US military can't find 'IS house' that prompted Kabul drone strike: report

The US military has admitted that it cannot find the so-called Islamic State“safe house” that prompted a drone strike on Kabul that killed 10 civilians, including seven children.

An inquiry into the drone strike found that initial intelligence suggesting IS was using a compound close to Kabul airport to plan for future attacks was incorrect, according to two senior military officials who spoke to the New York Times.

These planned attacks included car bombs and rockets, according to informants, as well as “aerial surveillance and electronic intercepts”, the news outlet said.

“We have not found any particular safe house,” Inspector General, Lt General Sami D. Said told NYT. 

“It was not faulty intelligence; it was just not specific.”

The drone strike took place during the final days of the chaotic US evacuation from Kabul, after the Taliban took over the city.

Pentagon officials said that almost everything the defence officials claimed in the time leading up to and immediately after the drone strike was false, including that the trunk of a white truck that was struck with a missile had been carrying explosives.

Officials also stated that Ezmarai Ahmadi the driver of the truck who they had accused of being connected to IS, was a US aid worker and “had nothing to do with the Islamic State”, and that the so-called “safe house” was in fact the home of his boss, whom he had visited to pick up a laptop earlier that day.

General Said found the law had not been broken, and said the drone strike took place because of a “series of assumptions” that led to “confirmation bias”.

The US offered last month to pay unspecified compensation to the relatives of the dead.

The offer to pay the relatives was made in a meeting between Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, and Steven Kwon, the founder and president of an aid group active in Afghanistan called Nutrition and Education, who had employed Ahmadi.

The Pentagon is also working with the State Department to relocate to the US any of those relatives who wish to leave Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.