate the families, and allow international criminal investigations into these attacks,” she wrote in a follow-up tweet.
McEnany, the White House press secretary under former President Donald Trump, wrote, “So the U.S. drone strike did NOT kill any ISIS-K but did kill 10 innocent civilians, including 7 children. Unbelievable. The Biden administration is a sad, tragic mess and an utter embarrassment on the world stage!”
Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz wrote, “The Biden Afghanistan catastrophe keeps getting worse. This raises two obvious Qs: Did the Taliban provide the faulty ‘intel’ that led to the Biden admin killing 10 innocent civilians, including 7 children? If so, why did Biden trust the Taliban?”
Political commentator Cenk Uygur wrote, “All the reporters who are outraged by Pentagon drone strike that killed civilians, are you guys not aware we’ve been killing civilians with drone strikes for decades? How is this news to you that you are all of a sudden bothered by it? Because almost none of you objected before.”
In a follow-up tweet, he wrote, “Interestingly, this outrage comes as a continuation of corporate media rage over the withdrawal from a war. This outrage did not at all exist in the middle of those wars but now ‘reporters’ are p**sed that the Pentagon makes mistakes? Please.”
Reporter Matthew Yglesias wrote, “The cynic in me can’t help but note that the one errant drone strike at the close of the Afghan War seems to have attracted roughly as much scrutiny as all strikes during the previous ten years combined.”
Journalist Emran Feroz wrote, “I covered countless US drone strikes and civial [sic] casualties during the last years. Not a single time, Washington acknowledged that it murdered civilians. Why? Because strikes mostly took place in rural Afghanistan and not in Kabul.”
The now-deceased target of the drone strike was Zemari Ahmadi, a 43-year-old electrical engineer for Nutrition and Education International, a California-based group doing work in Afghanistan. The strike killed members of the Ahmadi family, including seven children.
Newsweek contacted Omar’s office for comment.
