Subsequent to reading the following article, BE SURE to check out this one. Always so wonderful to see that some of our fellow Muslims have their priorities in order.
This woman lost everthing in a US air raid. A year on, she is still living amid the rubble
Rory McCarthy, The Guardian, 7 October 2002
Few people paid a higher price when America’s military machine launched its war in Afghanistan a year ago today than Orfa. She was away visiting relatives when the American fighter jet dropped out of the clear midday sky and dived towards her village in the hills outside Kabul. When she returned home a few days later it was left to her neighbours to explain the inexplicable.
They told her that the aircraft, almost certainly an F-16, had mistakenly fired a precision Mk 82 500lb bomb directly at her small mud and stone house, killing her husband, carpet weaver Gul Ahmad, his second wife, five of their daughters and one son. Two children from the house next door also died.
When the Guardian first found Orfa last year, four weeks after the bombing, she was still deep in shock, haunted by the horrifying image of her family’s remains. Their bodies were so badly torn apart they could not be identified for separate graves.
A year on, a line of eight green flags tied to stout wooden poles stands above the family grave just yards away from Orfa’s ruined home in Bibi Mahru. The village sits several hundred metres below what used to be an important Taliban radar and gun emplacement. It seems likely it was the target of the US jets on the day Orfa’s family were mistakenly hit.
From the start of the US campaign in Afghanistan on October 7, western governments promised that this time it would be different. Afghans would not be abandoned to their fate, as they had been after the end of Soviet occupation in 1989.
Once the bombing was done, and the Taliban removed, humanitarian aid amounting to $4.5bn (£2.8bn) would be pumped in to rebuild the country, brick by brick, home by home. There can be few better qualified subjects for western help than Orfa as she struggles to raise her surviving four daughters and two sons. Today, on the anniversary of the bombing, her house is still a pile of rubble, she has received no compensation and reconstruction remains a pipe dream.
“I don’t know how long it will be now until the Americans help us,” Orfa, 32, said. “They have done nothing for us and I don’t know what to do with my children or how to support them.”
The awkward truth is that the only outside help Orfa has received has come from the visitors who arrived at Bibi Mahru the day after the bombing. They were Taliban officials still clinging to power in the dying days of the ultra-orthodox Islamist regime and they brought shrouds for the dead as well as 17,000 Pakistan rupees (£190).
Orfa shared the Taliban’s money with her next-door neighbour, whose two children were killed by the same bomb. Most of her portion went on medical care for her seriously injured and deeply disturbed son, Jawad, 14.
“He went to his father’s grave every day and just stood there staring it at. I don’t have any more money to spend on medical care for him,” she said. Now the boy has been sent to Pakistan with an aunt in an attempt to break his grief-stricken obsession.
Estimates of the numbers killed by air strikes from B52 high-altitude bombers, F-16 and F-18 fighter jets and the devastating AC-130 Spectre gunships are elusive. The Afghan and American governments say fewer than 400 people died. A San Francisco-based human rights group, Global Exchange, has painstakingly confirmed at least 812 deaths. Many suspect the true number could be as high as 2,000, scattered in towns and villages across the map.
Far harder to calculate is the extent of psychological trauma inflicted on a population already struggling to survive after years of drought, economic collapse and 20 years of war. Many children appear to have suffered trauma similar to that of Jawad.
In a small mud-brick compound on the other side of Kabul sits Said Bilal, 10. In November he was in his uncle’s house when it was hit by a misguided American bomb. It was one of the last munitions dropped on Kabul before the Taliban fled and it killed the boy’s newly wed uncle, Said Akbar, and his wife Sawila.
“Said Bilal was just 10 metres away when the bomb fell. He went around the ruins of the house picking up pieces of flesh from his uncle’s body,” said his cousin Said Najib. “Now he is very disturbed.”
The boy’s distress is obvious. He barely speaks and his head hangs listlessly. The family is struggling to find money to re build their home and they cannot afford the medical treatment Said Bilal clearly needs.
The relatives of the civilian victims of the US bombing campaign have joined Afghanistan’s large underclass. Often the survivors are women who lost sons or husbands and who find it most difficult to obtain work in this conservative Islamic society. The flood of two million refugees returning home from Pakistan and Iran is also forcing the most vulnerable single-parent families and widows out of cheap rented accommodation.
“The government doesn’t consider them a priority,” said Nilufar Shuja, the Afghanistan co-ordinator for Global Exchange. “They don’t need handouts, just the money to rebuild their homes and get back on their feet.”
These are the people who most need the help of the $4.5bn reconstruction plan agreed at a Tokyo conference in January. Some of the money has been spent repairing schools and clinics in Kabul. Outside the capital, where security is less certain, very little has filtered through, particularly in the Pashtun areas of the south that were the Taliban’s heartland.
The Afghan government now recognises this slow disbursement of pledged aid money as the greatest failing of the past year. “The money that has been promised is not sufficient to rebuild our country,” said Omar Samad, the Afghan foreign ministry spokesman.
The disappointment began when the aid pledges were first unveiled in Tokyo. While similar reconstruction projects in Bosnia, Lebanon and the West Bank and Gaza were worth at least $1,000 a person, the Afghan package fell far short. The Tokyo pledges amount to just $225 for every Afghan.
“We are now seriously talking about having more Tokyos to bring us to a level that is realistic,” said Mr Samad. The Afghan government hopes for up to $15bn over the next 10 years.
Although $1.8bn was due to be spent on reconstruction in this first year, bureaucracy, particularly at the UN, and the cost of emergency humanitarian aid have swallowed most of the money. There are still huge areas of the country where people are on the brink of starvation and aid workers have warned that the situation is likely to get even worse as winter approaches in the weeks ahead. A four-year drought is also consuming more of the money than was expected, leaving only $100m this year for reconstruction.
The average cost of maintaining a foreign UN employee in Afghanistan for a year is around $250,000. Add to that the soaring cost of house rentals, which means some UN agencies are paying $15,000 a month for their Kabul offices, and it is little wonder funds are running out.
Some aid experts are starting to question the assumption that development work alone can bring peace and security to countries like Afghanistan that have been racked by years of conflict. “There is a dangerous tendency to think we can use aid to get peace and security on the cheap,” said Andrew Wilder, director of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit in Kabul.
“We raised expectations too high. We all read the documents about lessons learned in places like Rwanda and Kosovo. We all knew a lot of what was going to happen but it didn’t lead to a significant improvement in how the international aid community responded.”
He argues that western governments should have pressed earlier for an expansion of the international peacekeeping force, which is still confined to Kabul.
Today Orfa and her five children share with another family a small two-room hut, a few metres from the ruins of her former home. Her share of the monthly rent is 500,000 afghanis (£7.50) and she earns just 800,000 afghanis a month tailoring for her neighbours. When people in the village want to repair their clothes they bring them to her because they know she cannot support her family on her own.
Standing in the courtyard of her home she clutched the only photograph she has left of her husband. It is a small, creased black and white picture showing him 10 years ago as a handsome young man. “Under the Taliban, life was bad but at least my husband and my son were working,” she said. “Now how can I support us all? What am I supposed to do?”