Noor Mohammed, 57, had not slept all night, and he was distraught and exhausted. The U.S. planes that had dropped bombs on his village all night were keeping up the attack during the day, forcing him to stop and seek shelter and making the usual three-hour walk last all day.

By the time he got there, it was too late. His wife, two sons and two daughters had already been buried.

Mohammed's family members and three other Afghan civilians were killed when a U.S. plane bombed a tractor lumbering across the open desert on the morning of Dec. 1. Mohammed and survivors of the attack say the tractor was hauling a trailer with 20 people on board, including 10 women and girls and seven boys younger than 11.

"I have no idea why they did this," said Mohammed, a weathered field hand who looks about 20 years older than his age. "We were just escaping and trying to hide somewhere."

"We heard on the radio that America had pledged not to hit civilian houses or innocent people," said Abdul Ghafur, a scholar at the village mosque whose wife, brother and sister also were killed in the incident. "America says it has the technology to see tiny things on the ground [from fighter planes]. Why did they drop a bomb on an open tractor with no weapons, just women and children, in the middle of the desert in broad daylight?"

The United States has not acknowledged any missteps in a bombing campaign that occurred in late November and early December south of Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual capital. While numerous Taliban and al Qaeda bases were destroyed, the Dec. 1 tractor bombing was one of several incidents in which U.S. planes have targeted remote hamlets and vehicles that Afghans have described as having no military value, killing scores of civilians.

Marine Maj. Ralph Mills, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, said this week that bomb damage assessment (BDA) analysts reviewed information on the Dec. 1 airstrike on the village and concluded that a military target was hit.

"We struck our intended target on that particular day," Mills said. "This has gone to the BDA guys and back, and we did strike our intended target."

Yusuf Pashtoon, a provincial government spokesman in Kandahar, said 72 U.S. bombing incidents in the region -- including the tractor attack -- have been referred to the Afghan Interior Ministry in Kabul to determine whether they involved legitimate military targets and, if not, whether compensation should be sought from the United States.

Residents of this tiny farming community of six adobe houses and 116 people, about 12 miles southwest of Kandahar, say U.S. planes kept up a sustained attack on them for no apparent reason.

"We don't know why they bombed our village -- I swear to God there were no Talibans or al Qaedas," Mohammed said.

The first bomb exploded about 10 p.m. on Nov. 30 in a field just outside the village. The community has no electricity, and most of its residents were already in bed.

"We were asleep when the first bomb landed behind the house and blew the doors off," said Torily, 30, who like many Afghans uses only one name. "There was a huge noise, the walls were shaking and the children were crying. My wife yelled that we have to get away from this place."

Like others in the village, his family of 15 ran to the vineyards behind the town -- 370 acres of grapevines that produce raisins.

Ghafur, the Islamic scholar, said his family broke into two groups, so that if a bomb hit one, it would not kill them all.

"We just ran," said Mohammed, the farmer. Later, he wandered among the vines, collecting his family members and shepherding them to different places in the vineyard all night, depending on where the latest bomb had fallen.

Residents said perhaps four to six bombs exploded that night, but they could offer no reason for being targeted. In fact, said Torily, "we begged the Taliban not to come here. We said we have women and children, and we don't want them killed because of you, and they agreed."

"This was the wrong target -- the Taliban were in another village," said Noor Ahmad Azimi, the field supervisor of the Mine Clearance Planning Agency, an independent Afghan de-mining organization.

One of the bombs dropped that night left a grove of pomegranate trees about 100 yards from the village littered with about 50 yellow antipersonnel mines, he said. Another fragment bomb destroyed about 200 pomegranate trees 20 yards from Mohammed's home, blowing out the doors and collapsing some of the walls.

No one was killed in the nighttime raid. Though one bomb landed in a small alley between three homes, about 50 feet from the mosque in the center of town, it did not explode. Today, life goes on around the deep hole where it hit.

By the morning of Dec. 1, Ghafur and Mohammed found themselves together on the outskirts of a neighboring town, where they left their families and returned home to collect Ghafur's tractor and trailer. After loading it with personal belongings, they drove to their families, piled them on board and directed Mohammed's 23-year-old son, Hazrat, to take the group to his grandfather's home in a village about 10 miles east. Ghafur and Mohammed would return home to collect the family cows and would follow on foot, they said.

The tractor and trailer pulled away at about 7 a.m.

Following the custom in most rural Afghan communities, the men would not identify the women in their families by name and would not allow them to be interviewed. The oldest surviving males -- Mohammed's son Rahmatullah, 10, and Ghafur's son Abdul Kabir, 11 -- described what happened next.

At about 9 a.m., the tractor was slowly rumbling over a bumpy sand road in the middle of a flat, desolate expanse of barren desert -- devoid of trees, streams, houses or any significant structure for miles in all directions. It was a clear, sunny day, the boys said, and there were no other vehicles in sight.

From behind the tractor, a plane suddenly appeared and flew over them at a fairly high altitude, the boys said. It turned when it was in front of them, dipped to a lower altitude and when overhead, dropped a bomb that landed about 15 feet from the trailer.

"The plane was black and circled around in front of us and then came back. I didn't see anything -- there was just a huge explosion," said Rahmatullah, who displayed a tender-looking wound on his right shoulder that he said he suffered in the blast. While visiting the site recently, he described a scene of pandemonium, with survivors crying and screaming amid body parts and personal belongings drenched in blood.

"I didn't realize what had happened," he said. He drew a finger across his throat: "My mother's head was cut off. It was like a slaughter. My sister was killed and the trailer was full of blood.

"An airplane was still around, and I got scared and ran away and hid under a bridge" about a mile and a half away.

Ghafur, the scholar, said he was walking with his cows about two miles behind when an acquaintance told him that his tractor had been bombed. He borrowed a car from a friend and raced to the scene.

"It was a mess," he said. "Some were missing their heads, some their hands. My brother's stomach was sliced open."

Ghafur said he collected the dead in the car and the seriously injured in another borrowed vehicle. The wounded were taken to the hospital, and he took the bodies to the cemetery.

The bombing site is now marked by a grave where residents of the village returned to bury body parts and bloody clothes that had been scattered across the desert.

"We don't know who gave wrong information to the Americans, but they said they wouldn't hit civilians and they broke their promise," Ghafur said. "Maybe their Afghan allies told the Americans, 'Don't let anyone leave this village.' But in our town, there were no Talibans or al Qaedas or weapons or terror networks."

Noor Mohammed said his daughter and neighbors occasionally cook bread for him nowadays because his wife is dead. "My life has been destroyed. I feel like I've lost everything," he said.

"I'm an uneducated laborer. I don't know what caused this military campaign," he said. "But I have no enemies and I'm not angry at anyone. There are a lot of people who have been killed in our country."

Staff writer Vernon Loeb in Washington contributed to this report.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

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