| Granai airstrike | |||||
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| Part of the War in Afghanistan (2001–2021) | |||||
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| Estimate: 86–147 killed, mostly women and children | |||||
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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 (Pashto: گرانای, also Romanized Garani, Gerani, Granay)[1]inFarah Province, south of Herat, Afghanistan.[2][3][4][5][6]
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".[7][8][9]
The Afghan government said that around 140 civilians were killed, of whom 22 were adult males and 93 were children.[3][4] Afghanistan's top rights body has said 97 civilians were killed, most of them children.[3] Other estimates range from 86 to 147 civilians killed.[7][10] An earlier probe by the US military had said that 20–30 civilians were killed along with 60–65 insurgents.[3] A partially released American inquiry stated "no one will ever be able conclusively to determine the number of civilian casualties that occurred".[7] The Australian had said that the airstrike resulted in "one of the highest civilian death tolls from Western military action since foreign forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001".[11]
ACombat 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.[7][12]
By May 2010, WikiLeaks had an encrypted copy of the video it had received from then U.S. Army Specialist Chelsea Manning and was attempting to decrypt it.[13][14][15] 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."[16]
Assange said WikiLeaks no longer had the video due to former spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg deleting it and other files when he left WikiLeaks in September 2010 and a Swedish Intelligence operation conducted in September 2010 in which other copies of the video were also lost.[16][17][18]
{{cite web}}: |first1= has generic name (help)
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