Was Zawahiri there?:

The News, January 17, 2006
Lucky and not-so-lucky Damadola villagers
By Rahimullah Yusufzai

PESHAWAR: Teenager Samiullah talks incoherently while recalling the US aerial strike that demolished his home in Damadola village in Bajaur tribal agency last Friday and killed 11 of his family members. He still believes some of his near and dear ones are alive and would be back after undergoing treatment at the hospital.

The 16-year-old boy was lucky to have survived the attack in the dead of the night. In fact, he wasn’t home. He had gone to his uncle’s home located nearby to spend the night with his cousins as part of the Eidul Azha celebrations.

Everybody else in the family home was killed or injured. His 65-year old father, Bakhtpur Khan, and mother Noor Pari, 50, perished in the missile strike on their cemented home. Two of his brothers, 25-year-old Nazeer Mohammad and 18-year-old Amir Mohammad, were also killed. He also lost two sisters named Madia and Sadiqa aged 9 and 10 years, respectively.

No wonder then that Samiullah has become disoriented. Any other person would have behaved similarly or even worse after experiencing so much suffering. Samiullah’s uncle Bashir survived the attack but his life was turned upside down after losing his wife and sons Tayyab, aged 15, and Zahidullah, 13. His younger brother Said Rahman’s wife and a nephew Hussain were also killed. Bashir was injured and is now under treatment at a hospital in Khaar, headquarters of Bajaur Agency.

Mohammad Sadiq and Shah Zaman, two other uncles of Samiullah, escaped unhurt in the attack but their home located nearby was half destroyed. Sadiq, young and more articulate than the other survivors of the US attack, has become the family spokesman after having granted scores of interviews to print, radio and television journalists.

Strong-nerved and calm, he has by now grasped all the questions that reporters are likely to ask. "We were lucky to survive but our material losses were huge. The collapsed rooms and furnishings and the cattleheads that were killed must be worth Rs 3.2 million," he estimated.

The third home that suffered two missile hits belonged to five bothers. Couple of adjacent homes where two of their remaining brothers lived didn’t sustain any damage. A mosque and a madrassa for girls sited nearby also escaped damage. One of the brothers, Mohammad Noor, lost two young sons in the attack. One of them, Saeedullah, was a Hafiz-i-Quran and 25 years old. His brother Mohammad Usman was 15. Two of their young female cousins, Aasia and Panra, were injured and hospitalised. Their father Badshah Khan survived the attack. Mohammad Saeed, Mohammad Khan and Mohammad Ismail, the remaining brothers, also survived. The last-named is Pesh Imam (prayer leader) of the mosque and runs the Madrassa for girls.

The owners of the three homes that were hit by US missiles are related to each other. In fact, they are all jewellers by profession and most of them own small jewellery shops in Inayat Qala town, located at a distance of three kilometres from Damadola. They had earned enough money to build sturdy, cemented homes. But the missile strike was so devastating that most of the dwellings were flattened and roofs were blown away.

At least four children went missing after the attack. They somehow managed to run out of Bakhtpur Khan’s home to take refuge in nearby houses. Saima, Shahana, Zahra and Hassan Nawaz were initially listed as dead. That is how the death toll was reported at 18 or even more. Subsequently, the four children were found and the death toll was corrected. It is now 13 and that appears to be final.

There are 13 fresh graves, all covered with white and blue plastic sheets to keep away the rains, in an agricultural field just opposite the destroyed homes. In fact, villagers explained that they dug one large grave and then put stones in it to make compartments for each dead person. Initially, 18 to 20 compartments were made because it was estimated that the death toll could be that much. But later the empty graves were filled up with earth again and levelled.

The fact that more graves were dug up earlier is probably the reason for the unsubstantiated and apparently misleading reports that five or even more bodies of al-Qaeda figures such as Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri were taken away for secret burial somewhere else. Hundreds of villagers had reached the site of the US missile attack by 4 am Friday and volunteers struggled until 8 am to remove the debris and retrieve the bodies. Sahibzada Haroon-ur-Rasheed was among them and he and others who remained on site vehemently denied reports that some of the bodies were taken away. There is no evidence to support this claim and it appears this story was concocted to justify the inexcusable US missile attack that killed innocent men, women and children.