On a cold afternoon on February 4, 2002, three friends hiked to Zhwara Kili mountain. Situated in the south-eastern city of Khost, it had witnessed intense aerial bombings in recent days by a U.S. aircraft. Mir Hamad, Jehangir Khan, and Daraz Khan differed in height, build, and profession, but they had one thing in common: poverty. Carrying rucksacks and climbing the snowy mountain, all three were hoping to collect debris from the ordnance. Locally, it is said that after Tora Bora, a cave complex in eastern Afghanistan, it was the Zhwara Kili mountains where the U.S. unleashed its deadliest air campaign.

Cut off from the world, which was still in shock after the September 11 attacks, this remote part of the world was already dragged into a war where they had just become collateral damage. That February afternoon, a predator was humming over the sky, looking for one of the friends turned foes of the U.S.— al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

Zhawar Kili was bombed heavily by the B-52 and B-1 bombers and F/A Navy jet fighters from January 2002 onwards, and pieces of iron were scattered around the mountain. The three had packed their rucksacks with metal and descended, where Mir Hamad’s car was waiting to take them to Khost, where they would sell it to scrap dealers. Circling high and unseen above the mountain, the CIA-operated Predator drone transmitted a video feed of the scene below. A pilot sitting before the video monitor in an unknown location, waiting for the right moment, steered it and fired a Hellfire missile. It killed all three of them instantly, and their body parts were flung meters away on the same mountain they climbed a few hours ago.

The killing of Mir Hamad, Jehangir Khan, and Daraz Khan was the first publicly recorded killing with an unmanned drone.

U.S. air raids have killed many civilians in and around the villages and forced the locals to flee to the other side of the border to Pakistan. Interestingly, Zhawar Kili is the same mountain range where Afghan and foreign fighters received training to fight against the Russians by Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI, which was supported by the U.S. intelligence agency, the CIA. The support helped Al-Qaeda and other militant organizations to establish training camps in the mountains, where they built an extensive network of tunnels, caves, and surface buildings and housed local and foreign fighters with training facilities, weapon depots, and living quarters. When the Taliban first came to power in Afghanistan in 1996, ties between these groups strengthened. But in 1998, following the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, four U.S. ships and a submarine fired 75-80 cruise missiles at Zhawar Kili to kill Osama bin Laden and destroy its network. Although the strikes damaged the camp, Bin Laden was not present there.

***

It takes a little more than two hours to drive from Khost city to Zhawar Kili. A small, remote village surrounded by rugged mountains, thorny bushes, and stony silence. For years, these silent mountains have witnessed stories of blood, betrayal, and tyranny. The mountainous valley has a few checkpoints now controlled by the Taliban; the dry riverbed, rock-strewn tracks, goatherders, unmarked graves, canyons, and caves lead to the village of around 25 families. It was Mir Hamad’s home.  

Among clusters of mud houses camouflaged into the rugged mountain, Rahmanullah, in his pea-green shalwar kameez and a light brown jacket, met me in his ventilated mud house, which required a small climb to a hillock in Zhawar Kili. He was only four years old when the villagers brought his father, Mir Hamad. Charred and scattered in pieces, it was difficult to recognize him. So, the villagers told him it was his uncle’s body. Until the age of six, he was unaware of his father’s fate.

“My mother told me my father was driving others’ vehicles as a driver in the city, and sometimes he collected metal wreckage of bombs dropped in the mountains and sold it in the scrap market,” said Rahmanullah, a soft-spoken man.

Hamad was approximately five feet tall and had eight children from his two wives. As the family’s primary breadwinner, he could earn around 1,500 Pakistani Rupees in a good month working as a driver. The village is located near Pakistan’s border with neighboring North Waziristan, and from afar, the shape of Pakistani checkpoints can be seen. Given the support from Pakistan’s ISI for groups like the Haqqani, Al-Badr (operated by Arabs), and Suleman Farsi (affiliated with Hizb-e-Islami), the significance of the border was often fluid for those who used to trade in Pakistani currency in the area.

During its decade-long military occupation in Afghanistan, Soviet forces bombed Zhawar Kili to capture bases held by fighters and disrupt their logistical support. The guerrilla fighters had waged a jihad against the Soviet-backed communist government in Afghanistan, which had seized power in Kabul in a coup in 1978. Next year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, an event that marked a significant escalation of the Cold War. The act was seen as a direct challenge to the U.S. To counter Soviet influence, the fighters were welcomed in the Oval Office, praised, financed, armed, and named “Mujahideen” by the CIA. But as the Afghan and U.S. friendship gradually turned sour, and especially after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 and, particularly, after 9/11, the same “Mujahideen” became “terrorists” in the West.

***

Following the US-led invasion in 2001, Khost’s role in the fight against terrorism intensified because it was located at a strategic crossroads. Whoever controlled it could move fighters more effectively, protect supply lines, and launch attacks deeper into Afghanistan.

In his book No Good Men Among the Living, Anand Gopal’s deep investigation reveals how flawed intelligence, a lack of cultural understanding, the U.S. military’s support for certain warlords, and their personal agendas and rivalries were some of the factors that ultimately contributed to the devastating impact of the conflict on ordinary Afghans and the war’s prolonged agony.

Emran Feroz, an international journalist who has extensively written about Afghanistan’s two-decade-long occupation, considers that the flawed intelligence has killed more innocents than the real targets.

“You know the drone operating team is big; there are drone operators who watch footage and find targets, then there are local Pakistani and Afghan spies who were paid by the Americans. Also, intelligence officers from the U.S. Army or CIA were also operating on the ground, but these people often shared flawed intelligence,” said Emran. 

When the U.S. and allied nations overthrew the Taliban government, the CIA created, trained, and funded the Khost Protection Force (KPF), an Afghan paramilitary group, heavily armed and operating independently of Afghan security institutions, tasked with targeting Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants in Khost. However, over time, the group turned into a group of killers who killed innocents either for money or on the wrong piece of intelligence. Numerous reports have documented its involvement in serious human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings and kidnappings.

It is said that time flies but leaves its shadow behind. For Rahmanullah, his father’s memories are like a dream. A dream that he lived. A dream where he sees himself as a young boy, sitting in his father’s car, who drives him around the village. 

“As a child, I waited for the sound of his car engine, and the moment he was close to the house, I ran out of the house, and he held me in his arms and would put me on the bonnet. He would bring toffees for me and my siblings.”

“He was a loving father, my heart wrenched for him,” Rahmanullah said, trying to wipe away his tears.

For years, the villagers supported the family by paying Zakat and other donations. Presidents changed in the western bubble called Kabul, but no compensation or apology ever reached the grieving family. Trillions of dollars were spent on war, but this village still lacks a school, a road, or even a maulvi for the mosque. In case of a health emergency, villagers have to ride a bike all the way along the mountainous route to Khost city.

The responsibilities of the family have made Rahmanullah a man much before his age, but the void the death of his father left still churns his heart, and the pain of the child inside him comes out. 

“I grew up as a Yateem (orphan); if my father were alive, I’d be relying on him for his support, for his care and love, easing the responsibilities I have now as the eldest son. I have missed all those moments. In Pashtun culture, fathers offer valuable advice drawn from their experience to their sons and daughters. I long for those insights that I won’t ever get. People from Khost, Paktia, travel to Saudi Arabia and Dubai for work to earn good money, but I can’t leave home now as I carry the family’s responsibilities.” An emptiness was clear in Rahmanullah’s voice.

A few days after the burial of the dead, a group of American soldiers appeared at the door of Rahmanullah’s home and asked the family members to go to the graveyard and circle around the grave of Mir Hamad. While Rahmanullah and his siblings were circling around the grave, the soldiers filmed them.

“I remember, one of the soldiers gave me 50 dollars, which I gave to my mother”.

In a war-torn country like Afghanistan, growing up without a father comes with immense challenges. Rahmanullah had a difficult childhood; he was bullied by other children and adults, knowing there was no fatherly figure to support him, so he spent most of his time at home. He learned the Quran from his mother and Pashto, in which he sometimes writes poems. The blue sky gives him joy and puts him in a poetic mood. But the same sky makes him sad, too. 

“Sometimes when I hear the noise of a drone here, that humming sound like mosquitoes; it brings back the memories of my father.”

Emran believes that drone strikes have played a great role in the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan.

“A Taliban commander from Pakistan often quoted that he didn’t need many recruitment measures to find new people to join the Taliban because he just had to wait until the next drone strike hit a wedding or a funeral.”

“A lot of young Taliban fighters I met also had confirmed they got radicalized because of these war crimes and joined the Taliban,” said Emran.

While the villages were mourning the death of their three men, officials in Washington and the Pentagon were celebrating the strike. However, a week after the strike, on February 11, 2002, in two press conferences, the officials sounded confident but defensive at the same time about the killings of high-profile targets. When asked if they knew the identities of the dead, Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Dickson Stufflebeem said Predator gathered the intelligence of a group “meeting” on a “hillside” and “the initial indications afterward would seem to say that these are not peasant people up there farming.” However, he continued, saying that he “don’t know the identities of the individuals involved.”  

At the same press conference, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Victoria Clarke was confident the assassination targeted legitimate targets. 

“We are convinced it was an appropriate target, based on the observation, based on the information that it was an appropriate target. We do not know yet exactly who it was.” 

In the press conference on February 12, the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld informed the reporters that the drone operators were watching the trio and were convinced that the small group of people were who they were looking for for months.

 “People who have the responsibility for making those judgments made the judgments that, in fact, they were al Qaeda and that they were a proper target.”

“They’re honorable people. They’re talented people. They’re skillful. They’ve been doing it for weeks and weeks and weeks now, and they’ve got a darned good record, and I’ve got a lot of respect for them.” Rumsfeld said, praising the armed drone operators, and with this he whitewashed the crime of a botched drone strike. Over the years, in different parts of the world, the USA continued to kill innocents with its drone program without any accountability.

The Afghan paramilitary group, Khost Protection Force (KPF) was trained and funded in Camp Chapman, named after Nathan Chapman, the first American soldier killed in the tribal area in 2002. Camp Chapman was also extensively used as a key intelligence and counterterrorism hub where operatives selected the locations and targets of drone strikes in the region and recruited Afghans who could help find Al-Qaeda members. In 2009, a Jordanian triple agent claiming to have penetrated Al-Qaeda’s highest ranks and having information on senior leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, killed seven CIA personnel in a suicide bombing in the camp, marking one of the deadliest days in the agency’s history.

On the afternoon of February 4, the drone operating team, which Donald Rumsfeld was praising, saw a tall man among a group of three on the Zhawar Kili mountain, thought he was Osama, and fired the Hellfire missiles. 

Reports suggest U.S. Special Forces collected the evidence, including tissues and bone fragments for DNA testing to identify the victims from the Zhawar Kili. But the results of that investigation were never made public. The Pentagon kept the operation secret to hide its false drone strike. When Doug Struck, a Washington Post correspondent in Afghanistan at that time, arrived at the site, he was restrained and threatened at gunpoint by special forces.

Recalling the incident, Struck said that he received a call from his editor in Washington, who asked him to go to Khost and check out the drone strike and the ‘high profile’ assassination.

“In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have gone, because neither the editor nor I understood the dangers of the area.”  

However, he made that journey. And when he was close to the missile impact area, he was stopped and threatened by U.S. soldiers.

“It was a hot day, I was carrying my camera and climbed the hill where I was greeted by U.S. soldiers who aimed their guns at me and asked me to stop.”

Struck presented his media credentials, but that didn’t convince the soldiers, who were surprised to see him there. The tense situation lasted for a while. A special forces soldier spoke to a senior commander. But he also refused to let Struck go further.

“So, I said, this is not your country; you have no authority to tell me if I can go there or not.”

“And they said if you go there, you will be shot.” Arguing with those soldiers was playing with fire, so Struck didn’t push. But he found another route to the site and spoke to the family members of the deceased later. 

Drones have played a significant role in U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, providing both surveillance and strike capabilities. But they were nowhere near able to differentiate between a civilian and a combatant; they further raised concerns about the ethical implications of remote warfare. Over nearly two decades, these drone strikes, which look like giant flying robotic bug strikes, have resulted in the deaths of thousands of Afghans, most never named, mourned only by their crushed families, leaving behind a legacy of trauma and grief throughout the country. 

In 2012, the U.S. government, under the Barack Obama Administration, implemented a policy that excluded all military-age males (MAMs) from the official count of civilian casualties in drone strikes, effectively classifying them as combatants unless proven otherwise. It has turned weddings into mass graves. Farmers and even humanitarian workers became the targets. And the script is the same after every strike – first, chest-thumping and a claim of eliminating a high-profile target, and when it is proved that those who were charred to death were civilians, there is silence and no accountability.

“High-level targets, like Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, or Sirajuddin Haqqani, or other high-level ranking members, were never killed in drone strikes in Afghanistan. You see, some of them are now ruling Kabul. So, we have to ask: if they are alive, then who has been killed instead of them?” questions Emran.

That tall man who was thought to be Osama by the drone pilot was Jehangir Khan. At the time of his death, Jehangir was around 29 years old.

“He was a small-time trader buying cattle, sheep, and goats, anything which he could sell and get some profits,” said Pela Khan, the eldest son of Jehangir. He was only two years old at the time of his father’s assassination.

An hour’s drive from Zhawar Kili village is the hamlet of Jag Maghulgai.  About 30 houses of peasants, goat herders, and pickup truck drivers. Jehangir lived here with his wife and children.

Pela Khan sat with his younger brother Sher Gul, who was only two months old at the time of Jehangir’s death, in a small room of a mud house. The walls were painted light yellow and grey. In one corner were blankets and a few mats; in the other, a bukhari, the traditional Afghan metal stove. 

“Though I don’t remember much, the villagers told us he (Jehangir) was killed by a bangana (Pashto word for drone, which means wasp),” said Pela. 

Looking at the body, Jehangir’s wife lost consciousness several times; the face was recognizable, but his body was severely deformed. As the sole breadwinner of the family, his death pushed the family into further poverty and helplessness. When a picture of their father standing with two other men was shown, both brothers’ facial expressions changed.  

“We grew up without the love and kindness of a father. If we find who killed him, we’ll take him to court,” said Pela with his piercing eyes. 

“In our tradition, on Eid, fathers give Eidi (usually cash) and buy new clothes for their children and take them to a picnic. What we do on that day is go to the grave of Babajan,” Sher Gul said.

The villagers believe Sher Gul is tall and thin with kind eyes, just like his father. He is a quiet man whose uncombed hair was hidden under a skullcap, and a light maroon shawl was wrapped around his head. When asked if he was aware of the rumor that his father was tall and was thought to be Osama by the drone pilot,  he stayed quiet for a moment. Then, with a bitter, mocking smile on his face, he asked.

“Then who was killed in Pakistan?” 

All these years, the family survived with the help and donations of the villagers. No government or non-governmental organization ever came to help. The U.S. embassy never released any press release explaining what happened on February 4. No reparations were ever made.

Pela and Sher Gul work as sheepherders to feed the family. But they are hopeful they will give their children a better life.

“Though our children will never get the love and affection of their grandfather, we will make sure we give them all the care and love which we didn’t get, or education, or a good life.”

An hour’s drive from there, in the rugged mountains, was the family of the third victim, Daraz Khan, in Kaskay village. At that time, Daraz was working in Dubai but had returned to see his family. On that fateful day, he attended a village meeting in Zhawar, organized by the village elders.

“The village elders were worried about the regular attacks by the U.S. in the area, and they decided to move the villagers to somewhere else,” said Nawab Khan, the cousin of Daraz Khan.

Daraz was Nawab’s brother-in-law, too. After Daraz’s death, his wife married one of his brothers. 

Recalling the day, a lump formed in Nawab’s throat, and his voice was stuck. But he found the courage to continue. “Daraz’s body was in pieces; his face was not even recognizable. We recognized him from his clothes”.

Daraz had fought against the Soviets before moving to Dubai. At the time of his death, he was in his thirties and left behind two wives.

After ending the two-decade occupation of the U.S. and its allies in 2021, the Taliban prioritized opening and cleaning the destroyed caves, instead of providing the basic necessities to the people of the area. A prominent member of the Taliban’s cultural commission, Mohammad Jalal, shared a short video on X of one of the caves of Zhawar Kili a few years ago, which he claimed was used by Jalaludin Haqqani against the Soviet invasion. The video shows the interior of a vast, complex cave with doors and windows.

The last known US drone strike in Kabul was on 29 August 2021, which killed ten civilians – including seven children – when the target, Zemari Ahmadi, was “mistakenly” identified as an ISIS-K terrorist; he was an Afghan aid worker and worked for the California-based NGO Nutrition and Education International (NEI), and his family had ties to the Afghan army and US forces. General Mark Milley, chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted it was a “righteous strike”. Despite extensive U.S. databases tracking Afghans who worked with Americans, those killed were not recognized and were publicly labeled as terrorists until journalists exposed the truth. No U.S. personnel faced consequences for the “mistake”, and accountability remains unresolved. 

Over the past two decades, drones have become a haunting reality of modern warfare. They have terrorized Afghans, day and night, in villages and cities and in rugged mountains. They are being used in the genocide in Gaza, where its victims are still under the rubble and where children grow up under skies filled with fear. In Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, they have replaced the sound of birds with the distant, chilling buzz that often comes before destruction. Drones are also causing havoc in the frozen trenches of Ukraine and Russia, watching exhausted soldiers who rarely see the sun. Their use has increased at the tense border between India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers whose peace always feels fragile. And more recently, hundreds of them light up the sky of Iran and Israel, reminding us that these flying machines are not just weapons of war but also tools of intimidation. These armed and unmanned drones not only leave behind wreckage – they leave fear, trauma, blood, dead bodies, and a sense that the sky is no longer safe.

An occupation in Afghanistan started with a botched drone strike and ended with the same. In between these two strikes, the U.S. and its allies ruined a country and its people; tens of thousands were killed, countless maimed, and a country pushed into civil war. The occupation created and supported warlords, incentivized corruption, legitimized puppet governments, and pushed Afghanistan into a humanitarian crisis, where families like these are still looking for answers, for solace, for accountability.