The U.S. military on Sunday carried out a drone strike targeting a vehicle in a residential neighborhood of Kabul, killing 10 civilians, the youngest of whom was only 2 years old, family members said.

The Pentagon claimed the airstrike was aimed at a suspected ISIS-K member who had posed imminent threats to Kabul airport. 

In a statement, Capt. Bill Urban, spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said "significant secondary explosions from the vehicle indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive material," and "may have caused additional casualties."

The vehicle, which remained unmoved after the strike, belonged to a family of four brothers, one of whom was killed, according to a China Media Group (CMG) reporter.

At least 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members were killed during a suicide bombing attack at Kabul airport last week. Since then, the Pentagon has been on high alert, and President Joe Biden has vowed to revenge his soldiers. 

ISIS-K, the Afghan branch of ISIS, has claimed responsibility for the atrocity.

The man driving the vehicle Sunday was suspected by the U.S. military to be another ISIS-K suicide bomber, on his way to the airport for a second attack. 

He was not heading for the airport as they claimed, his brother told CMG.

When the drone strike took place, he just got home, and his children surrounded the car to welcome him, said the brother. 

Eyewitnesses at the scene told CMG there were no explosives in the car, and signs of a second explosion were not detected in its vicinity. 

The old apartments in the neighborhood simply cannot stand a second explosion, they said. 

The deceased driver, who was supposedly the airstrike's target, had been working for a foreign organization and was recently granted a visa, according to his relatives. 

He was waiting for his employer to arrange his evacuation, but what he got instead was a drone strike that took his life, one of the relatives lamented.

The relatives were also angry at Western media reporters, who they said kept asking where they hid other "terrorists." 

The devastating scene in this residential neighborhood is just a microcosm of the tragedies contributed by the U.S. military over the past 20 years. 

Over and again, drone operators sitting on cold computer chairs would mistake innocent Afghans for militants, killing them from hundreds of miles away based on rough guesses about their identity from the way they behaved, or if they carried a weapon. The frequency of these "signature strikes" also accounted for a disproportionate number of civilian deaths.

At its peak, U.S. airstrikes killed 700 innocent Afghans a year – a figure that is likely well below the actual number due to Washington's loose definition of enemy combatants. As one Obama administration official revealed to The New York Times in 2012, all military-age males in a strike zone are counted as combatants unless "explicit intelligence posthumously" prove their innocence.

In February 2010, a NATO airstrike in Daikundi Province took at least 33 civilian lives, including 4 women and 1 child. 

In July 2010, a residential building was blown up during a NATO military operation in Helmand Province, leaving 52 civilians dead. 

In October 2015, a hospital in north Afghanistan's Kunduz City was mistakenly struck by the U.S. military, resulting in over 20 deaths, many of them children, patients and medical workers. 

Even after the Biden administration had decided to fully withdraw its forces, the taking of innocent Afghan lives did not stop. During last week's suicide bombing attack at Kabul airport, Afghans were killed not only by the explosion but American troops who fired at the crowd.