By Dion Nissenbaum and Nooruddin Bakhshi | McClatchy Newspapers
KABUL, Afgahnsitan — One day after Afghan President Hamid Karzai made an impassioned plea for American-led forces to do more to avoid killing civilians in their fight against the Taliban, a NATO air strike killed as many as 33 civilians in southern Afghanistan, Afghan and U.S. officials said Monday.
The errant strike hit a small convoy on Sunday that NATO forces suspected was filled with Afghan insurgents preparing to attack coalition soldiers, NATO said in a prepared statement. Instead, a local police official said, the three vehicles were carrying members of the Hazara ethnic minority who traditionally have little sympathy for Taliban insurgents, who are predominantly Pashtun.
NATO soldiers realized their mistake when they arrived at the scene and found the bodies of women and children.
While there were conflicting reports on the number of civilians killed, the toll appeared to be one of the highest in the seven-year-old war.
U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the head of coalition forces in Afghanistan, issued a personal apology to Karzai. He conceded that the deaths would shake confidence in his pledge to minimize civilian deaths in Afghanistan.
"We are extremely saddened by the tragic loss of innocent lives,” McChrystal's statement said. “I have made it clear to our forces that we are here to protect the Afghan people, and inadvertently killing or injuring civilians undermines their trust and confidence in our mission. We will re-double our efforts to regain that trust."
There were conflicting estimates of the death toll. The Afghan Council of Ministers said 33 civilians -– including four women and one child -- had been killed. The local police chief who visited the scene put the death toll at 21.
The Afghan ministers condemned the attack, calling it “unjustifiable.”
“This creates an opportunity for the Taliban to use this against the Afghan government and the Americans,” said Mohammed Hashim Watanwal, an Afghan lawmaker from the country’s southern Uruzgan province. “NATO has said that it will take care to avoid civilian casualties, but they don’t follow through.”
The convoy was traveling through a Taliban controlled area of southern Afghanistan, said Saeed Zahir Zia, the local police chief who visited the site of the attack. Zia said the dead included a three-year-old boy and nine-year-old-girl.
The convoy attack came one day after Karzai used a speech before the Afghan parliament to prod McChrystal and NATO to step up their efforts to reduce the number of civilian deaths.
It one week after another errant NATO attack killed 12 civilians during the coalition’s major offensive in Marja.
“We need to reach the point where there are no civilian casualties,” Karzai told lawmakers on Saturday as he held up a photograph of an 8-year-old girl the president said was the only survivor of the Feb. 14 rocket attack in Marja.
McChrystal has made minimizing civilian casualties a top priority since assuming command in Afghanistan last year. In recent months, NATO forces have taken increased precautions before launching air strikes in Afghanistan.
Anger over civilian air strikes reached an apex last September when a NATO air strike hit two fuel tankers that had been commandeered by Taliban fighters. The strike set off a huge fireball that killed as many as 142 people, including 30 civilians.
Germany’s top commander was forced to resign after revelations that the government had concealed information about the air strike.
Note: I wonder if the United Nations Human Rights Organizaiton will demand that Goldstone write a report about this incident. Maybe we should have Israel investigate this matter! BeeSting
