KABUL – Seven civilians, three of them children, were killed and five others wounded in a NATO air strike targeting insurgents in restive southern Afghanistan, a local official said Saturday. The governor of Helmand province said the two men, two women and three children died when the car they were travelling in was hit by NATO fire late Friday.
Earlier, NATO said its International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) called in an air strike on two vehicles believed to be carrying a Taliban leader and his associates, but later discovered they were transporting civilians.
“ISAF forces fired on a vehicle carrying insurgents,” said a statement from Helmand governor Muhammad Gulab Mangal’s office. “The explosion hit another vehicle in which civilians were travelling, and as a result two men, two women and three children were killed and a man, a woman and three other children were wounded.” NATO said it had launched an investigation into the incident, which came after nine people – who Afghan officials said were children collecting firewood – were killed in another air strike in eastern Kunar province this month.
Helmand, the heartland of the global opium trade, is one of the biggest flashpoints in the 10-year Taliban insurgency that erupted after a US-led invasion brought down their regime in 2001. Officials in Helmand, where mobile phone networks have been cut off for several days on Taliban orders, could not immediately be reached for comment on the latest civilian casualties. Civilian casualties in military operations are highly sensitive in Afghanistan as the coalition troops battle to curb a Taliban-led insurgency ahead of a planned handover of security to Afghan forces.
The United Nations says Afghan civilian deaths in the war increased 15 percent to a record high of 2,777 last year. More than three-quarters of the dead were killed in violence blamed on insurgents. The number of civilian casualties linked to international military operations actually fell by 21 percent, but public anger surrounding the issue has grown as the conflict drags on.
