US Afghan air strike kills sixteen Afghan police

Omar Zwak a spokesperson for the governor of Helmand said:"Sixteen Afghan policemen were killed including two commanders. Two other policemen were wounded. It was most probably a miscommunication or the coordinates were not correct, which resulted in the US air strikes. An investigation has been launched."

The aerial attack on a compound took place on Friday afternoon after Afghan police had retaken a checkpoint captured by the Taliban a day earlier in Gereshk district, north of the provincial capital Lashkar Gah. A statement by the US military confirmed the event saying "aerial fires resulted in the deaths of the friendly Afghan forces, who were gathered in a compound." The statement did not give the number of deaths. There has been increased fighting in the southern Helmand province.

Trump has still not decided on a new strategy for Afghanistan. There have been recommendations that three to five thousand more troops be sent but Trump still has not announced a decision. The US has been fighting in Afghanistan for almost 16 years without defeating the Taliban insurgency. Indeed in June, US defense secretary James Mattis admitted the US was not winning in Afghanistan.

Earlier in June, US troops killed an Afghan civilian and his two young sons after their convoy was hit by a roadside bomb in eastern Afghanistan. Local officials and witnesses said the US troops began to fire indiscriminately after the incident. Ziya Gul a bricklayer and his two sons, 8 and 10 were working when they came under fire. A spokesperson for the governor of Nagarhar province said that an investigation had been launched into the incident. The increased civilian casualties are bound to cause resentment in Afghanistan and create political opposition to the Afghan government.

The US has upped its air attacks to a level not seen since the US forces were still in a combat role in  2012. As of  June 30 the US and coalition had used 1,634 munitions in Afghanistan just this year. In 2015 the figure was 298 and in 2016, 545.

3 Afghan civilians killed after an IED hit a coalition vehicle

In Nangarhar Province in eastern Afghanistan three civilians were killed after soldiers opened fire after a roadside bomb hit a vehicle according to Afghan officials.

A spokesperson for the governor of Nangarhar, Attaullah Khogyahi said that soldiers opened fire after the explosion. The US military said that none of its personnel had been wounded but claimed there was an exchange of gunfire after the explosion. Khogyahi said: "As the bomb blast hit their vehicle, the US troops starting shooting." He said the authorities were investigating the incident.The US military said it had no official report of civilian casualties. In a news release the US military said: “We take civilian casualties very seriously, and all allegations are thoroughly investigated.”

All six US soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year have been killed in Nangarhar Province while fighting the Islamic State (IS). On Saturday three were killed in an apparent insider attack as shown on the appended video. A Taliban spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, claimed they had planted the bomb in the Ghanikhei district bordering an area which is a stronghold of the IS.

An Al Jazeera report gives more details of the incident claiming that an Afghan civilian and his two young sons were killed. Ziyar Gul, a brick kiln labourer was at work with two sons, one aged eight and the other ten when they came under fire witnesses claim. Witness Azizullah Aziz said: "As soon as the blast took place, the US troops started firing indiscriminately out of fear." He said a third son escaped the firing and ran for help but when he came back his father and two brothers were already dead. Relatives claim that other members of the Gul family had been killed in a raid last year. Neyaz Gul, brother of Ziyar said:"Could they not see that the people they [US troops] killed were children and an unarmed man? How could they fire directly at children and kill them? Their bodies were in bits and pieces after being shot numerous times.No one is held accountable for killing innocent people like this in Afghanistan."

Douglas High, a spokesperson for the NATO mission in Afghanistan, confirmed that a roadside bomb had hit a convoy that was conveying both US and Afghan soldiers. He said that the soldiers used small arms in self-defence but that he had not received any official reports of civilian casualties.

A UN tally of civilian casualties in Afghanistan for 2016 was the worst year since the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) began keeping records in 2009. Casualties included 3,498 civilians killed and another 7,920 wounded. US special forces have been concentrating on fighting an estimated 600 to 800 IS fighters mostly in Nangarhar but some in Kunar province bordering Nangarhar.

There are now about 8,400 US troops in Afghanistan with a further 5,000 from NATO allies. US-led NATO troops have been fighting in Afghanistan since back in 2001 when the Taliban were toppled. Trump should soon decide what degree of increased involvement there will be for the US . Suggestions include 3,000 to 5,000 more troops including Special Operations forces who could carry out their own anti-terror operations. According to a recent Digital Journal article Trump will let the Pentagon decide on maximum troop levels.  As the appended video shows the US has suffered casualties at the hands of Afghan trainees.

Kandahar riots show rising resentment against NATO.

In spite of the fact that General McChrystal has emphasized that civilian deaths should be avoided there seems to be continual events such as mentioned in this article in which civilians are killed in one way or another. The result is as the article points out protests and a growing anti-NATO and anti-U.S. feeling. Of course in this case Kandahar is also a place where the Taliban have a strong following. But the way things are going there seems little chance that NATO is going to have the majority of the population on their side. More likely many will help the Taliban counterattack when NATO tries to rule the town with its chosen puppets. This is from antiwar.com.

Kandahar Riots Show Rising Resentment in Key Province
Posted By Jason Ditz

Who knew that opening fire on a busload of innocent civilians would be such a hot-button issue?

The US was quick to take responsbility today, and NATO was quick to express regrets, but the attack earlier today on a civilian bus, leaving five civilians dead and 18 others wounded, sparking protests and later riots.

Hundreds took to the streets, chanting “death to America,” burning tires, blocking the main road into town and generally causing a ruckus. Certainly such attacks have been a source of consternation for Afghans, but with their alarming regularity the US killing only five civilians in one go is for many just “another day in Afghanistan” and in many parts of the nation would’ve past barely acknowledged.

Rather the fury reflects not only the outrage at yet another civilian massacre, but also the serious resentment among residents of Kandahar, one of the most corrupt cities in the nation and one for which NATO is planning a massive invasion. It is exactly the same resentment which Karzai attempted to tap into in last weekend’s visit.

But it also spells disaster for the June invasion. The Pentagon has made tackling corruption and winning the “hearts and minds” in Kandahar the two centerpieces of the victory. They have already made it clear that ousting Wali Karzai, one of the driving forces behind the corruption, simply isn’t happening. Now it seems the “hearts and minds” portion isn’t going to happen either, as if the US can’t avoid killing civilians on the open highway they certainly won’t be able to avoid killing far more in a densely populated urban environment.

Protest at Civilian Killing in Afghanistan produces more casualties

It is amazing that the US Lt. Col. simply shrugs off the civilian casualties. The earlier deaths as it usual are "'under investigation". This means that they have not been able to sweep things under the table so they will wait a while and see if press interest declines not that there is that much interest in the first place.

News From Antiwar.com -
NATO: US Troops Shot Civilian Protesters in Afghanistan’s Garmsir District

Posted By Jason Ditz

In the second NATO shooting incident in a little over 24 hours in the Garmsir District of Afghanistan’s restive Helmand Province, US troops opened fire on a crowd of civilian protesters on Wednesday, wounding five.

NATO explained that US Marines went out to direct an anti-NATO protest in Garmsir and when the “civilians in the crowd disregarded instructions,” the troops opened fire on the crowd. US Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale shrugged off the civilian casualties, insisting “things like this happen.”

Ironically the civilians at the Wednesday rally, estimated at between 200 and 400 strong by the NATO forces, were protesting against a Tuesday incident, in which NATO forces opened fire on civilians at a Tuesday protest, killing 13 people and wounding several others.

NATO has denied the Tuesday incident, but confirmed the Wednesday incident. It insists the Tuesday shootings are “under investigation” while the Wednesday shootings involved appropriate escalation against unarmed civilians.

Though both NATO and the United Nations insist the Taliban actually killed somewhat more civilians in 2009 than NATO did, the high profile NATO shootings continue to do considerable damage to the alliance’s reputation.


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Afghan Villagers: NATO forces opened fire on protesters, killing 13.

As usual there are contradictory accounts of the same event. In this case NATO authorities themselves have given contradictory accounts. The more official accounts I see the more it becomes clear that official accounts are meant to generate the most favorable public perception rather than report on what happened. The public should understand that war includes psychological warfare and this makes truthful reporting irrlevant. Only when other reports eventually force a change to the official story does the official account change but even then as little as possible.


- News From Antiwar.com -

Afghan Villagers: NATO Forces Opened Fire on Protesters, Killing 13

Posted By Jason Ditz

In what is just the latest in a growing string of recent allegations of NATO forces killing civilians, local villagers in the Garmsir District, Helmand Province said they came out to protest against a reported raid in a nearby town when a NATO patrol arrived on the scene. The villagers say NATO forces opened fire on the crowd, killing at least 13 civilians and wounding dozens.

NATO officials denied the incident, but issued a perplexing statement that simultaneously insisted the forces didn’t fire a single shot while lauding them for opening fire on a sniper on the scene. The local police confirmed the killings, but speculated that the apparently unarmed protesters might have secretly been Taliban.

“The Taliban were provoking the people,” noted Helmand’s deputy police chief, insisting that protesters had overturned cars and raided a building belonging to an Afghan spy agency. The police insisted that it was actually Afghan forces that were with NATO who initially opened fire and that they were still looking into the identities of the slain.

The incident came just hours after US General Richard Mills insisted that the United States has claimed victory in the Helmand Province, and that the Taliban are “defeated.”


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McChrystal Looks to Spin Afghan Civilian Deaths Problem

As the article mentions the real war is shifting to public relations. More and better intelligence gathering may help but probably not much. The Taliban do not wait around apart from civilians to be bombed. Usually they are among the population and often indeed hoping that they will not be bombed because they are with civilians--but to no avail. The public relations will be to blame the Taliban and go ahead and bomb them.
Another aspect of the situation is that msm is basically an entertainment medium. When there is little immediate interest in an issue or it has little effect on most citizens it will disappear off the radar screen. Right now for example much foreign affairs coverage is concentrated upon Iran and this ensures that issues such as the bombings of civilians are below the radar screen and thus create little problem for the military.
So far there does not seem much criticism of the Afghan war in the US whereas citizens in countries allied with the NATO effort almost all have majorities opposed to their involvement.

- Antiwar.com Original - http://original.antiwar.com -
McChrystal Looks to Spin Afghan Civilian Deaths Problem
Posted By Gareth Porter
At his confirmation hearings two weeks ago, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said reducing civilian deaths from air strikes in Afghanistan was "strategically decisive" and declared his "willingness to operate in ways that minimize casualties or damage, even when it makes our task more difficult."
Some McChrystal supporters hope he will rein in the main source of civilian casualties: Special Operations Forces (SOF) units that carry out targeted strikes against suspected "Taliban" on the basis of doubtful intelligence and raids that require air strikes when they get into trouble. But there are growing indications that his command is preparing to deal with the issue primarily by seeking to shift the blame to the Taliban through more and better propaganda operations and by using more high-tech drone intelligence aircraft to increase battlefield surveillance rather than by curbing the main direct cause of civilian casualties. U.S. officials at a NATO conference in Brussels last Friday were telling reporters that "public relations" are now considered "crucial" to "turning the tide" in Afghanistan, according to an AFP story on Jun 12. CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus also referred to the importance of taking the propaganda offensive in a presentation to the pro-military think tank Center for a New American Security (CNAS) Jun. 11. "When you’re dealing the press," he said, "when you’re dealing the tribal leaders, when you’re dealing with host nations… you got to beat the bad guys to the headlines." The new emphasis on more aggressive public relations appears to respond to demands from U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan to wrest control of the issue of civilian casualties from the Taliban. In a discussion of that issue at the same conference, Gen. David Barno, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, said, "We’ve got to be careful about who controls the narrative on civilian casualties." U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan "see the enemy seeking to take air strikes off the table" by exaggerating civilian casualties, Barno said. He objected to making civilian casualties an indicator of success or failure, as a CNAS paper has recommended. The U.S. command in Afghanistan has already tried, in fact, to apply "information war" techniques in effort to control the narrative on the issue. The command has argued both that the Taliban were responsible for the massive civilians casualties in a U.S. air strike on May 4 that killed 147 civilians, including 90 women and children, and that the number of civilian deaths claimed has been vastly exaggerated, despite detailed evidence from village residents supporting the casualty figures. Col. Greg Julian, the command’s spokesman, said in late May that a "weapon-sight" video would show that the Taliban were to blame. However, Nancy A. Youssef reported Jun. 15 in McClatchy newspapers that the video in question shows that no one had checked to see if women and children were in the building before it was bombed, according to two U.S. military officials. The Afghan government has highlighted the problem of SOF units carrying out raids which result in air strikes against civilian targets. Kai Eide, the chief of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, has now publicly supported that position, saying in a video conference call from Kabul to NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels Jun. 12 that there is an "urgent need" to review raids by SOF units, because the civilian casualties being created have been "disproportionate to the military gains." But McChrystal hinted in his confirmation hearing that he hoped to reduce civilian casualties by obtaining more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft. Petraeus confirmed that approach to the problem in remarks at the CNAS conference last week, announcing that he was planning to shift some high-tech intelligence vehicles from Iraq to Afghanistan. Petraeus referred to "predators, armed full motion video with Hellfire missiles," "special intelligence birds," and unmanned intelligence vehicles called Shadows and Ravens, which fly 24 hours a day. Although such intelligence aircraft may make U.S. battlefield targeting more precise, Petraeus’s reference to drones equipped with Hellfire missiles suggests that U.S. forces in Afghanistan may now rely more than previously on drone strikes against suspected Afghan insurgents. Given the chronic lack of accurate intelligence on the identity of insurgent leaders, that would tend to increase civilian casualties. Petraeus’s past reluctance to stop or dramatically reduce such SOF operations, despite the bad publicity surrounding them, suggests that high level intra-military politics are involved. The Marine Corps Special Operations Command (MarSOC) has been involved in the most highly publicized cases of massive civilian casualties in Afghanistan. It was established by the Marine Corps only in February 2006, and the first MarSOC company arrived in Afghanistan just a year later. MarSOC was unable to recruit the more mature officers and troops needed for cross-cultural situations, and its recruits had only a few months of training before being sent to Afghanistan. The unit’s commanding officer had been warned by one participant in the training before the unit had arrived in Afghanistan that his troops were too young and too oriented toward killing to serve in Afghanistan, according to Chris Mason, a former U.S. official in Afghanistan familiar with the unit’s history. In March 2007, a company of MarSOC troops which had only arrived in the country the previous month were accused of firing indiscriminately at pedestrians and cars as they sped away from a suicide bomb attack, killing as many as 19 Afghan civilians. Five days later the same unit reportedly fired on traffic again. As a result, a powerful Pashtun tribe, the Shinwari, demanded to the governor of Nangahar province and Afghan President Hamid Karzai that U.S. military operations in the province be terminated. Within a month, the 120-man MarSOC company was pulled out of Afghanistan. Significantly, however, a new MarSOC unit was sent back to Afghanistan only a few weeks later, assigned to Herat province. Last August, a MarSOC unit launched an attack against a preplanned target in Azizabad that combined unmanned drones, attack helicopters and a Specter gunship. More than 90 civilians were killed in the attack, including 60 children, but not a single Taliban fighter was killed in the attack, according to Afghan and U.N. officials. Karzai said the operation had been triggered by false information given by the leader of a rival tribe, and no U.S. official contradicted him. When Petraeus took command at CENTCOM just a few weeks later, Afghans were still seething over the Azizabad massacre. That would have been the perfect time for him to take decisive action on MarSOC’s operations. But Petraeus took no action on MarSOC. Meanwhile, other SOF units were continuing to carry out raids that did not get headlines but which regularly killed women and children, stirring more Afghan anger. Petraeus may have been confronted with the necessity of stopping all the operations if he wished to discipline MarSOC, which would have been too serious a blow to the reputation of U.S. Special Operations Forces. For two weeks, from mid-February to early March, the rate of SOF raids was reduced. But in early March, they were resumed, despite the near certainty that there would be more embarrassing incidents involving SOF operations. The worst case of massive civilian deaths in the war would come just two months later, and involved the MarSOC unit.
(Inter Press Service)
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US admits Afghan civilian deaths

This follows the predictable pattern. The US claims all casualties or most in an incident are Taliban but the Afghan locals and officials claim many civilian casualties. The US then investigates and changes their tally at least somewhat depending on the particular case. Of course in this instance there is the marvelous spin to the effect that the investigation shows how serious the US takes these instances. Indeed, when their erroneous reporting is taken to task and their is Afghan outrage. However, the policy that produces the casualties is not changed.


US admits Afghan civilian deaths

An investigation into a missile strike carried out by US-led forces in Afghanistan earlier this week has found that 13 civilians were among 16 people killed, the US military has said.
The military made the admission on Saturday, after originally saying that 15 opposition fighters had been killed in the strike in the Gozara district of Herat province.
Afghan officials insisted all along that six women and two children were among those killed.
Following Afghan outrage over the attack, US generals undertook an investigation, travelling to Gozara and talking to locals there.
The generals said some anti-government fighters had also been killed in the strike.
Michael Ryan, a US brigadier general, said that the investigation proved how seriously the US takes civilian casualties.
The US has come under increasing criticism over the past few months over the deaths of civilians in military operations in Afghanistan.
Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, said that rising civilian deaths was a source of tension between Kabul and Washington.
There are currently 80,000 US and Nato soldiers in Afghanistan, battling Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.
Barack Obama, the US president, announced last week that an additional 17,000 troops would be sent to the country, in addition to the 38,000 already stationed there.

Strike kills 2 Afghan Tribal Leaders NATO says

It seems that McKiernan who took over as head of NATO forces from Bomber McNeil is following in the bombing tradition. The outlook for Afghanistan is more recruits for the Taliban and on the NATO side a surge in Afghanistan led by that great agent for change Barack Obama.

July 18, 2008
Strike Kills 2 Afghan Tribal Leaders, NATO Says
By CARLOTTA GALL
KABUL, Afghanistan — American Special Forces troops and Afghan commandos killed two influential tribal leaders and a number of their followers in western Afghanistan in a joint airborne operation on Wednesday night, military officials said Thursday. But as with some previous operations, there were differing accounts over whether the strike also killed Afghan civilians.
NATO and the Afghan Ministry of Defense declared that the tribal leaders were high-priority Taliban targets and that the operation against them was successful. In a statement from its press office in Kabul, NATO said there was no evidence of civilian casualties.
Villagers, however, gave a different account, saying houses had been bombed and civilians had been killed and wounded as they fled. Local officials confirmed the bombardment and damage to houses but did not say whether civilians had been killed or wounded.
The operation took place in the Zerkoh Valley near Shindand in Herat, a western province where United States Special Forces clashed with the same tribe in April 2007. When they came under fire from villagers, the Special Forces called in airstrikes on the village, resulting in 57 deaths, including women and children.
Those strikes, occurring the month after marines killed 19 civilians in eastern Afghanistan, caused an outcry from Afghan politicians and aid organizations and led the NATO commander at the time, Gen. Dan K. McNeill, to issue orders to his forces to take extra care to avoid civilian casualties.
Gen. David D. McKiernan, who took over command of the NATO forces in Afghanistan in June, is facing a similar problem. As insurgent attacks have increased, so have civilian casualties caused by airstrikes. Calls in Parliament and around Afghanistan are again increasing for the foreign forces to stop their bombing raids. The Red Cross called for the Taliban and the foreign forces to show greater restraint in view of the civilian suffering.
President Hamid Karzai flew by helicopter on Thursday to commiserate with residents in a mountain village in eastern Nangarhar Province where 47 people, mostly women and children, accompanying a bride to a neighboring village were killed in an aerial bombardment on July 6. The United States military said it had killed militants, but a government delegation visited the area and confirmed that the dead had been women and children and included the bride.
Two days before that assault, 15 civilians, including medical workers, were killed in airstrikes in Nuristan Province, government officials said. The United States military, which contended at the time that it had killed militants, has said the matter is under investigation.
The United States-led coalition said Wednesday that it had called in airstrikes on a compound after coming under fire from militants in western Afghanistan and confirmed that eight civilians inside had been killed and two had been wounded.
“Coalition forces never intentionally target noncombatants, and deeply regret any occurrence such as this where civilians are killed and injured as a result of insurgent activity and actions,” the coalition said in a statement.
Government officials said 15 militants were killed in the operation on Wednesday night. Afghan commandos and American Special Forces attacked a militant camp in a mountainous area away from villages, said Gen. Zaher Azimi, the spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense.
The leader of the militant group, Nangialai, and two of his uncles, Hajji Daulat Khan and Hajji Nasrullah Khan, were killed, General Azimi said. He said the forces had intercepted them making a call to Waziristan in Pakistan’s tribal areas, asking for reinforcements from the Taliban. The commandos also freed 15 prisoners they found being held in grim conditions in a private lockup, he said. General Azimi denied that there were any civilian casualties.
But the Khans and members of their tribe had insisted in the past that they had no dealings with the Taliban and that local rivalries had caused government officials to brand them as Taliban.
Zalmai, 31, who brought his wounded uncle to the hospital in Shindand, said planes bombed their village, Parmakan, and two other places, causing many residents to panic and flee. Many were killed or wounded as they left on motorbikes and on foot, he said by telephone.
Zalmai, a shopkeeper who uses only one name, said eight other wounded people, including women and children, were taken to the hospital. He said that more wounded people were still lying under the rubble or in the open and that the soldiers were not letting villagers reach them.
Local officials confirmed that the bombing hit some houses. Abdul Shukur, the Shindand police chief, said three houses were destroyed, The Associated Press reported.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Alan Cowell from London.

Afghan Governor: Airstrikes kill 22 Afghan civilians

No wonder the Afghan resistance is growing. Events such as these in a tribal society where retribution and vengeance are obligations simply help the Taliban gain recruits. Of course usually the U.S. and NATO have a quite different story. Usually the counter report is that the dead are all (or mostly) Taliban. Note that this report is by a governor not a Taliban supporter.
The same hubris is being shown by NATO and the US as was shown by the former USSR. Both think that a vastly superior military force can ultimately win against a jihadist insurgency.


Airstrikes kill 22 Afghan civilians
Afghan governor says airstrikes kill 22 civilians; US military denies noncombatants hurt
FISNIK ABRASHIAP News
Jul 04, 2008 19:59 EST
The U.S. military said airstrikes by its attack helicopters hit two vehicles carrying insurgents in eastern Afghanistan. The province's governor said 22 civilians, including a woman and a child, were killed.





A spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition said Friday the airstrikes in Nuristan province hit militants who earlier attacked a U.S. military base with mortars.
The helicopters identified the militants' firing positions, tracked them down and destroyed the vehicles they were traveling in, said 1st Lt. Nathan Perry.
"These were combatants. These were people who were firing on us," Perry said. "We have no reports of noncombatant injuries."
He gave no account of casualties in the vehicles.
Nuristan's Gov. Tamim Nuristani said, however, 22 civilians were killed in the Waygal district of Nuristan province. "This afternoon (Friday), two civilian vehicles were hit by airstrikes," Nuristani said over the phone.
Among those killed were a woman and a child. All 22 dead bodies were brought to a provincial hospital, Nuristani said. Seven other people were wounded.
"Last night, the opposition fired rockets at the (U.S.) base ... and today this incident happened," said Nuristani, speaking from Kabul.
The military base is 6 miles away from the place where the airstrikes happened, Nuristani said.
It was impossible to independently verify any of the claims because of the remoteness of the area.
In other violence, gunmen lobbed a grenade and sprayed a police checkpoint with gunfire in the southern Kandahar province, killing eight officers, said provincial police chief Sumanwal Matiullah.
Overall, more than 8,000 people were killed in insurgency-related attacks in Afghanistan last year — the most since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. Violence has claimed more than 2,100 lives so far this year.
___
Associated Press reporters Amir Shah in Kabul and Noor Khan in Kandahar contributed to this report.
Source: AP News

Lawmaker: Air raid kills civilians in Afghan south..

Air operations produce no casualties for occupying forces. They make use of the superior force and technology of the occupiers. They also produce extensive "collateral damage". In a tribal society the killing of relatives demands revenge. Air operations thus ensure a constant stream of suicide bombers and recruits for the Taliban. It also makes the central government unpopular. Karzai constantly complains about such operations but to no avail. This disabuses any Afghans not profiting from the occupation that Afghanistan is sovereign. Sovereignty involves having a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within your borders. An occupied country has no such monopoly. Karzai does not control the operations of the occupying forces.

Air raid kills civilians in Afghan south-lawmaker


REUTERS
Reuters North American News Service

Mar 18, 2008 09:02 EST

KABUL, March 18 (Reuters) - An air strike by foreign forces has killed more than 30 people, including civilians, in Afghanistan's southern province of Helmand, a lawmaker said on Tuesday.

The raid happened on Monday in a village in the province's Sangin district, scene of a series of battles between Taliban insurgents and foreign troops in recent years, she said.

Civilian deaths are a sensitive issue for the foreign forces in Afghanistan under the command of the U.S. military and NATO and for President Hamid Karzai's government.

"More than 30 people have lost their lives and it is said that the Taliban and civilians were amongst those killed," Nasima Niyazi, who is a member of the lower house of the Afghan parliament representing the province, told Reuters.

She did not have any more details about the air strike.

But several people who identified themselves as residents of Sangin said the raid targeted a picnic spot where civilians had gathered to play traditional sports. The Taliban said 40 civilians were killed and 60 more wounded.

Both NATO and U.S.-led troops are stationed in Helmand, a bastion for Taliban insurgents and the key drug-producing region of Afghanistan, the world's top supplier of heroin.

A spokesman for NATO in Kabul said the alliance had carried out an air attack to the south of Sangin and a total of 12 insurgents were killed while driving in three cars.

The strike comes amid spiralling violence in the past two years in Afghanistan, the bloodiest period since U.S.-led troops overthrew the Taliban's hardline Islamist government in 2001.

More than 12,000 people, nearly a quarter of them civilians, have been killed by the violence.

Civilian deaths have sparked protests and added to growing frustration among ordinary Afghans that Karzai's government and its Western backers have not brought more security to the country. (Reporting by Sayed Salahuddin; Editing by Alex Richardson)

Source: Reuters North American News Service

Civilian deaths cause outrage in Afghanistan.

So ISAF and the US operations are supposed to co-ordinate their actions with Afghan authorities. What does that mean? In any event it seems that they do not even inform authorities let alone ask permission for their operations. The NATO chief blames the Taliban. Imagine they seek shelter in homes. Of course it is not the Taliban who blow the houses up but what the heck.
The message is clear. If you shelter the Taliban willingly or not you will be wiped out along with them. Moral: Don't co-operate with the Taliban in any way. This is just a mirror image of the Taliban policy. Don't co-operate with ISAF or the US or you may have your throats slit. The difference is that the Taliban do not have high tech ways to enforce their policy.


Civilian deaths fuel Afghan outrage
By Andrew Buncombe, Asia Correspondent
Published: 02 July 2007
More than 100 people, nearly half of them Afghan civilians, were killed in Nato air strikes against the Taliban this weekend, an investigation by local officials in Helmand province has concluded.

The civilian deaths are just the latest incident of so-called collateral damage to have occurred in recent weeks - a pattern that even foreign troops admit is rapidly undermining efforts to establish some sort of security in the country and win the support and loyalty of local people.

The assessment of Saturday's pre-dawn air strike in the Gereshk district came from the mayor and police chief, who said that 62 Taliban militants had died during the attacks as well as 45 ordinary Afghans including women, children and the elderly. President Hamid Karzai said this weekend that it was "difficult for us to accept or understand" what had happened .

He has repeatedly called on US, Nato and Taliban forces to do more to prevent civilian casualties, warning that "Afghan life is not cheap and it should not be treated as such". And he has ordered foreign forces to co-ordinate military operations with the Afghan government. "From now on, they have to work the way we ask them to work in here."

Concerns about the impact the fighting is having on civilians, especially children, has been growing since clashes increased after the spring thaws.

Such appeals appear to have had little impact on the operations of Nato's International Security Assistance Force [Isaf] or the US military's Operation Enduring Freedom, both of which are supposed to co-ordinate their actions with the Afghan authorities but often appeared to act unilaterally.

Isaf has previously admitted there was a problem with the number of civilians being killed. But after this latest incident officials disputed the Afghan total. Major John Thomas, an Isaf spokesman told the Associated Press: "We don't mean to trivialise any of those who died but we want to make it clear that we believe the numbers are a dozen or less."

He blamed the Taliban for the civilian deaths, saying: "It's the enemy fighters who willingly fire when civilians are right next to them."

The deaths occurred after fighting late on Friday. Helmand's provincial police chief Mohammad Hussein said Taliban fighters had tried to ambush a joint US-Afghan military convoy and then fled to the village of Hyderabad to take cover.