The Nation.



The Others

By Howard Zinn

This article appeared in the February 11, 2002 edition of The Nation.

January 24, 2002

The report continued:

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"The hospital's morgue received 17 bodies last weekend, and officials here estimate at least 89 civilians were killed in several villages. In the hospital yesterday, a bomb's damage could be chronicled in the life of one family. A bomb had killed the father, Faisal Karim. In one bed was his wife, Mustafa Jama, who had severe head injuries.... Around her, six of her children were in bandages.... One of them, Zahidullah, 8, lay in a coma."

In the New York Times, Barry Bearak, reporting December 15 from the village of Madoo, Afghanistan, tells of the destruction of fifteen houses and their occupants. "'In the night, as we slept, they dropped the bombs on us,' said Paira Gul, a young man whose eyes were aflame with bitterness. His sisters and their families had perished, he said.... The houses were small, the bombing precise. No structure escaped the thundering havoc. Fifteen houses, 15 ruins.... 'Most of the dead are children,' Tor Tul said."

Another Times reporter, C.J. Chivers, writing from the village of Charykari on December 12, reported "a terrifying and rolling barrage that the villagers believe was the payload of an American B-52.... The villagers say 30 people died.... One man, Muhibullah, 40, led the way through his yard and showed three unexploded cluster bombs he is afraid to touch. A fourth was not a dud. It landed near his porch. 'My son was sitting there...the metal went inside him.' The boy, Zumarai, 5, is in a hospital in Kunduz, with wounds to leg and abdomen. His sister, Sharpari, 10, was killed. 'The United States killed my daughter and injured my son,' Mr. Muhibullah said. 'Six of my cows were destroyed and all of my wheat and rice was burned. I am very angry. I miss my daughter.'"

From the Washington Post, October 24, from Peshawar, Pakistan, by Pamela Constable: "Sardar, a taxi driver and father of 12, said his family had spent night after night listening to the bombing in their community south of Kabul. One night during the first week, he said, a bomb aimed at a nearby radio station struck a house, killing all five members of the family living there. 'There was no sign of a home left,' he said. 'We just collected the pieces of bodies and buried them.'"

Reporter Catherine Philp of the Times of London, reporting October 25 from Quetta, Pakistan: "It was not long after 7 pm on Sunday when the bombs began to fall over the outskirts of Torai village.... Rushing outside, Mauroof saw a massive fireball. Morning brought an end to the bombing and...a neighbor arrived to tell him that some 20 villagers had been killed in the blasts, among them ten of his relatives. 'I saw the body of one of my brothers-in-law being pulled from the debris,' Mauroof said. 'The lower part of his body had been blown away. Some of the other bodies were unrecognizable. There were heads missing and arms blown off....' The roll call of the dead read like an invitation list to a family wedding: his mother-in-law, two sisters-in-law, three brothers-in-law, and four of his sister's five young children, two girls and two boys, all under the age of eight."

Human Rights Watch report, October 26: "Twenty-five-year-old Samiullah...rushed home to rescue his family.... he found the bodies of his twenty-year-old wife and three of his children: Mohibullah, aged six; Harifullah, aged three; and Bibi Aysha, aged one.... Also killed were his two brothers, Nasiullah, aged eight, and Ghaziullah, aged six, as well as two of his sisters, aged fourteen and eleven."

From Reuters, October 28, Sayed Salahuddin reporting from Kabul: "A U.S. bomb flattened a flimsy mud-brick home in Kabul Sunday, blowing apart seven children as they ate breakfast with their father.... Sobs racked the body of a middle-aged man as he cradled the head of his baby, its dust-covered body dressed only in a blue diaper, lying beside the bodies of three other children, their colorful clothes layered with debris from their shattered homes."

About Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn is the author of A People’s History of the United States and, most recently, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress. more...

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