US air strikes kill more civilians in Afghanistan

At least 21 civilians, including six children, were killed on May 8 in US air strikes in Afghanistan, leading to angry protests among locals. The deaths brought the total of civilian deaths to almost 100 in the past two weeks and followed President Hamid Karzai's declaration that his people "can no longer accept casualties the way they occur." The new round of "collateral damage" also came a day after the US military said it was "deeply ashamed" of the killings of 19 civilians by marines in early March. In the latest incident, US Special Forces called for air strikes in the village of Soro near Sangin in Helmand, after coming under attack from around 200 Taliban fighters. At first, a spokesman for the US forces, Major William Mitchell, declared that the troops had killed a "significant" number of insurgents in firefights and the subsequent bombing. "We don't have any reports of civilian casualties" he said.–There are enemy casualties–I think the number is significant." However, this was immediately contradicted by the governor of Helmand, who said: "NATO forces carried out an operation in Sangin and as a result of the bombing, 21 civilians, including women and children, were killed." Residents of the area said the civilian death toll was higher. Local people around Soro said up to 80 civilians may have been killed in the bombing raids, with 12 people dying in a single home. The US military later recanted, saying an unspecified number of civilians had been killed. Mohammed Asif, a resident of the village which came under NATO aircraft fire, said: "I know at least five homes were destroyed, there may be up to 38 people killed and 20 more were wounded. Foreign and Afghan troops are stopping people from some of the roads getting here." Another resident claimed that a number of bodies had been taken to the British base in Sangin in an attempt to prove that they were civilians and not Taliban fighters. However, there was no confirmation of this from the British forces. It is the third major incident in recent weeks of civilians being killed by US military action. Meanwhile, local anger was so strong that the Afghan Senate passed a draft law calling for a halt to military offensives by international forces unless they were under attack or had consulted with the Afghan government. Afghanistan's senate also called on Karzai's government to open direct talks with the Taliban in an effort to bring the bloodshed to an end. The bill would have to pass the lower house and be signed by Karzai to take effect. NATO labeled the resolution"a warning shot" across its own bow. The proposal, which also calls for a date to be set for the withdrawal of foreign troops, suggests that Afghan support for the five-and-a-half-year-old international military mission is crumbling amid a spate of civilian deaths. What angers Afghans are not just the bombings, but also the raids of homes, the shootings of civilians in the streets and at checkpoints, and the failure to address those issues. The anger is visible in the farming village of Zerkoh in the largely peaceful western province of Herat, where US airstrikes left 57 villagers dead, nearly half of them women and children, on Apr. 27 and 29. The accounts of villagers bore little resemblance to those of NATO and US officials. The United States military says it came under heavy fire from insurgents as it searched for a local tribal commander and weapons caches and called in airstrikes, killing 136 Taliban fighters. But the villagers denied that any Taliban were in the area. Instead, they said, they rose up and fought the US themselves, after the soldiers raided several houses, arrested two men and shot dead two old men on a village road. After burying the dead, the tribe's elders met with their chief, Hajji Arbab Daulat Khan, and resolved to fight US forces if they returned. "If they come again, we will stand against them, and we will raise the whole area against them," he warned. Or in the words of one foreign official in Afghanistan, the US military went after one guerrilla commander and created a hundred more.