The Hindu : Front Page : U.S. air raids kill dozens of civilians in Afghanistan

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Thursday, May 07, 2009
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U.S. air raids kill dozens of civilians in Afghanistan

Carlotta Gall and Taimoor Shah

KABUL: Dozens of Afghan civilians were killed in American air raids in western Afghanistan, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Wednesday. But Afghan officials gave far higher death tolls, ranging from 100 to 130 or more.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s office called the civilian deaths “unjustifiable and unacceptable” and said a government team had been sent to investigate. Mr. Karzai, who is in Washington, is scheduled to meet U.S. President Barack Obama.

If the deaths are confirmed to have been from American bombing raids, this would be the largest case of civilian death in Afghanistan since Mr. Obama took office.

The continuing toll in civilian casualties has been a principal factor in turning many Afghans against the war to defeat the Taliban.

The governor of Farah Province, where the strikes occurred overnight on Monday, told the national Parliament in a phone call played on a loudspeaker that about 100 civilians were killed, according to a legislator, Mohammad Naim Farahi.

Mr. Farahi said there might be even more deaths. He said he gathered accounts from villagers, tribal elders and officials and calculated that 130 people, including many women and children, were killed.

On Tuesday, enraged villagers took between 20 and 25 bodies from their district to the capital of Farah Province to show them to officials. Villagers’ accounts then put the death toll at 70 to 100, they said.

In Washington on Wednesday morning, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton held a joint news conference with Mr. Karzai. “We deeply, deeply regret” the loss of innocent lives, she said.

“We hope we can work together in reducing and eventually eliminating civilian casualties,” Mr. Karzai responded.

Jessica Barry, a spokeswoman for the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross, said the organisation had sent a team to the scene of the bombing on Tuesday.

The team members saw houses destroyed and dozens of bodies. Some, the team reported, had died while trying to shelter in a house.

“What our team saw was dozens of bodies, graves and people preparing burials,” she said in a telephone interview. “It’s not the first time,” Ms. Barry said, but “really this is one of the very serious and biggest incidents for a very long time.” In a statement on its Web site, the International Committee blamed the deaths squarely on the airstrikes.

“We know that those killed included an Afghan Red Crescent volunteer and 13 members of his family who had been sheltering from fighting in a house that was bombed in an air strike,” the statement said.

On Tuesday, the head of provincial council in Farah, Muhammad Nazir, said the raids had made the local people “very furious” against both the Afghan government and American and NATO forces. But he blamed the deaths on a Taliban tactic of attacking police posts to provoke airstrikes that risked civilian casualties. — © 2009 The New York Times News Service

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