The international Red Cross said yesterday that its officials saw women and children among dozens of dead bodies in two villages in western Afghanistan targeted in US bombing runs.
The Afghan president said he would raise the issue with US President Barack Obama. The two were scheduled to meet later yesterday.
A team from the International Committee of the Red Cross traveled to two villages in Farah Province on Tuesday, where the team saw “dozens of bodies in each of the two locations that we went to,” spokeswoman Jessica Barry said.
PHOTO: AP
“There were bodies, there were graves and there were people burying bodies when we were there,” she said. “We do confirm women and children. There were women and children.”
Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered a probe yesterday into the killings and the US military sent a brigadier general to Farah to head a US investigation, said Colonel Greg Julian, a US spokesman.
Afghan military and police officials were also part of the investigative team.
Karzai, currently in the US, intended to raise the issue of civilian deaths with Obama, a statement from Karzai’s office said.
The two presidents were scheduled to hold their first face-to-face meeting.
Karzai called civilian casualties “unacceptable.”
Civilian deaths have caused increasing friction between the Afghan and US governments and Karzai has long pleaded with US officials to reduce the number of civilian casualties in their operations.
US and NATO officials accuse the Taliban militants of fighting from within civilian homes, thus putting them in danger.
Local officials said on Tuesday that bombing runs called by US forces killed dozens of civilians in Gerani village in Farah Province’s Bala Buluk district.
The fighting broke out on Monday soon after Taliban fighters — including Taliban from Pakistan and Iran — massed in the province, said Belqis Roshan, a member of the provincial council.
Provincial police chief Abdul Ghafar said 25 militants and three police officers had died in the battle near the village of Ganjabad in Bala Baluk district, an area controlled by the Taliban near the border with Iran.
Villagers told Afghan officials that they put children, women and elderly men in several housing compounds in the village of Gerani a few kilometers away to keep them safe. But fighter aircraft later targeted those compounds, killing a majority of those inside, Roshan and other officials said.
A Western official in Kabul said Marine special operations forces — which fall under the US coalition — had called in the air strikes.
The official asked not to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to release the information.
Villagers brought bodies, including women and children, to Farah city to show the province’s governor on Tuesday, said Abdul Basir Khan, a member of Farah’s provincial council. He estimated that villagers brought about 30 bodies.
Farah’s hospital treated at least three wounded villagers. A girl named Shafiqa had bandages under her chin. Two of her toes were severed in the fighting.
“We were at home when the bombing started,” she told AP Television News. “Seven members of my family were killed.”
Khan said villagers told him more than 150 civilians had died, but he said he had no way to know whether that claim was true.
Journalists and human rights workers can rarely visit remote battle sites to verify claims of civilian casualties. US officials say Taliban militants sometimes force villagers to lie and say civilians have died in coalition strikes.
But the villagers’ claims on Tuesday were bolstered by the wounded at Farah’s hospital.
In remarks on Tuesday, Karzai alluded to the problem of civilian casualties without mentioning the bombing deaths.
He said the success of the new US war strategy depended on “making sure absolutely that Afghans don’t suffer — that Afghan civilians are protected.”
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