It's finally acknowledged: "A tragic mistake" VIDEO

It's finally acknowledged: "A tragic mistake" VIDEO

That involved a catastrophic intelligence failure for the Biden administration, writes "Blic".

A detailed timeline released by the Pentagon on Friday, compared to previous reports of humanitarian worker Zemari Ahmadi spending a day in Kabul on August 29, reveals misconceptions and huge mistakes that led to the disaster.

Ahmadi, 43, worked for the U.S. aid group Nutrition and Education International (NEI), and U.S. officials now admit he had no connection to the ISIS-Khorasan terrorists (a branch of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS-K).

It seems that his fatal mistake was driving a white "Toyota Corolla" from 1996. After the suicide attack in which 13 American soldiers were killed at the airport in Kabul, American officials had information that such a vehicle was included in the planning of the second attack, said General Frank McKenzie, the head of the American Central Command, at the briefing on Friday afternoon.

The Daily Mail and the New York Times published a detailed movement of Ahmadi and the last hours of his life. On the morning of August 29, Ahmadi left a property near Kabul airport, where he lived with his children, two brothers and nephews and nieces. On the way to work, Ahmadi picked up a colleague in the shared vehicle fleet, before stopping at the house of the NEI director at 8:52 to pick up a laptop.

The director's house was under the intensive supervision of MK-9 Reaper drones, and General McKenzie still insists that a strong intelligence service connects the home with ISIS-K. A New York Times reporter visited the director of NEI at his house and met with members of his family, who said they had lived there for 40 years.

"We have nothing to do with terrorism or ISIS. We love America. We want to go there," said the director, who is trying to move to the United States. Seeing the white "corolla" agreeing with the intelligence reports on the visit to the allegedly suspicious house, the American officials focused on the vehicle, following its every movement.

Everything they saw seemed to build on their incorrect theory of following a terrorist. At 9:05 a.m., Ahmadi picked up another associate not far from the director’s house, and the three of them drove together to the NEI office a few miles south. At 9.35, Ahmadi and his two associates arrived at the offices of NEI, a non-profit organization from California that promotes the cultivation of soybean crops in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon believed that the offices were another "suspicious property". Drone surveillance caught Ahmadi and his colleagues unloading "bags and jugs" as soon as they arrived at the office, which probably refers to the empty water jugs that Ahmadi filled at work to return home to his family.

Two hours later, at 11:22 a.m., Ahmadi and some associates left the offices and drove to the 10th Taliban-controlled district police station to seek permission to distribute food to displaced Afghans in the park. McKenzie says that at about the same time, US forces received a "sensitive collection of intelligence indicating that the leader of the ISIS-K cell in Kabul was delivering supplies," and apparently made conclusions linking the information to Ahmadi.

Ahmadi and his colleagues arrived at the police station at 12.11 and stayed for about an hour, and at 13.27 they returned to the NEI office. Ahmadi spent the afternoon in the NEI office, and while he was preparing to go home, he filled several large jugs with water from a hose to take them home, as the water supply service in his neighborhood was interrupted.

Witnesses helped him fill the jugs, and video surveillance shows that they were filled with water. But the Pentagon believed it had seen bombs being loaded for the impending attack. At 3:47 p.m., Ahmadi left the office with three colleagues and drove them home. They later told the Times that it was a normal commute from work to home, filled with laughter and jokes.

The only difference from normal was that Ahmadi did not turn on the car radio to listen to pop music as he usually did, for fear of violating the harsh restrictions imposed by the Taliban. At 16.11 Ahmadi left his first colleague and then stopped on two more occasions to leave the others.

The Pentagon sounded the alarm when it finally stopped at the location at 16.39, just a few blocks away from the alleged "ISIS-K complex" where the car was first monitored. At 16.51 Ahmadi arrived home and started parking his car.

A group of children and nephews ran outside to greet him. Ahmadi's house is about three kilometers from the airport in Kabul, where American forces were captured in an evacuation attempt, and where a suicide attack killed hundreds of Afghans and 13 Americans on August 26. "We were very worried that the vehicle could start quickly and be on the border of the airport in a few moments," McKenzie said.

While the children were greeting Ahmadi, his adult cousin Nasser went outside to help him bring jugs of water inside. U.S. forces immediately assessed that Nasser was a "conspirator" and launched an attack, claiming that they did not see children in that area. The "Hellfire" projectile hit the "Toyota Corolla" at 4.53. Ahmadi and his three children were killed - Zamir (20), Faisal (16) and Farzad (10), his cousin Nasser (30) and his nephews - Arvin (7), Benjamin (6) and Hayat (2), as well as two three-year-old girls Malika and Somaja.

The Pentagon initially claimed that the secondary explosion proved that the "corolla" was carrying explosive materials. McKenzie admitted on Friday that the projectile probably set fire to the gas tank near the car, which created a large fireball observed during the surveillance of the drones.

"The attack was a tragic mistake," McKenzie said.