A ‘Righteous Strike’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When he visited the site of an American drone strike in Kabul, Matthieu Aikins, a Times journalist, knew something wasn’t adding up. He uncovered a story that was quite different from the one offered up by the United States military. We follow The Times’s investigation and how it forced the military to acknowledge that the drone attack was a mistake. Guest: Matthieu Aikins, a writer based in Afghanistan for The New York Times.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobaro. This is a Daily.
0:10.8	The US military now says that a drone strike launched in the final hours of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan
0:18.9	was a quote, tragic mistake that killed 10 innocent civilians.
0:24.3	Today, I spoke with my colleague Matthew Agons about the Times investigation that helped force the military to acknowledge its deadly error.
0:42.3	It's Tuesday, September 21st.
0:46.3	Matt, where did this investigation begin?
0:54.3	So it all starts after ISIS suicide bombers killed almost 200 people at the airport in Kabul.
1:01.3	The US promised retaliation and on August 29th there's this blast near the airport, which the US claimed was a targeted strike against an ISIS facilitator who posed an imminent threat to US forces.
1:14.3	So the next morning, August 30th, we wake up early to go find the site of the strike.
1:24.3	So I get on my motorcycle. It's me and Jim Hoylebrook who's a photographer for the Times and my house main.
1:33.3	We drive out to the neighborhood and as I'm driving, I wonder what we're going to find.
1:39.3	They said this is an ISIS target. Is this going to be some kind of terrorist safehouse?
1:45.3	So we get to the neighborhood and we ask some local residents where the bombing was and they give us directions and we start going through these increasingly narrow alleyways.
1:56.3	Turn a corner and then down this narrow lane we can see a group of people gathered in front of this house.
2:02.3	So these are really crowded, densely packed neighborhood.
2:05.3	So we pull up, muzz new York Times system and introduce ourselves as journalists and they usher us into this courtyard that this little house is built around.
2:20.3	And in the courtyard is the twisted wreckage of a white Toyota crow. So clearly we're at the site.
2:28.3	And there's a couple dozen people gathered there, crowded in the street and into the yard and they were very distraught.
2:37.3	So as we've been killed in this right, they said 10 civilians had died in this explosion, including seven children.
2:44.3	Oh wow.
2:49.3	They started showing pictures of these children on their phones being like, does this look like ISIS to you?
2:55.3	They're holding up a picture of a kid.
	...

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