Former US President Donald Trump has condemned his successor Joe Biden for civilian killings in Afghanistan, but his . US Central Command’s Marine Corps General Frank McKenzie admitted on Friday that the military had killed 10 Afghans, including seven children, in Kabul on August 29 in a drone strike due to a “tragic mistake.” The Pentagon had previously claimed the strike as a targeted attack against a militant affiliated with the extremist group ISIS-K.  However, civilian deaths from US-led airstrikes in Afghanistan increased by 330% during the Trump administration.

In a statement posted to Twitter by his spokesperson Liz Harrington, Trump said it was “disgraceful that so many people have been killed because of our incompetent Generals.” He accused the Joe Biden administration of being eager to show that they “were tough guys after they surrendered to the Taliban, which left many soldiers injured or dead and left Americans and the best military equipment in the world behind.” Trump said the US had never been “so embarrassed or humiliated.”   

“The number of civilians killed by international airstrikes increased about 330 percent from 2016, the last full year of the Obama Administration, to 2019, the most recent year for which there is complete data from the United Nations,” Newsweek quotes a December 2020 report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

The killing of more than 700 Afghan civilians in 2019 by airstrikes was more than “in any other year since the beginning of the war in 2001 and 2002,” the report said.

Several of Trump’s key allies slammed Biden over the August 29 deaths, with some even calling for his impeachment.

“War Crimes. #ImpeachBiden,” Georgia’s Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, tweeted on Friday.

“So the U.S. drone strike did NOT kill any ISIS-K but did kill 10 innocent civilians, including 7 children. Unbelievable,” Trump’s former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany tweeted.