An Afghan army colonel whose wife and children died in a US-led raid demanded action against the troops responsible on Friday, as Afghan as President Hamid Karzai condemned the killings.
The operation in the eastern province of Khost around midnight on Wednesday killed the wife of Afghan National Army artillery commander Awal Khan, two of his children and a brother.
The troops, who had been hunting a militant linked to radical Islamist groups, also shot a pregnant woman and killed her unborn baby, which had almost come to term, Khan and a provincial health official said. The woman survived the shooting.
The mounting civilian death toll from military operations is one of the main sources of tension between Afghan authorities and the US and NATO-led forces in Afghanistan.
“The [international] coalition has to stop this cruelty and brutal action,” a grieving Khan said in the village of Ali Daya, a few kilometers south of Khost.
Khan said he was flown home from his base in the eastern province of Ghazni in a military helicopter on Thursday after being told of the deaths.
“I want the coalition leaders to expose those behind this and punish them,” Khan said, adding that the government should resign if it could not protect its people.
Khan lost his schoolteacher wife, a 17-year-old daughter named Nadia, a 15-year-old son, Aimal, and his brother, who worked for a government department. Another daughter was wounded.
After the shooting, the pregnant wife of Khan’s cousin, who lived next door, went outside her home and was shot five times in the abdomen, the army officer said.
She was taken to Khost provincial hospital, where the nine-month-old fetus was removed, he said.
“She survived but her child died. The child was hit by bullets,” Khost province health director Abdul Majeed said.
Police said troops stood on the roofs of houses surrounding that of a militant suspect and appeared to be intruders to neighboring residents, who came out with weapons and opened fire.
The US-led military initially said four people killed by troops were “armed militants.”
But a statement on Thursday said investigations “suggest that the people killed and wounded were not enemy combatants as previously reported.”
US military spokesman Colonel Greg Julian said on Friday it had become clear that the four were not associated with the targeted militant, who was arrested.
“It was an unfortunate set of circumstances where they may have thought they were being robbed or attacked and came out, and the forces may have thought they were associated with the targeted individual,” he said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
RSS