In These New Times

Press-TV

22nd August, 2008

An airstrike by the US-led forces in western Afghanistan has killed 76 civilians including women and children.

Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry released a statement on Friday confirming the deaths.

“Seventy-six people, all civilians and most of them women and children, were martyred during the operation by coalition forces in the Shindan district of Herat province,” the statement said.

The statement added that seven men and 19 women were killed with “children under 15 years of age” accounting for the rest of the dead.

The death toll, which has been confirmed by the provincial governor and police chief, makes the attack one of the biggest civilian killings by coalition forces since the US-led invasion of 2001.

On Thursday, US forces confirmed that they carried out the attack but reported that they had killed 30 suspected Taliban fighters. A US military spokesman said he had no knowledge of civilian deaths.

“We stand by our account and our reports and what we know and I can’t reconcile why [the Interior Ministry] would have a different figure,” US military spokeswoman Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green said on Friday.

According to UN figures, some 698 Afghan civilians died in violent incidents in the first half of 2008, of which 255 were killed by Afghan government or international military forces.

The Afghan government has long criticized US-led forces for conducting indiscriminate air and artillery strikes which have killed large numbers of innocent Afghans.

In July a US air strike killed 47 Afghan civilians, including 39 women and children, as they were travelling to a wedding. The bride was among the dead. At the time, US military officials in Kabul said the airstrike had hit a group of militants.

In 2007 Afghan President Hamid Karzai complained that innocent people were becoming the victims of “reckless operations” because foreign forces were ignoring Afghan intelligence and advice.

“You don’t fight a terrorist by firing a field gun 37 kilometres (24 miles) away into a target. That’s definitely, surely bound to cause civilian casualties,” Karzai said.