Thread by @TBIJ

On September 23, 2018, an airstrike on a house in an Afghan village killed 11 children from the same family. The US military denied carrying it out. That denial was false. Here’s how we know...

Masih Mubarez lost his wife, all seven of his children and four young relatives. Determined to find out who had killed his family, he took photos of their destroyed home and weapon fragments at the scene which he passed to our Afghan reporter

From the image metadata, we got the coordinates of Masih’s home in the village of Mullah Hafiz. Satellite images confirmed the house had been attacked, with the damage consistent with an airstrike. The left image shows where the bodies were found, the right shows the damage

This is one of the pictures Masih took of weapon fragments at the scene of his destroyed house. While most were nondescript, a few pieces had distinctive markings

On one piece we could see a “CAGE code” - a unique identifier given to companies which supply government or defence agencies. This code linked the fragment to a US company called @woodward_inc, that makes components for a GPS missile guidance kit known as a JDAM

Weapons experts then reviewed the photos, and saw something else - a distinctive square pattern of bolts that identified it as part of a JDAM. A JDAM is a device that attaches to a bomb to guide it more precisely

In Afghanistan only two countries are carrying out airstrikes: Afghanistan and the US. But only the American aircraft are capable of using JDAMs.
After 4 years of tracking airstrikes in Afghanistan, we were finally able to say for certain who had pushed the button on one.

Over the course of eight months, the US kept changing its story. At first @ResoluteSupport said there were no connections between its actions and allegations of civilian deaths in Mullah Hafiz. Four months later they said no strike had taken place in the district on that day

But shortly before we were going to publish, the US finally admitted bombing Masih’s home. Five days later, in another statement, they claimed US soldiers had been fired on from inside the house and the strike was carried out in “self-defence”

The US still denies any civilians were killed in the airstrike. Here is the full list of those who died:

Masih still has no way of holding anyone accountable for the killing of his wife and children. “In Afghanistan the killing is non-stop,” he says. “People get killed and justice never gets served”.