This is Mohammad Ilyas. He lived in eastern Afghanistan. He was eight years old when an airstrike killed him inside his home last fall. His six brothers and sisters were killed, too. So was their mother, Amina, and four young cousins. Twelve dead in total, an entire immediate family gone, except for one person — the husband and father, 39-year-old Masih Mubarez. It’s a familiar story for civilians caught up in the 18-year war. Mubarez has searched in vain for answers about his family’s deaths. He went public with his plight. A U.N. statement pointed toward American responsibility, but the answers never came. Along with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, we investigated the airstrike. We wanted to find out who was behind the attack and how complicated it would be to get answers. Our own analysis of the airstrike’s aftermath led us to the U.S. military. The U.S. denied the strike, later admitted it. But even today, it still hasn’t acknowledged civilians were killed. Mubarez’s story shows just how hard it can be to find the truth when your family is killed in Afghanistan. Here’s how it unfolded. The airstrike on the family home happened here, in a remote area southwest of Kabul. Mubarez survived because he was 1,000 miles away in Iran, working illegally. It was the only way he could earn money. Mubarez’s wife Amina called him on the morning of the airstrike, seven hours before she would be killed. Already, something was wrong. Their home was in an area mostly controlled by the Taliban. The Afghan military, backed by the U.S., is fighting to get it back. One Afghan army raid there a few months earlier was captured on camera. Amina told her husband that a raid similar to this had just taken place in their village. She said foreign soldiers were there, too, speaking English. That phone call was the last time Mubarez and Amina ever spoke. The raid was part of an operation to free Afghan army soldiers from a Taliban prison. The prison was just 200 yards from Mubarez’s house. This is the home before it was destroyed. Here are the living quarters. The family was in there when the bomb struck the morning after the raid. Photos we obtained show fragments of the weapon that was used. The twisted metal holds several clues, including a square pattern of four bolts on a tailfin. Weapons experts said this construction is only used in one type of aerial weapon — a JDAM. JDAMs are devices with fins that fit onto the backs of bombs to steer them and make them more accurate. We then traced an ID number on another piece of debris to a U.S.-based company that manufactures parts for guided weapons. So we knew the weapon, but we still needed to figure out who launched it. There are just two forces conducting airstrikes in Afghanistan — the Afghan government and the United States. But only U.S. warplanes are capable of carrying JDAMs. Two weeks after the airstrike, the U.S. military said it could find no connection between an American operation and the deaths of Mubarez’s family. Five months after the airstrike, the U.S. denied that any strike ever took place in the area of Mubarez’s home. But that’s not the story Mubarez tells. When we recently gave the U.S. military the precise coordinates of the Mubarez home, their story changed. They now admit to striking it. They say it was done in self-defense because of sniper fire coming from the house. Taliban fighters often use civilians as shields against American airstrikes. But the U.S. military denies that any civilians were killed in the airstrike. We spoke to a medical analyst who concluded that the family’s corpses show injuries consistent with the effects of an explosive blast. That leaves Mubarez still with lots of questions, but with no one to take responsibility for killing his family.