Drone Strike Video Shows Killing of Civilians in Afghanistan

WASHINGTON — Newly declassified surveillance footage provides additional details about the final minutes and aftermath of a botched drone strike in Kabul in August, when the American military mistakenly killed 10 innocent people — including seven children — in a tragic blunder that punctuated the end of the 20-year war in Afghanistan.

The disclosure of the videos is the first time any footage from the strike has been seen publicly. They encompass about 25 minutes of silent video from two drones — a military official said both were MQ-9 Reapers — showing the minutes before, during and after the strike.

While the videos will continue to be scrutinized for any new details about how the episode unfolded, they show the dangers of making hair-trigger, life-or-death decisions based on imagery that can be fuzzy, hard to interpret in real time and prone to confirmation bias. The risk of error was further heightened by striking in a densely populated neighborhood.

In this case, the military was operating under extreme pressure to head off another attack on troops and civilians in the middle of the chaotic withdrawal. It has said it believed it was tracking an ISIS-K terrorist who might imminently detonate a bomb near the Kabul airport. Three days earlier, a suicide bombing at the airport had killed at least 182 people, including 13 American troops.

The New York Times obtained the footage of the Aug. 29 strike through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against United States Central Command, which oversaw military operations in Afghanistan. The disclosure — a rare step by the U.S. military in the case of an airstrike that causes civilian casualties — is likely to add fuel to a debate about the rules for drone warfare and protections for civilians.

The videos — one of which is in grainy imagery apparently from a camera designed to detect heat — show a car arriving at and backing into a courtyard on a residential street. Blurry figures are moving around the courtyard, and children are walking on the street outside the walls in the moments before a fireball from a Hellfire missile engulfs the interior. Neighbors can then be seen desperately dumping water onto the courtyard from rooftops.

The scenes unfolding on the video are murky in some respects, although in retrospect it is clear that what evidence they provided was misinterpreted by those who decided to fire.

American operators on Aug. 29 had been tracking the driver of a white Toyota Corolla for about eight hours before targeting him in the mistaken belief that he was an ISIS-K member moving bombs. But the man was instead Zemari Ahmadi, a worker employed by Nutrition and Education International, a California-based aid organization.

A Pentagon official in November described blurry images of at least one child about two minutes before the missile was launched, but said that recognizing the presence of a child in the blast zone was obvious only with hindsight understanding and “the luxury of time.”

The footage from one of the drones briefly shows what appears to be a blurry shorter figure in white next to a taller figure in black inside the courtyard as the car is backing in, about two and a half minutes before the explosion. Shuddering on the other drone’s footage, about 21 seconds before the explosion, suggests that might be the time when it launched a missile.

Relatives have told The Times that some children rushed out to greet Mr. Ahmadi — one getting into his car — when he got home to a compound where four interrelated families lived, but that others were fatally wounded in rooms alongside the courtyard.

The footage also shows other figures of indeterminate height moving around the courtyard over several minutes as Mr. Ahmadi’s sedan backed into the compound, including one person opening the door to enter the passenger seat of the car just before the blast.

In the first days after the strike, the military also described a secondary explosion that it insisted supported the suspicion the car contained a bomb but later said was probably instead a propane tank. The footage shows a fireball from the blast, which expands about two seconds later, but it is difficult to make out what is happening in the flare.

The heights of most figures inside the courtyard are difficult to determine because the footage was shot from overhead, making it harder to identify whether they might be children. The video with the better angle into the courtyard is in black-and-white and has lower resolution. The other video, which is in color, begins after the car was already backing in, but briefly shifts into black-and-white — apparently a thermal lens — at the moment of the strike.

Reached by phone, Emal Ahmadi, the brother of Mr. Ahmadi, whose daughter Malika was also killed in the strike, told The Times that he wanted to view the video himself, after having only heard descriptions from the military. “It will be difficult for me,” he said, “but I want to see it.”

Responding to a description, Hina Shamsi, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who is representing the families of the victims and Nutrition and Education International, which employed Mr. Ahmadi, said the footage highlighted “a painful, devastating loss of 10 deeply beloved people.”

She added that while the United States government had pledged to resettle the relatives of the victims, along with Afghan employees of the aid organization and their families, they had not yet been able to leave the country.

“The urgent need right now is for the U.S. government to follow through on its promises of evacuation because every day our clients remain in Afghanistan is a day they are in imminent danger,” Ms. Shamsi said.

Capt. Bill Urban, the spokesman for the United States Central Command, reiterated the Pentagon’s apology.

“While the strike was intended for what was believed to be an imminent threat to our troops at Hamad Karzai International Airport, none of the family members killed are now believed to have been connected to ISIS-K or threats to our troops,” he said. “We deeply regret the loss of life that resulted from this strike.”

The blurrier main video begins as the white car was approaching the courtyard, following the vehicle through several streets. It shows people moving in the courtyard several minutes before the strike, as the car stops and then backs in. A laser range-finder briefly appears in view about 70 seconds before the strike, and then returns and stays for the final half minute. Additional blurry figures are visible just before they are engulfed in flames.

The clearer and mostly color video, which starts as the car is already backing in, shows little about who was in the courtyard because of the angle from which it was shot. But it more clearly shows a figure opening the front right door of the car just before the explosion, as well as children out on the street.

Both videos show people rushing to the site and throwing water onto the fire from nearby roofs. About 90 seconds after the strike, the higher-resolution color camera abruptly swivels away from the carnage to instead point at an unremarkable street scene nearby, and about five more minutes of the overall footage shows that location.

They also underscore that even if the drone operators were convinced they had good reason to believe that the driver of the car they had been tracking for hours was an ISIS-K member — they were wrong — operators may jump to the conclusion that unknown people who interact with a terrorism suspect are likely fellow militants.

In November, the Air Force’s inspector general, Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said, released findings of his investigation, which found no violations of law and did not recommend any disciplinary action. (The military later said no one involved would be punished.) The general blamed “confirmation bias” for warping operators’ interpretation of what they were seeing.

The Pentagon had resisted making public the videos even as a Times investigation intensified scrutiny of the military’s account of the strike.

The government deemed the videos classified and exempt from disclosure. But it told a judge on Jan. 6 that officials were “engaged in high-level consultations regarding whether any portions can be declassified and publicly released” in response to The Times’s lawsuit. Under a court order, the government had a deadline of Tuesday to make a final determination.

The botched strike has helped spur a closer look at the military’s targeting rules and the adequacy of protections for civilians in war zones after two decades in which airstrikes from remote-operated drones became routine — leading to recurring incidents in which civilian bystanders are killed.

Under the law of war, it can be legal to carry out strikes that kill some civilians, as long as they were not the intended target and as long as the anticipated collateral damage is deemed to be necessary and proportionate to the military aim. But the Defense Department has long said that it tries to minimize civilian casualties.

In November, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III declared that the military needed to do more to prevent them. Pentagon officials have been developing new procedures intended to foster a culture that does more to prioritize minimizing civilian harm and are expected to announce such changes soon, officials said.

Still, with United States ground forces no longer in theaters like Afghanistan and Somalia and drawing down from Syria and Iraq, strikes on traditional or “hot” battlefields may be less frequent compared with so-called over-the-horizon counterterrorism strikes in poorly governed places where there are no American troops to defend on the ground — but where good intelligence may be even harder to come by.

The Biden administration has also been working on a new policy governing drone warfare away from traditional battlefields. That process was meant to last only a few months, but after a year of drafts, deliberations and high-level meetings, it remains uncompleted.

The Aug. 29 strike unfolded three days after a suicide bomber claimed by an arm of the Islamic State, known as ISIS-Khorasan or ISIS-K, had carried out the attack at the airport’s Abbey Gate.

The military announced that it had thwarted another planned attack outside the airport. But nearly everything that senior Pentagon officials claimed in the hours, days and weeks after the drone strike turned out to be wrong.

A Times video investigation showed that the man driving the car was instead Mr. Ahmadi, an innocent aid worker, and that what the military claimed were explosives loaded in the trunk of the car had probably instead been water bottles. A week later, the Pentagon acknowledged that the strike had been a tragic mistake and no ISIS-K fighters had been killed.

The Times sued for a copy of the surveillance footage starting five minutes before the drone began tracking the white car to five minutes after the missile strike, which would amount to about eight hours. It is not clear what happened to the remaining footage, a question that may be the subject of further litigation.

The department has offered to make unspecified condolence payments to the families of those it had killed. Ms. Shamsi said the relatives have received no compensation and are instead focused on leaving Afghanistan.

“We aren’t even discussing compensation because our clients’ safety comes first,” she said.

Ainara Tiefenthäler contributed reporting.