AFGHAN President Hamid Karzai yesterday condemned a US-led coalition air strike his government says killed dozens of civilians, most of them women and children.
An Afghan human rights group said that at least 88 people, including 20 women, were killed in a joint operation in the west of the country.
Karzai, lamenting that his efforts to get the US and Nato to prevent civilian casualties had not been succe
ssful, said that the Afghan government would announce "necessary measures" to prevent civilian deaths. He provided no details.
Meanwhile, an Afghan school principal and a police official said Afghan army troops tried to hand out food and clothes to Afghans in Azizabad – the village in the Shindand district of Herat province where the operation took place on Thursday – but villagers started throwing stones at the soldiers, who then fired on the Afghans, wounding up to eight.
US coalition spokeswoman Rumi Nielson-Green said Thursday's operation was led by Afghan National Army commandos, with support from the coalition. Originally the coalition said the battle killed 30 militants, but Nielson-Green said five civilians – two women and three children connected to the militants – were among the dead.
Ahmad Nader Nadery, commissioner of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, said one of the group's researchers visited Azizabad on Friday and found that 88 people had been killed and 25 houses had been damaged, including 15 that were destroyed.
He did not provide a breakdown of how many were civilians or militants.
The interior ministry has said that 76 civilians were killed, including 50 children under the age of 15. Karzai's office said at least 70 civilians died.
But the Afghan ministry of defence said 25 militants and five civilians were killed.
The US coalition said it would investigate the claims of civilian deaths.
"Obviously there are allegations and a disconnect here. The sooner we can get that cleared up and get it official the better off we'll all be," said US coalition spokesman First Lieutenant Nathan Perry. "We had people on the ground."
Ghulam Azrat, director of the middle school in Azizabad, said he collected 60 bodies on Friday morning after the bombing.
"We put the bodies in the main mosque," he said, pausing to collect himself in between tears. "Most of these dead bodies were children and women. It took all morning to collect them."
Azrat said villagers threw stones at Afghan soldiers who tried to give food and clothes to the villagers yesterday. He said the soldiers fired into the crowd and wounded eight people, including one child critically.
"The people were very angry," he said. "They told the soldiers, 'We don't need your food, we don't need your clothes. We want our children, we want our relatives. Can you give it to us? You cannot, so go away.'"
A spokesman for Afghan police in western Afghanistan, Rauf Ahmadi, confirmed that the demonstration took place, but said the soldiers fired into the air. He said two Afghans were wounded by the gunfire.
The differing death tolls for Thursday's airstrikes were impossible to verify because of the remote and dangerous location of the battle site.
Complicating the matter, Afghan officials have been accused of exaggerating civilian death claims for political payback, to qualify for more compensation money from the US or because of pressure from the Taliban.
The operation was launched after an intelligence report that a Taliban commander, Mullah Siddiq, was inside a compound presiding over a meeting of militants, Azimi said. Siddiq was one of those killed during the raid, Azimi said.
More than 3,400 people – mostly militants – have been killed in insurgency-related violence this year, according to figures from Western and Afghan officials.
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