Red Cross acts as Taliban's useful idiots

NY Times:

Dozens of civilians, including women and children, have been killed during bombing raids by United States forces in western Afghanistan as Afghan troops battled Taliban fighters in heavy fighting, the Red Cross said Wednesday, confirming earlier accounts by Afghan officials.

Enraged villagers brought between 20 and 25 bodies from their district to the capital of Farah Province to show officials, the officials said Tuesday. Villagers’ accounts put the death toll at 70 to 100, they said.

The fatalities offered a grim back-drop to talks scheduled Wednesday in Washington between President Obama and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, whose office called the civilian deaths “unjustifiable and unacceptable” and said a government team had been sent to investigate.

Mr. Karzai will discuss with Mr. Obama how further civilian casualties can be avoided, a statement said. If the deaths are confirmed to have been from American bombing raid, this would be the largest case of civilian death in Afghanistan since Mr. Obama took office.

Jessica Barry, a spokeswoman for the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross, said the organization had sent a team to scene of the bombing on Tuesday. The team members saw houses destroyed and dozens of dead bodies. Some had died while trying to shelter in a house.

“What our team saw was dozens of bodies, graves and people preparing burials,” she said in a telephone interview.

The dead included women and children. “It’s not the first time,” Ms. Barry said, but “really this is one of the very serious and biggest incidents for a very long time.”

In a statement on its Web site, the International Committee blamed the deaths squarely on the airstrikes.

“We know that those killed included an Afghan Red Crescent volunteer and 13 members of his family who had been sheltering from fighting in a house that was bombed in an air strike,” the statement said, quoting Reto Stocker, the head of the Red Cross delegation in Kabul.

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They are repeating Taliban propaganda and playing into the Taliban antiaircraft strategy. What is likely is that they were either Taliban human shields or Taliban families. Since the Taliban camouflage themselves at civilians, many were probably Taliban that got killed.

The Taliban know that their best chance to defeat the US air power is to get useful idiots like the Red Cross to go along with their war crimes. In cases like this the Red Cross becomes an accessory after the fact. They demonstrate little skepticism of the claims of the people alleging civilians were killed by the air strike, or were killed because the Taliban deliberately used them as shields.

It is possible that these people were killed by accident in a battle with the Taliban, but it is wrong to jump to that conclusion when the Taliban even admit they use this strategy to deflect US attacks.