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Village Demolished as Misinformed CIA Hunts Al-Qaeda Families
By Husban Mutawakel, IOL correspondent in Nangarhar & Rasheed Omar, IOL correspondent in Islamabad
NANGARHAR & ISLAMABAD, October 13 (IslamOnline) - The U.S. airstrikes which eradicated the Karam and neighboring villages were a result of a misinformed CIA regarding the existence of families related to al-Qaeda members in those villages, informed Taliban sources told IslamOnline.
The information said the villages of Karam and other villages in the Sarkhord region, 20 kilometers from Jalalabad, were demolished after the CIA thought that the families, which had originally lived in Jalalabad behind buildings built by the CIA in the 1980s, had moved to them from Dronte, eight kilometers away from Jalalabad.
The relatives disappeared from their homes immediately after the start of the U.S. strikes. Later, U.S. intelligence agents living in the area told the CIA they had moved to the above-mentioned villages.
"This information was wrong. No one knows where those families went. Nevertheless, the U.S. forces severely pounded the area while the inhabitants were in deep sleep," said a Taliban official who preferred to remain anonymous.
More than 160 were killed during the strikes, as hundreds were injured and more than 1,000 heads of livestock, the community's livelihood, were also killed.
Meanwhile, Pakistani newspapers covered the incidents on their front pages with appeals from the villages under attack to their brethren in Pakistan, asking them for help.
Pashtun village exist on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani borders.
The strikes incited anger amongst Pakistanis two days before the scheduled visit of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to Islamabad, which will be met by an invitation to a general strike.
A delegation of television stations is scheduled Saturday to visit the demolished area, in a visit organized by the Afghani Embassy in Kabul.
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