A year after the military targeted an aid worker whom it believed was a terrorist posing an imminent threat to U.S. troops in Afghanistan, almost all of his family members remain outside the United States despite a promise from the Biden administration to evacuate them.
Zemari Ahmadi, an Afghan working for Nutrition and Education International, was killed in the strike along with nine other family members, including seven children, on Aug. 29, 2021, when a series of false pieces of intelligence appeared to confirm to U.S. Central Command that he was an Islamic State fighter on the verge of carrying out an attack at Hamid Karzai International Airport, where U.S. forces were evacuating Afghans allies escaping the Taliban’s takeover.
The Pentagon said in the aftermath of the strike that it would evacuate Ahmadi’s family and compensate them, but only 11 of the 144 people included in the group have made it to the U.S., according to Brett Max Kaufman, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU who is representing the family and NEI. More than 30 remain in Afghanistan under threat from the Taliban.
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“Shamefully, today, only 11 of the 144 people the government promised to help and who we and our partners represent are in the United States. 32 of them are still awaiting evacuation in Afghanistan, increasingly hopeless by the day and under constant threat from the Taliban,” he said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “That some members of Zemari’s family have begun to pick up the pieces of their lives with a new start in America is undoubtedly good news. But the bottom line is that the government has not done enough, and many of our clients remain in danger.”
In an interview, Kaufman blamed the status on “a combination of error and bad luck and things out of the U.S. government’s control that have contributed to the situation we’re in now,” though he expressed optimism that “they’re going to be out soon.”
Roughly 100 of the 144 people on the evacuation list are family members, while the rest of them are NEI employees and their families. The first of the 11 who have resettled in the U.S. arrived around May, Kaufman said. The most recent was last month, while others remain in third-party countries awaiting immigration processing.
One of the reasons the Ahmadi family became a possible target for violence was the Department of Defense’s public confirmation that it would be offering the family compensation for their loss.
“One of the government’s early mistakes was, which it acknowledged, was sort of making public that it plans to compensate some of the victims of the strike and that led to real direct threats because there were lots of rumors going around about certain people having already received compensation and, or they were going to receive compensation and that made them sort of identifiable targets of bad actors in the country,” Kaufman continued.
Dr. Steven Kwon, the founder of Nutrition and Education International, a nonprofit organization dedicated to eradicating malnutrition globally, said in a statement, “It has been a year since a U.S. drone strike mistakenly killed Zemari Ahmadi, our ever kind, ever dedicated and loyal employee of 15 years, as well as three of his sons and six of his nieces and nephews. The strike affected scores of people forever.”
A State Department spokesperson said the NEI group “is very important to the U.S. government” and that officials “are involved in relocating” them in response to questions about how they’ll get the remaining members out of Afghanistan. The spokesperson added: “We will continue our efforts to facilitate the safe and orderly travel of U.S. citizens, LPRs, and other Afghan allies and their eligible family members. We will not be sharing details of these efforts.”
The strike, which top defense officials claimed was successful in its immediate aftermath, occurred three days after an ISIS-K operative detonated a suicide vest outside the gates of the airport, killing 13 U.S. service members and roughly 170 Afghans hoping to get on a flight out of Afghanistan. Biden administration officials stressed in its aftermath that future attacks were possible.
On Sept. 1, nearly a week after the strike, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reiterated to reporters that an “ISIS facilitator” was killed in the strike, which he called “righteous,” even though there had already been reports of civilian casualties. The strike that hit Ahmadi’s white Toyota that U.S. forces tracked for eight hours initiated a secondary explosion, which was likely caused by explosives in the car, Milley claimed, though an investigation concluded otherwise.
Lt. Gen. Sami Said, the U.S. Air Force’s inspector general, investigated the strike and concluded there were no illegalities, though he highlighted the role confirmation bias played in their intelligence gathering ahead of the strike. Confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret new information as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs, and in this case, it meant launching the strike with the inaccurate belief that Ahmadi was an imminent threat to U.S. troops.
Said, in response to questions in November about the supposed secondary explosion, acknowledged that it was “highly unlikely” that there were “any explosives in the car.”
“The investigation found no violation of law, including the law of war. It did find execution errors … combined with confirmation bias and communication breakdowns that regrettably led to civilian casualties,” he said.
Said explained his recommendations included “implementing procedures in a strike cell where if we find ourselves in a similar situation where we’re time-constrained conducting strikes very quickly because of the need to exercise self-defense in urban terrain and we’re trying to interpret or correlate intelligence to what we’re seeing in a rapid fashion, implementing procedures to mitigate the risk of confirmation bias.”
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Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin signed off on his conclusions, while then-Pentagon spokesman John Kirby announced on Dec. 13 that no military personnel would be punished for the botched strike.
Kaufman’s remarks, which come at the anniversary of the strike, are a departure from the ACLU’s strategy of not commenting publicly for most of the last year on the Ahmadi family’s status.
“For many months, we have beseeched the government at the highest levels, up to and including the president, to evacuate our clients, and have refrained from commenting publicly in order to respect the government’s efforts and protect our clients’ safety,” the statement continued. “But as the anniversary of the strike approaches, the public needs to know that the government is failing to meet its promises, and our clients’ lives are in the United States’ hands.”
