[explosion] In one of the final
acts of its 20-year war in Afghanistan,
the United States fired a missile from a
drone at a car in Kabul. It was parked in the
courtyard of a home, and the explosion
killed 10 people, including 43-year-old
Zemari Ahmadi and seven children,
according to his family. The Pentagon claimed
that Ahmadi was a facilitator for
the Islamic State, and that his car was
packed with explosives, posing an imminent
threat to U.S. troops guarding the evacuation
at the Kabul airport. “The procedures were
correctly followed, and it was a righteous strike.” What the military
apparently didn’t know was that Ahmadi was
a longtime aid worker, who colleagues
and family members said spent the hours before he
died running office errands, and ended his day by pulling
up to his house. Soon after, his Toyota was
hit with a 20-pound Hellfire missile. What was interpreted
as the suspicious moves of a terrorist may have
just been an average day in his life.
And it’s possible
that what the military saw Ahmadi loading into his
car were water canisters he was bringing
home to his family — not explosives. Using never-before seen
security camera footage of Ahmadi, interviews with
his family, co-workers and witnesses, we will piece together
for the first time his movements in the hours
before he was killed. Zemari Ahmadi was an
electrical engineer by training. For 14 years, he had worked for
the Kabul office of Nutrition and Education
International. “NEI established a total of 11
soybean processing plants in Afghanistan.” It’s a California based NGO
that fights malnutrition. On most days, he drove one of the company’s
white Toyota corollas, taking his colleagues
to and from work and distributing the
NGO’s food to Afghans displaced by the war. Only three days
before Ahmadi was killed, 13 U.S. troops and more
than 170 Afghan civilians died in an Islamic State
suicide attack at the airport. The military had given
lower-level commanders the authority to order
airstrikes earlier in the evacuation,
and they were bracing for what they feared
was another imminent attack. To reconstruct Ahmadi’s
movements on Aug. 29, in the hours before
he was killed, The Times pieced together
the security camera footage from his office,
with interviews with more than a dozen of
Ahmadi’s colleagues and family members.
Ahmadi appears to have
left his home around 9 a.m. He then picked up a colleague
and his boss’s laptop near his house. It’s around this time that
the U.S. military claimed it observed a white sedan
leaving an alleged Islamic State safehouse, around five kilometers
northwest of the airport. That’s why the
U.S. military said they tracked Ahmadi’s
Corolla that day. They also said they
intercepted communications from the safehouse,
instructing the car to make several stops. But every colleague
who rode with Ahmadi that day said what the
military interpreted as a series of
suspicious moves was just a typical
day in his life.
After Ahmadi picked up
another colleague, the three stopped to get
breakfast, and at 9:35 a.m., they arrived at the
N.G.O.’s office. Later that morning, Ahmadi
drove some of his co-workers to a Taliban-occupied
police station to get permission for
future food distribution at a new displacement camp. At around 2 p.m., Ahmadi and his colleagues
returned to the office. The security camera footage
we obtained from the office is crucial to understanding
what happens next. The camera’s timestamp is
off, but we went to the office and verified the time.
We also matched an exact
scene from the footage with a timestamp
satellite image to confirm it was accurate. A 2:35 p.m., Ahmadi
pulls out a hose, and then he and a co-worker
fill empty containers with water. Earlier that morning,
we saw Ahmadi bring these same empty plastic
containers to the office. There was a water shortage
in his neighborhood, his family said, so he regularly brought
water home from the office. At around 3:38 p.m.,
a colleague moves Ahmadi’s car
further into the driveway. A senior U.S. official
told us that at roughly the same time,
the military saw Ahmadi’s car pull
into an unknown compound 8 to 12 kilometers
southwest of the airport. That overlaps with the
location of the NGO’s office, which we believe is
what the military called an unknown compound.
With the workday
ending, an employee switched off the office
generator and the feed from the camera ends. We don’t have footage of
the moments that followed. But it’s at this
time, the military said that its drone
feed showed four men gingerly loading wrapped
packages into the car. Officials said they couldn’t
tell what was inside them. This footage from
earlier in the day shows what the men said they
were carrying — their laptops one in a plastic
shopping bag. And the only things in the
trunk, Ahmadi’s co-workers said, were the water containers. Ahmadi dropped each
one of them off, then drove to his home
in a dense neighborhood near the airport. He backed into the
home’s small courtyard. Children surrounded the car,
according to his brother. A U.S. official
said the military feared the car would
leave again, and go into an even more crowded
street or to the airport itself.
The drone operators, who
hadn’t been watching Ahmadi’s home at all that day, quickly
scanned the courtyard and said they saw only
one adult male talking to the driver and no children. They decided this was
the moment to strike. A U.S. official told us
that the strike on Ahmadi’s car was conducted
by an MQ-9 Reaper drone that fired a single
Hellfire missile with a 20-pound warhead. We found remnants of the
missile, which experts said matched a Hellfire at
the scene of the attack. In the days after the attack,
the Pentagon repeatedly claimed that the
missile strike set off other explosions, and
that these likely killed the civilians
in the courtyard. “Significant secondary
explosions from the targeted vehicle
indicated the presence of a substantial amount
of explosive material.” “Because there were
secondary explosions, there’s a reasonable conclusion to be made that there was
explosives in that vehicle.” But a senior military
official later told us that it was only
possible to probable that explosives in the
car caused another blast. We gathered photos and
videos of the scene taken by journalists and visited
the courtyard multiple times.
We shared the evidence
with three weapons experts who said the damage was
consistent with the impact of a Hellfire missile. They pointed to
the small crater beneath Ahmadi’s car and the
damage from the metal fragments of the warhead. This plastic melted as
a result of a car fire triggered by the
missile strike. All three experts also
pointed out what was missing: any evidence of the large
secondary explosions described by the Pentagon. No collapsed or
blown-out walls, including next to the trunk
with the alleged explosives. No sign that a second car
parked in the courtyard was overturned
by a large blast. No destroyed vegetation. All of this matches what
eyewitnesses told us, that a single missile exploded
and triggered a large fire.
There is one final detail
visible in the wreckage: containers identical
to the ones that Ahmadi and his
colleague filled with water and loaded into his trunk
before heading home. Even though the military
said the drone team watched the car for eight
hours that day, a senior official
also said they weren’t aware of any
water containers. The Pentagon has not
provided The Times with evidence of explosives
in Ahmadi’s vehicle or shared what they say is the
intelligence that linked him to the Islamic State. But the morning after
the U.S. killed Ahmadi, the Islamic State
did launch rockets at the airport from a
residential area Ahmadi had driven through
the previous day. And the vehicle
they used … … was a white Toyota. The U.S. military has
so far acknowledged only three civilian
deaths from its strike, and says there is an
investigation underway. They have also admitted
to knowing nothing about Ahmadi before killing him,
leading them to interpret the work of an
engineer at a U.S. NGO as that of an
Islamic State terrorist. Four days before
Ahmadi was killed, his employer had
applied for his family to receive refugee
resettlement in the United States.
At the time of
the strike, they were still awaiting approval. Looking to the U.S.
for protection, they instead became
some of the last victims in America’s longest war. “Hi, I’m Evan, one
of the producers on this story. Our latest
visual investigation began with word on social
media of an explosion near Kabul airport. It turned out that
this was a U.S. drone strike, one of the final
acts in the 20-year war in Afghanistan. Our goal was to fill in
the gaps in the Pentagon’s version of events. We analyzed exclusive
security camera footage, and combined it with
eyewitness accounts and expert analysis of
the strike aftermath. You can see more of
our investigations by signing up for
our newsletter.”.
