page_title: 2009 Kunduz airstrike
section_title: Airstrike
hierarchical_section_title: 2009 Kunduz airstrike / Airstrike
caption_attribution_description: English: An F-15E Strike Eagle (was built to be an Air Superiority Fighter) conducts a mission over Afghanistan on Nov. 7. The F-15E Strike Eagle is a dual-role fighter designed to Be An "Air Superiority" fighter capable of performing air-to-air and air-to-ground missions. An array of avionics and electronics systems gives the F-15E the capability to fight at low altitude, day or night, and in all weather.
context_page_description: The 2009 Kunduz airstrike took place on Friday 4 September 2009 at roughly 2:30 am local time, 7 km southwest of Kunduz City, Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan, near the hamlets of Omar Kheil by the border of the Chahar Dara and Ali Abad districts. Responding to a call by German forces, an American F-15E fighter jet struck two fuel tankers captured by Taliban insurgents, killing over 90 civilians in the attack.
  Because of the high civilian death toll, the airstrike had political repercussions, especially in Germany. In June 2010 Germany announced it would pay $5,000 to each of the families of over 100 civilian victims, as an ex gratia payment without admitting liability. The former Afghan Commerce Minister Amin Farhang described the $5,000—equivalent to about 20,000 Afghanis—as a "laughable" sum. Earlier, Germany had reclassified the Afghanistan deployment as an "armed conflict within the parameters of international law", allowing German forces to act without risk of prosecution under German law.
context_section_description: With video of the scene being transmitted from the F-15Es, German Oberst (Colonel) Georg Klein was told by an intelligence officer in contact with a sole informant that all the people around the stationary tankers were insurgents. The German commander ordered that 500-pound GBU-38 bombs be dropped onto each of the two trucks at 2:30 am.
  The bombs struck two minutes later, exploding the oil tankers in a fireball that incinerated many of those around. The video in the German tactical operations center showed a huge mushroom cloud blanketing the area and revealed only a few fleeing survivors out of the 100 or so people that had previously been present on the screen. Abdul Malek, one of the truck drivers,  was sitting approximately 50 meters from the attack and later described it in an interview:
  At first, there was a loud droning, like what you hear when a generator short-circuits. Then there was a bright flash. I just let myself fall forward and went down underwater. Even from there, I could feel the shock wave. For a few seconds, it was as bright as day. Even the water was heating up. When I came out of the water, the whole area around the tanker trucks was on fire. It looked like the ground was spitting up fire, though it was just the fuel from the trucks. It was unbearably hot. There were bodies lying everywhere; they were completely carbonized. I believe there were about 120 there before the bombing; only a handful survived.
  — Abdul Malek, 15 December 2009,
  Malek stated that local Taliban had stolen the tankers in order to provide fuel to local villagers, who surrounded the tankers to siphon fuel when they became stuck in the riverbank. By his estimate, between 1/5 and 1/4 of those present were armed.
  It is unknown exactly how many people were killed in the resulting explosions but estimates of the death toll have ranged from 56 to 179. The governor of Kunduz, Mohammad Omar, stated that 90 people had been killed, amongst them a local Taliban commander and four Chechen fighters.  An anonymous senior Afghan National Police officer said that around 40 civilians were killed in the blasts. A NATO fact-finding team estimated a day after the incident that about 125 people were killed in the U.S. airstrike, and that at least 24 – but perhaps many more – of those killed had been Afghan civilians. A later German investigation found that up to 142 people died in the attack, including over 100 Afghan civilian victims.
  The strike occurred as villagers gathered to collect fuel from the tankers. The governor of Kunduz province has said that Taliban leaders are among the dead and was supportive of the ISAF attack. NATO has said its commanders had believed that only insurgents were in the vicinity. German forces had responded to the hijack at 12:30 pm and exchanged fire with militants within 40 minutes of arriving, but were unable to reclaim the vehicles.
  German forces stated that the strike took place after an unmanned surveillance aircraft had determined that there were no civilians in the area. German officials said the strike took place 40 minutes after the commanders requested it. It is unclear whether civilians began to assemble during that time, but one eyewitness claims that up to 500 people from surrounding villages swarmed the tankers for free fuel.
caption: An American F-15E Strike Eagle similar to one used in the attack.
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