Granite State Times

It's unclear whether U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-New Hampshire) is joining the list of legislators calling for an investigation into the Aug. 29 airstrike in Kabul that killed 10 innocent civilians, including seven children.

After multiple attempts, Hassan's office did not reply to requests for comment.

Representatives from both political parties have called for an investigation into the events surrounding the strike.

“I will demand a full accounting of how this strike went so horribly wrong.... President (Joe) Biden bears ultimate responsibility," ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), said in a Sept. 17 statement on his website. “His precipitous withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan has left our military with an impossible mission of countering terrorists without any personnel or partners on the ground. The Aug. 29 strike shows how difficult and complex counterterrorism operations can be, and unfortunately, it highlights that an 'over-the-horizon' strategy will only increase the complexity and difficulty.”

On Sept. 17, nearly two and a half weeks after Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, declared the U.S. had executed a “righteous strike” against an “imminent threat,” the Pentagon acknowledged that the Aug. 29 drone strike in the midst of a hurried and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan was a “horrible mistake” which killed 10 innocent Afghans, including several children. according to a U.S. Department of Defense transcript.

According to the Pentagon and several other reports, Ahmadi was an employee of an American-based aid organization Nutrition and Education International and posed no threat to U.S. forces.

The Sept. 17 statements contradicted statements issued on the day of the strike by the U.S. Central Command that said the U.S. executed a "self-defense unmanned over-the-horizon airstrike" against a vehicle in Kabul, which posed an imminent ISIS-K threat. Three days later, Milley praised the airstrike, saying at least one of the people killed was an ISIS facilitator and the action and "procedures were correctly followed," according to another U.S. Department of Defense transcript.

Two days after the strike, Biden endorsed the airstrike, calling it an example of his "over-the-horizon" counterterrorism strategy. He called the attack retribution for the 13 servicemen and dozens of innocent Afghans killed in an ISIS-K attack at the airport. The tragedy has counterterrorism experts questioning Biden's "over-the-horizon" strategy, with one member calling it the "over-the-rainbow" strategy, according to an Axios report.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) said in a Sept. 7 Tweet that there should be consequences: “There must be accountability. If there are no consequences for a strike this disastrous, it signals to the entire drone program chain of command that killing kids and civilians will be tolerated.”