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SANGIN DISTRICT, Afghanistan — Bleeding and moaning softly, dozens of injured women and children fled the fighting in a northern valley of Helmand province Wednesday after a night of U.S. air strikes that killed an estimated 21 civilians.
Their stories of terror amid thunderous attacks from the sky will add to the pressure on Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has recently grown more strident in his protests against civilian deaths inflicted by foreign troops.
Rising concern about civilian casualties was also seen as a factor behind a law proposed by Afghanistan's Senate this week calling for talks with Taliban insurgents and urging international forces to halt their operations in the country unless attacked.
A grim tally emerged as angry villagers brought their injured and dead to Forward Operating Base Robinson, an outpost shared by Canadian, British, and U.S. troops. There were seven women, three men and two children among the dead; five women, five men and 15 children were injured.
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Helmand governor Assadullah Wafa estimated the total number of dead civilians at 21, and said he plans to investigate.
Survivors arrived in the town of Sangin in a ragtag stream of vehicles, some of them riding along with bodies of slain relatives. Many of the victims were related to each other, living in a cluster of villages about 24 kilometres northeast of Sangin District Centre.
Rahmatullah, who is 13 and uses only one name, seemed to forget the shrapnel wound on his hand as he watched British medics treating his uncle. Four of his other relatives were killed, he said, but he dragged two of his brothers alive from the mud rubble of a house.
“The people who bombed us are bad guys,” Rahmatullah said. “They should attack the Taliban, not us.”
The violence started Tuesday when U.S. Special Forces were ambushed by suspected Taliban insurgents using rocket-propelled grenades and smaller weapons.
The Americans had been trying to secure a river valley that runs from Sangin to Kajaki, which serves as a strategic heartland for the opium trade and is the most important electricity corridor in southern Afghanistan. A U.S. soldier was shot and killed.
Documenting what happened next is difficult, as Sangin remains too dangerous to travel independently. The U.S. Special Forces declined to comment, but a U.S. military spokesman told The Associated Press that aircraft killed “a large number of insurgents.” The spokesman said he could not confirm any civilian deaths.
Anecdotal reports suggest that the U.S. forces pulled back after a heated firefight with the insurgents and called in air support, including Apache attack helicopters, F-18 fighter jets and an AC-130 gunship. It's not clear which of the aircraft fired, but the attacks resulted in an initial count of 39 Taliban killed.
The governor suggested that the air strikes happened after insurgents took shelter in civilian homes; the use of human shields is an increasingly common Taliban tactic.
However, the villagers denied that fighters were sheltering in their houses. Many of the injured came from tribes such as the Alokozai and Barakzai, not usually seen as hostile to the government.
“We had not seen the Taliban for the last 10 days,” said Daru Khan, a white-bearded tribal elder who accompanied his injured wife and other family members to the military outpost.
Mr. Khan said the bombing started in the late evening and continued into yesterday morning. He hid inside his home, but ventured out at dawn to find his brother's home destroyed and nearby trees flattened.
His brother was alive, lying beside a wall.
Two children were dead on the other side of the compound, but Mr. Khan's terrified brother yelled at him to stay away from the corpses.
“He was afraid to go collect them,” he said. “He said, ‘Don't go there! They will bomb you, too!' ”
Another resident of the same village, which is known as Barakzai, said the Taliban started the trouble by ambushing the Americans but that fight was far away from his ravaged village.
“This is completely wrong behaviour by the foreigners, and it's always happening now,” Jan Mohammed said by telephone. “It's like Shindand, and the shopkeepers in Kandahar.”
Late last month, an investigation was launched into reports that perhaps 50 civilians were killed in U.S. air strikes in Shindand, in western Afghanistan.
Many people in the south also remember the reaction of British troops to a bombing in Kandahar city last December; at least seven people were shot throughout the city during the aftermath.
Army Colonel John Nicholson, U.S. commander for eastern Afghanistan, apologized on Tuesday for the deaths of 19 civilians shot by U.S. soldiers about a month ago in Nangarhar province.
As in many such cases, the ordinary Afghans caught in the latest incident say they feel trapped between warring factions. Rahmatullah said he hasn't been able to attend classes since the Taliban visited his school a year ago and cut the heads off four students. Yesterday morning, he said he saw 12 of his neighbours lying dead and a girl with her foot blown off by the foreigners' bombs. Both sides are brutal, he said.
“We ran when we heard the bombs,” he said, with a shrug. “Still, they found us.”
