In memory of and sympathy for
Noorullah’s two small sons, aged 2 years and 9 months
Noorullah, a father
Noorullah’s wife, died in hospital
after
in the Hudkhail (Hotkheil) neighborhood in
eastern Kabul. U.S forces raided the mud-walled home, blasted open the gate
with explosives and stormed into the home. The occupation troops fired weapons
killing a father, Noorullah, his two young sons, and wounding his wife. A
neighbor, Abdul Wakil, told the Deutsche Presses Agentur, “The two dead
children were 2 years old and 9 months old. Did the soldiers think they were
terrorists? Or they knew that one day they will become Taliban? Then they
should kill us all.” Mrs. Noorullah died in a hospital at
Many
months after the deadly U.S. attack, Dexter Filkins interviewed Syed
Mohammed, elder of the home which was attacked. Filkins wrote,
- …an old man who called himself Syed Mohammed sat on the floor of his mud-brick hut in the eastern Kabul neighborhood of Hotkheil and recounted how most of his son’s family was wiped out in an American-led raid last September. Mr. Mohammed said he was awakened in the early morning to the sound of gunfire and explosions. Such sounds were not uncommon; Hotkheil is a Pashtun-dominated area, where sympathies for the Taliban run strong. In a flash, Mr. Mohammed said, several American and Afghan soldiers kicked open the door of his home. The Americans, he said, had beards, an almost certain sign that they belonged to a unit of the Special Forces, which permits uniformed soldiers to grow facial hair. “Who are you?” Mr. Mohammed recalled asking the intruders. “Shut up,” came the reply from one of the Afghan soldiers. “We are the government.” Mr. Mohammed said he was taken to a nearby base, interrogated for several hours and let go as sunrise neared. When he returned home, Mr. Mohammed said, he went next door to his son’s house, only to find that most of his family had been killed: the son, Nurallah, and his pregnant wife and two of his sons, Abdul Basit, age 1, and Mohammed, 2. Only Mr. Mohammed’s 4-year-old grandson, Zarqawi, survived. “The soldiers had a right to search our house,” Mr. Mohammed said. “But they didn’t have a right to do this.” Bullet holes still pockmarked Nurallah’s home more than four months after the attack, and the infant’s cradle still hung from the ceiling. The day after the attack, a senior Afghan official came to the door and handed Mr. Mohammed $800. “If you spent some time here, you would see that we are not the kind of people who would get involved with the Taliban,” Mr. Mohammed said. “Anyway, what was the fault of the babies?”
Killed in a midnight ground raid by US Special Forces