IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser.

NATO apologizes for Afghan civilian deaths

The top U.S. generals in Afghanistan have issued an apology for an airstrike that killed civilians in southwestern Afghanistan.
/ Source: msnbc.com news services

The top U.S. generals in Afghanistan have issued an apology for an airstrike that killed civilians in southwestern Afghanistan.

Gen. David Petraeus, Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez and the commander of the southwest say NATO's top priority is to prevent civilian casualties and it takes such cases very seriously.

In a joint statement issued early Monday by U.S. Marine Maj. Gen. John Toolan, they said the airstrike took place after a U.S. Marine was killed and five insurgents took cover in a compound and kept fighting. It said the compound had civilians inside.

"Unfortunately, the compound the insurgents purposefully occupied was later discovered to house innocent civilians," Toolan said. "While I know there is no price on human life we will ensure that we make amends with the families in accordance with Afghan culture."

The number civilians killed — nine — differs from that given by some Afghan officials, who said the strike hit two civilian homes in the volatile southwestern Helmand province, killing 14 civilians: 12 children and two women.

Bereaved relatives brought the bodies of young children to the provincial capital to protest. M ale relatives cradled the bodies of several young children wrapped in bloody sheets and placed side to side, and brought them in the back of a truck to the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, Reuters television pictures showed.

"My house was bombarded in the middle of the night and my children were killed ... the Taliban were far away from my home, why was my house bombed?" relative Noor Agha told Reuters.

Dawood Ahmadi, a spokesman for the provincial government, said the alliance launched the airstrike late on Saturday in retaliation for an attack earlier in the day on a U.S. Marine base in Helmand's northwest district of Nawzad. He said NATO hit two civilian houses, killing five girls, seven boys and two women.

Attacks on foreign forcesMeanwhile, Taliban insurgents led by suicide bombers launched attacks on an Italian military base and near a government building in the main city in Afghanistan's west on Monday, killing four people and wounding dozens, officials said.

The simultaneous attacks were launched in the center of Herat, near a Transport Department building and bus stop, and outside the Italian base on the city's outskirts, Herat provincial police chief Sayed Aqa Saqib said.

Additionally, NATO said Monday an Afghan wearing an army uniform has shot and killed one of its service member in southern Afghanistan.

It was not immediately clear if the shooter was an Afghan soldier or a militant who had donned an army uniform to infiltrate NATO defenses.

Investigation
Earlier, NATO spokesman Maj. Tim James said a joint coalition and Afghan delegation was traveling Sunday to the site in Helmand where civilians were killed to investigate. He didn't confirm the airstrike and provided no details about it or the attack on the Marines.

Civilian deaths are a constant source of tension between NATO and Afghan officials, and the Afghan public, which has grown increasingly hostile to foreigners as the nearly decade-long war continues, tends to perceive the NATO raids as capturing the wrong people or mistreating civilians during searches of private homes and compounds. The civilian casualties on Sunday were likely to add to the hostility.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai blamed American troops for airstrikes that killed the 14 women and children and two men, injuring of six other civilians. He has repeatedly called on coalition forces to minimize night raids and airstrikes and clear the operations with his forces.

"We have told the Americans and NATO forces several times that uncoordinated operations will result in the killing of innocent civilians and that such operations are inhumane, but still no one has listened," Karzai said Sunday, adding that his condemnation would be "the last warning to NATO forces, American forces, and American officials."

Helmand borders Pakistan and is an insurgent bastion. The province's vast poppy fields are the Taliban's prime profit center.

Spring offensive
Afghan insurgents have stepped up a spring offensive across the country.

On Saturday, a Taliban suicide bomber wearing a police uniform blew himself up inside a heavily guarded compound in northern Afghanistan as top Afghan and international officials were leaving a meeting.

The blast killed two senior Afghan police commanders and wounded a German general in command of coalition troops in the region. Two German soldiers and two other Afghans were also killed in the blast that came just weeks before a planned drawdown of U.S. troops begins this summer.

The bomber detonated his explosives-laden vest inside the governor's complex in Takhar province, where high-ranking Afghan officials were meeting with members of the international coalition.

Among the dead was Gen. Daud Daud, regional police commander in northern Afghanistan. Daud was a former deputy interior minister for counternarcotics and a former bodyguard of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the charismatic Tajik leader who commanded the Northern Alliance and died in an al-Qaida suicide bombing two days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that provoked the U.S. invasion.

Also killed in the Saturday blast were provincial police chief Gen. Shah Jahan Noori, a secretary to the governor and one of Daud's bodyguards, the health director said.

Gen. Markus Kneip, the NATO force's commander for nine northern provinces, was among the wounded, German Defense Minister Thomas de Maiziere said in Berlin.

Abdul Jabar Taqwa, the Takhar province governor who was at the meeting and suffered burns to his head, hands and back, described the attack from a residence where he was recovering Sunday.

"General Kneip and I were about to leave the building," he said. "Suddenly, we heard a very big explosion. I didn't know from which direction the sound came or what was going on ... the explosion threw me out of the building and down the stairs."

Nine other Afghans were wounded, including a cameraman working in the governor's office and eight Afghan troops.

The meeting focused on ways to prevent another violent protest in the northern province, where security has deteriorated as NATO and Afghan forces tackle insurgent strongholds in the south. Last week, 12 people died in Taloqan when a protest over a NATO raid that killed four deteriorated into a riot.