The Associated Press
Outside the U.S. Embassy on Sunday, Amina, 8, tells embassy official Michael Metrinko about how she lost 16 family members in the U.S. led military campaign in Afghanistan.

Afghans rally for U.S. rebuilding aid

THE BALTIMORE SUN

Originally published Monday, April 8, 2002

KABUL, Afghanistan -- When Harafa came to the U.S. Embassy here Sunday, she didn't ask for compensation for the loss of her husband, a carpetmaker killed when a stray American bomb landed on her family's compound last fall.

She didn't want damages for the death of her 14-year-old son or the six other members of her extended family killed in the same raid on her eastern Kabul neighborhood.

All she asked for was help in rebuilding her home.

The 30-year-old woman and her five surviving children have worn out their welcome at a neighbor's, where they are crowded into a single room.

She and about 60 other Afghans from across the country came here seeking help, if not answers, from America. They are neither Taliban nor al-Qaida. Yet they lost homes, possessions and loved ones to the anti-terrorism bombing campaign.

Michael Metrinko, an embassy official, emerged from the compound Sunday to listen to the Afghans and accept their petitions for aid. But he said he could offer only his sympathy.

The embassy, he said, recommended in January that the U.S. government offer compensation to civilians who suffered from the bombing. But the State Department and the Pentagon haven't agreed on how to respond after weeks of discussion, and he finds the delay frustrating.

"You can't imagine how difficult it is to listen to stories like this," he said. "We get them a lot. It's not easy to tell people we can't give them an answer."

Harafa recalled the bombing. About 6 a.m. one day in the fall, a plane roared over her neighborhood in a Hazara section of Kabul and dropped a bomb. It missed a targeted anti-aircraft battery by a wide margin and landed a few feet from where her husband slept. A son, Ali Jawad, 13, was sleeping several yards away in a different room with two other children.

Their mud-brick house blew up in a cloud of fire and dust. Ali Jawad was told that rescuers dug him out of the rubble while he was unconscious. Both of the children sharing his bedroom were killed.

Because of the raids, Harafa and her younger children were living with relatives in another community. She did not hear about the bombing for two days. By the time she returned, what was left of her husband's body and that of a 14-year-old son were being wrapped in a sheet at a mosque. "The bodies were destroyed," she said. "They were in pieces."

Harafa knows the bombing was an accident. But that doesn't explain, she said, why Americans don't seem to care what happened. "Why?" she asks. "We are not Taliban. We are just poor people. We are just laborers."

Because of the bombing, Ali Jawad refuses to go to school. He was injured in the head, and his face is permanently scarred. He hates walking by the bombed-out remnants of his home, turned to lumps of mud by recent rains. "I never want to see my house again," he recently told Harafa.

The Olympian Copyright 2002

back to Terror in America index