U.S. Airstrike Kills 9 in Afghan Family
By CARLOTTA GALL and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA
KABUL, Afghanistan, March 5 — Nine members of a family were killed in an American airstrike in central Afghanistan, including five women and three children during a battle with militants, Afghan officials said today.
The United States military acknowledged it had dropped two 2,000 pound bombs on a compound Sunday night but said it could not confirm the casualties.
The incident came just 12 hours after American forces in eastern Afghanistan opened fire on civilians when a suicide car bomb exploded next to their convoy Sunday morning, leaving at least 10 people dead and 25 wounded, according to Afghan officials. The shooting sparked angry demonstrations that blocked the main highway Sunday.
United States forces at a small base at Tape Ahmed Beg, in Kapisa province, northeast of Kabul, called in the airstrike after coming under rocket fire around 9 p.m. local time on Sunday, the American military said in a statement. When two men with Kalashnikov rifles were spotted entering a compound, they called an airstrike on the compound, which ended the engagement, it said.
“Coalition forces observed two men with AK-47s leaving the scene of the rocket attack and entering the compound,” said Lt. Col. David Accetta, a military spokesman, said in a statement. “These men knowingly endangered civilians by retreating into a populated area while conducting attacks against coalition forces,” he said.
“We did this in self-defense,” said Gen. Muhammad Eiwaz Masloom, police chief of Kapisa Province, whose police work alongside United States forces at the base. “The enemy of Afghanistan is trying to use different tactics to destroy the peace and stability in our area, especially in the districts of Tagab and Nejarab, and they have repeatedly attacked our bases,” he said. He said members of Hesb-e-Islami, a party led by a renegade mujahedeen commander, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Taliban supporters were active in the area.
But a local representative of the provincial council, Suraya Bahadur, who comes from Nejarab district where the bombing occurred, condemned it. “I condemned both the suicide attacks and the rocket attacks by the enemy of Afghanistan, and also I condemn these type of mistakes,” by American and NATO forces, she said. “We never want our civilian people to be killed.”
John Sifton, senior researcher at the New York-based group Human Rights Watch, also expressed concern at the level of force used by coalition and NATO troops. “That is heavy firepower to respond to two men, even if they have Kalashnikovs,” he said in a telephone interview. “If that version of events bears up, it would strongly suggest that the attack was disproportionate.” Mr. Sifton said insurgents also regularly violate the rules of war by using force near civilian areas.
President Hamid Karzai strongly condemned the killing of the civilians in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday morning in a statement from his office today. He blamed the “enemies of Afghanistan” for the suicide bombing, which “caused the American forces to fire on civilian people and demonstrators that killed 10 people.” He ordered a high-level government delegation to the scene to conduct a joint investigation with the United States military.
In a statement, the United States military lowered its own account of the death toll to 8 civilians killed and 35 wounded, (down from 16 dead and 24 wounded), saying that the latest figures were the most accurate it had. A spokesman at Bagram airbase, Sgt. Dean Welch, said that as the day progressed and after coordination with Afghan officials, the initial reports of 16 dead were corrected.
The statement said the United States military deeply regretted the loss of civilian life. “This attack put every innocent man, woman and child buying food or clothing in the bazaar at risk,” Army Col. John Nicholson, the Task Force Spartan commander, was quoted saying in the statement. United States forces would work with the Afghan authorities to “investigate and identify those responsible,” the statement said.
Nine witnesses including five Afghans recuperating from bullet wounds in the hospital told The Associated Press that American forces fired indiscriminately along at least a six-mile stretch of one of eastern Afghanistan’s busiest highways — a route often filled not only with cars and trucks but Afghans on foot and bicycles.
Civilian casualties have increased in the last year as the insurgency has seen a resurgence in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Mr. Sifton of Human Rights Watch called on the Afghan government and NATO and coalition forces to sit down and work out operating procedures for troops in these circumstances in order to prevent further civilian deaths.
Source
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/wo...gewanted=print