Six children were crushed to death by a collapsing wall during an assault by US forces on a compound stuffed with weapons in eastern Afghanistan, an American military spokesman said yesterday, the second time in a week that civilians have died in action against Taliban and al-Qaeda suspects.
The children died during a night attack Friday against a complex in Paktia province where a renegade Afghan commander, Mullah Jalani, kept a huge cache of weapons, said Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Hilferty.
"The next day we discovered the bodies of two adults and six children," he said. "We had no indication there were noncombatants" in the compound.
Jalani was not at the site, 20km east of Gardez, but Hilferty said nine other people were arrested. He did not identify the adults that were killed or say whether they were combatants or civilians.
Hilferty said US warplanes and troops attacked the compound, setting off secondary explosions.
Hilferty expressed regret over the death of civilians in Afghanistan, but said it was impossible to completely eliminate such incidents.
"We try very hard not to kill anyone. We would prefer to capture the terrorists rather than kill them," Hilferty said. "But in this incident, if noncombatants surround themselves with thousands of weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition and howitzers and mortars in a compound known to be used by a terrorist, we are not completely responsible for the consequences."
It was unclear if the wall was knocked down by troops searching for weapons or the secondary explosions. Hilferty said it was still too dangerous to search the whole site.
The US military, which launched Dec. 2 what it describes as its biggest operation against militants since the fall of the Taliban two years ago, says it found hidden storage compartments containing hundreds of 107mm rockets, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank and anti-personnel mines and several howitzers at the compound.
The news comes on the heels of a tragic US military blunder in neighboring Ghazni province on Saturday. Nine children were found dead in a field after an attack by an A-10 ground attack aircraft that was targeting a Taliban suspect.
US officials have apologized for that incident. They originally claimed that the attack killed the intended target, a former Taliban district commander named Mullah Wazir suspected of recent attacks on road workers.
But US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad on Tuesday said they were no longer certain.
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