Video: A US gunship at work in Afghanistan
This highly disturbing nine-minute US airforce video is alluded to – but without an explicit link – in a recent dispatch by Declan Walsh, the Guardian’s correspondent embedded with troops in Afghanistan. It shows people coming out of a mosque and a C-130 gunship hunting them down.
Walsh writes: “For a chilling display of the awesome power of American air strikes, look no further than the internet.
“A nine-minute clip on YouTube offers a terrifying glimpse of the way the war is being won and lost in southern Afghanistan. The video, filmed from the belly of a Spectre AC-130 gunship, shows an attack on an alleged insurgent camp, rendered through a quivering black and white screen and the pilot’s mechanical monotone.
“The crosshairs wander across a cluster of buildings, seeking out targets and shredding them to pieces. The bombs blitz mud dwellings, turn vehicles into fireballs, and mow down dozens of small white figures - people - as they sprint hopeless for their lives. ‘You are clear to level the building,’ says the voice. The only sop to local sensitivities is that the Americans avoid hitting a mosque.
“This is the death-dealing air power that has allowed Nato and US troops to spread deep into Afghanistan’s most remote and hostile territory.”
Walsh also notes that “Human rights groups estimate that 230 civilians were killed in combat in southern Afghanistan last year; another 300 have died in Helmand this year, according to one estimate. The majority perished in air strikes. Last December Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, wept as he spoke of his frustration to stop coalition forces ‘killing our children’.”
