2009 Kunduz airstrike
According to The Daily Telegraph, it was roughly 22:00 local time when they were approached by a group of Taliban and Chechens (apparently foreign volunteers), who killed several of the tanker drivers by beheading them[8] and seized their vehicles.
[1] 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 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.
[3] 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.
[8] German forces had responded to the hijacking of tankers at 12:30 pm and exchanged fire with militants within 40 minutes of arriving, but were unable to reclaim the vehicles.
[15] General Stanley McChrystal made a statement on Afghan television and visited the site of the bombing the following day; a NATO team charged with investigating the airstrike also arrived at the scene.
"[19] Afghan President Hamid Karzai had long been critical of the high civilian death toll caused by the tactics of the NATO International Security Assistance Force.
[22] In early 2010, further material came to light, especially about the political handling in the German government, which brought further pressure on a number of people, including Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the new defense minister.
The major German newsweekly Der Spiegel, in an exhaustive research article published in February 2010, called the incident a war crime due to the fact that the attack on the tankers had broken a number of rules of conduct, and had led to a later cover-up.
In the aftermath of the Kunduz airstrike, pressure from the field and demands from NATO allies led to a strong call for action in the German political arena.
[23] On the day of the events, September 4, 2009, the Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung (CDU) defended the attack that was ordered by the German commander Colonel Georg Klein.
Several German officials initially justified the airstrike: including on October 29, the Germany Army's Chief of Staff, General Wolfgang Schneiderhan and on November 6 the newly appointed Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (CSU).
[26] On November 27, Franz Josef Jung submitted his resignation as Germany's Minister of Labour and Social Affairs (Bundesarbeitsminister), a position he had accepted after the September federal election, after repeatedly denying civilian deaths in the attack.
On December 9, the German weekly "Der Stern" published that Guttenberg had received a report of the International Red Cross already on November 6 in which civilian casualties were mentioned.
[29] In 2021 two judges from the German Federal Court of Justice's third senate (which had dismissed damage claims by Afghan families over the incident) wrote a letter to the editor of Neue Juristische Wochenschrift where they complained about the public perception of the affair, describing it as "ultimately based on a Taliban propaganda victory," and decried as highly regrettable how Col. Klein was portrayed in a wrong light as having recklessly ordered a bombing that killed over 100 people, including many civilians and even children.
The non-governmental group reached the figure based on interviews with local residents that indicated that 60 to 70 non-combatants had died in the airstrike, as well as more than a dozen armed men.
[16] The Taliban said they had also set up a commission to investigate the incident, and released a list of 79 civilians – showing name, father's name, and age – that they claimed had been killed in the airstrike.
