One of the major challenges that under-represented and endangered language communities face in language technology is the lack or paucity of language data. This is also the case of the Southern varieties of the Kurdish and Laki languages for which very limited resources are available with insubstantial progress in tools. To tackle this, we provide a few approaches that rely on the content of local news websites, a local radio station that broadcasts content in Southern Kurdish and fieldwork for Laki. In this paper, we describe some of the challenges of such under-represented languages, particularly in writing and standardization, and also, in retrieving sources of data and retro-digitizing handwritten content to create a corpus for Southern Kurdish and Laki. In addition, we study the task of language identification in light of the other variants of Kurdish and Zaza-Gorani languages.

Fox News senior foreign affairs correspondent Greg Palkot provides details on the August 2021 U.S. drone strike that mistakenly killed 10 civilians. A New York Times report on the investigation into how the U.S. military conducted a drone strike that killed several civilians, including children, in Afghanistan last year, characterized the attack as a "deadly blunder" that was motivated by the "assumptions and biases" of those conducting the strike. The report also claimed that the U.S. military was aware that innocent children had been killed in the attack only hours after the strike, and it made "misleading" statements to the public about that reality. The Times report noted that through a FOIA request, it obtained internal documents from a U.S. Central Command investigation into the August 2021 U.S. drone strike that killed 10 civilians in Kabul, Afghanistan. GENERAL SAYS IT IS UNLIKELY ISIS-K MEMBERS KILLED IN AUGUST KABUL DRONE STRIKE: 'A TRAGIC MISTAKE' Photo taken on Sept. 2, 2021 shows damaged vehicles at the site of the U.S. airstrike in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan.

Fox News senior foreign affairs correspondent Greg Palkot provides details on the August 2021 U.S. drone strike that mistakenly killed 10 civilians. There is a lot of unfinished business following last year's messy U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan as the Taliban were taking over, including the fallout from a drone strike there that went horribly wrong. Three days after the Islamic State suicide bomb attack at Kabul Airport, which left 13 U.S. service members and many more Afghan civilians killed, the military thought they were on to another ISIS terrorist. All day on Aug. 29, 2021, they tracked a car making what appeared to be suspicious stops across Kabul. Late in the day, they let loose a Hellfire missile from a Reaper drone, obliterating the car, its surroundings and those at scene.

The Pentagon for the first time publicly released drone footage of a botched strike in Kabul that killed 10 members of a family, including seven children, amid the chaotic US withdrawal from the country. The footage was initially obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by The New York Times and was subsequently released by US Central Command on Thursday. It appears to underscore how, by the Pentagon's own account, limited intelligence, a heightened state of alert, and rushed decision-making led to the killing of civilians. The fuzzy footage, which officials told the newspaper was recorded by two MQ-9 Reaper drones, shows the moments before the fatal drone strike on a car in a courtyard in Kabul on August 29. One segment of footage appears to show a shorter, blurry figure in white next to a taller figure in black in the courtyard as the targeted car backs in to park, according to the analysis by the Times.

"Surprise: Top US soldier clears US soldiers of murder" That should have been the headline attached to any story written about the "findings" of a recent "probe" into the massacre of an Afghan family, including seven children, obliterated by a US "Hellfire" missile in late August. Of course, not one editor – as far as I can gather – opted to tell that simple, blunt truth. Instead, most trotted out the usual pallet of euphemisms in effect to absolve US soldiers of the murders of an Afghan humanitarian worker, Zemari Ahmadi, three of his children, Zamir, 20, Faisal, 16, and Farzad, 13, as well as his cousin, Ahmad, 30, and three of Ahmadi's nephews, Arwin, seven, Benyamin, six, and Hayat, two and two three-year-old girls, Malika and Somaya. So, editors wrote lots of headlines like this one to summarise the predictable "conclusions" of a report authored by US Air Force Lieutenant General Sami Said: "Watchdog Finds No Misconduct in Mistaken Afghan Airstrike." The Pentagon could not have penned a more agreeable precis of Lieutenant General Said's "investigation" into the summary execution of Ahmadi and his family.

The Pentagon has offered unspecified condolence payments to the family of 10 civilians who were killed in a botched US drone attack in Afghanistan in August during the final days before American troops withdrew from the country. The US Department of Defense said it made a commitment that included offering "ex-gratia condolence payments", in addition to working with the US Department of State in support of the family members who were interested in relocation to the United States. Colin Kahl, the US under-secretary of defense for policy, held a virtual meeting on Thursday with Steven Kwon, the founder and president of Nutrition & Education International, the aid organisation that employed Zemari Ahmadi, who was killed in the August 29 drone attack, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said late on Friday. Ahmadi and others who were killed in the drone raid were innocent victims who bore no blame and were not affiliated with Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K) or threats to US forces, Kirby said. The drone raid in Kabul killed as many as 10 civilians, including seven children.

Tuesday, top U.S. military officials publicly acknowledged they advised President Joe Biden to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan despite the president's claim otherwise. This amid multiple sources confirming extremist organizations such al-Qaeda and ISIS-K are still present in Afghanistan and remain a rising threat to U.S. national security. While Tuesday's Senate hearing was a productive start to this investigation, I am looking forward to asking General Mark Milley, Secretary Lloyd Austin, and General Kenneth McKenzie questions in Wednesday's House Armed Services Committee Hearing. Leading up to the Biden Administration's disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the president touted an "over-the-horizon" capability that would allow the U.S. to identify and eliminate threats from afar. The Biden administration has claimed the U.S. did not need a counterterrorism force in Afghanistan because the U.S. possessed significant intelligence and military capability to attack and eliminate terrorist threats reaching into Afghanistan from other U.S. military locations. However, Biden's withdrawal left a gap in intelligence gathering capabilities that has caused targeting decisions to be made with incomplete information, with increased risk and assumptions, and outside the norms of standard protocols.

After insisting it had been a "righteous strike," the Pentagon finally faced up to the facts and acknowledged that the last U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan before the withdrawal of American troops was a "horrible mistake" that killed 10 civilians, including as many as seven children. The admission came after news organizations, including the New York Times and Washington Post, had published reports casting doubt on the official version of events that claimed the Aug. 29 drone strike had stopped an imminent attack on the Kabul airport. Military officials now admit that pretty much everything they believed when they carried out the strike was wrong. The driver that the drone targeted and officials believed was a terrorist was actually Zamarai Ahmadi, a longtime aid worker for a U.S.-based group. Officials believed he had loaded explosives in the trunk of a white Toyota, but in fact he was likely carrying water bottles.

U.S. officials called it a "righteous strike." It was the last drone strike before the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and American officials claimed they stopped an ISIS bomb that posed an imminent threat to the Kabul airport. Turns out though that the strike appears to have killed a worker for a U.S. aid group and there are indications there were no explosives in the vehicle that was hit, according to investigations by the New York Times and Washington Post. In all, 10 civilians appeared to have been killed in the Aug. 29 strike, including seven children. They were all members of the same extended family.

Kabul – It was the last known missile fired by the United States in its 20-year war in Afghanistan, and the military called it a "righteous strike" -- a drone attack after hours of surveillance Aug. 29 against a vehicle that U.S. officials thought contained an Islamic State bomb and posed an imminent threat to troops at Kabul's airport. But a New York Times investigation of video evidence, along with interviews with more than a dozen of the driver's co-workers and family members in Kabul, raises doubts about the U.S. version of events, including whether explosives were present in the vehicle, whether the driver had a connection to the Islamic State group and whether there was a second explosion after the missile struck the car. Military officials said they did not know the identity of the car's driver when the drone fired but deemed him suspicious because of how they interpreted his activities that day, saying that he possibly visited an Islamic State group safe house and, at one point, loaded what they thought could be explosives into the car. Times reporting has identified the driver as Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime worker for a U.S. aid group. The evidence, including extensive interviews with family members, co-workers and witnesses, suggests that his travels that day actually involved transporting colleagues to and from work.