On September 16, 2012, at three in the morning, Mohammad Zahir Shah, received a phone call. 

There were air strikes in the mountains near his home in Lagham province. 

For the next two hours, Shah and fellow villagers waited for the shelling to come to an end. Then they set out looking for the dead and wounded.

Seven were killed, including Shah's daughter, 22-year-old Khan Bibi, who was five months pregnant.

"Just one of them had children," Shah told Al Jazeera. "All the others were very young; we are very upset about that. I lost my young daughter."

The group of women had been out collecting wood that night. According to Shah, someone informed the US military that the Taliban district governor would be travelling the same route that night. 

US forces explained the air strike was a mistake - an extraordinary miscalculation. 

"Obviously it was a mistake, no one would bomb women," Shah said. "But they told us they would punish the killer, and they have not. We want justice."

The US military has failed to provide accountability, information, and transparency in the vast majority of military operations in Afghanistan resulting in the death and injury of Afghan civilians, according to a report released on August 11 by Amnesty International.

The report compiled from a database of 70 incidences from 2009 to 2013, investigates 10 cases, in which at least 140 civilians, including 50 children, were killed by military operations across the country.

"We found a shocking level of lack of accountability towards civilian casualties in Afghanistan, particularly in cases where US forces were involved," said Horia Mosadiq, a researcher at Amnesty International, who also noted a lack of transparency in the cases. 

"Many Afghans whose family members were killed or wounded by a military operation had no information to tell them who did it, why it happened and what was the proof that they or any of their family members were linked to the Taliban or insurgents."

According to Amnesty International, US military investigators never showed up to interview the families or any eyewitnesses in nine out of ten cases. 

There are only six reported instances in which military forces have been criminally prosecuted for the unlawful killing of civilians.

In February 2010, US Special forces raided the home of Haji Sharabuddin, a tribal elder in the Khataba village as he celebrated the birth of his grandson.

The botched operation resulted in the killing of five civilians including two pregnant women.

Before leaving the patriarch's home, US troops removed the bullets from the bodies of the victims and those stuck in the walls of the house.  

"I begged them not to touch the bodies of the women," Sharabuddin told Amnesty, explaining how he watched the soldiers use a metallic instrument to remove the bullets, "but they didn't listen".

US senior officials later claimed the women were the victims of honour killings, or had possibly been killed by the Taliban. 

After two months of issuing false statements and discrediting journalists' reports, NATO finally took responsibility for the deaths.

Admiral William McRaven, the commander of Joint Special Operations Command, visited the victims, bringing with him money and sheep, a customary gesture in the Pashtun culture when asking for forgiveness.

Sharabuddin who lost several of his family members in the attack accepted the apology, but said what he wanted most was to see those guilty of the killings tried for their crimes.

McRaven and the US embassy in Kabul declined to respond to questions sent by Al Jazeera regarding the case.

The families of victims who saw some sort of accountability still said they felt justice had not been served.

(Aljazeera)