Agence France-Presse,
The NATO-led force in Afghanistan admitted Sunday to killing more civilians, this time in Pakistan, a day after harsh criticism from President Hamid Karzai about military operations.
A weapon fired by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) hit a building in Pakistan as warplanes were chasing down insurgents preparing to attack a base across the Afghan border Saturday, a spokesman said.
Pakistan military spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad Sunday put the toll at 10 dead and 14 wounded, seven of them seriously. Residents said the dead included a child, a woman and seven men.
The Pakistani spokesman said his government had protested and demanded an explanation. He said a rocket had struck the building.
“We have reports that one of our weapons hit a building which may have had a number of civilians in it and that building may have been a home or way-station or some hotel facility,” ISAF spokesman Major John Thomas told AFP.
“We regret the loss of innocent life,” he said.
ISAF said earlier up to 60 militants were killed in the operation, which spanned the border in Afghanistan's southeastern Paktika province and Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area.
In Kabul Saturday, Karzai accused ISAF and the separate US-led coalition of of causing civilian casualties in the battle against insurgents through “indiscriminate and unprecise” operations.
There was an “extreme use of force” and action was not being coordinated with Afghan forces despite repeated complaints over several years, the president said.
A NATO spokesman said the president's anger was understandable.
“But let's make clear that no ISAF soldier intends to kill civilians,” Nicholas Lunt said in Kabul. “That's not the case with Taliban. They deliberately kill civilians.”
A district police chief told media Sunday that Taliban insurgents had kidnapped his 18-year-old son and beheaded him.
Ghulam Wali, head of police in Helmand province's Sangin district, said he had pleaded in vain with the men to free his child, saying: “He's an innocent young boy and your enmity is with me not to him.”
The insurgents kill by far the most civilians in the fighting in Afghanistan, often in suicide and roadside bombings aimed at the foreign and Afghan security forces.
The mounting civilian casualties by Afghan and foreign military forces — said by a body of nongovernment groups to have reached nearly 250 this year — is adding to disillusionment about post-Taliban Afghanistan.
There was meanwhile more fighting across the country with nearly 20 militants, four Afghan soldiers, three policemen and four foreign servicemen killed in the past day.
A British soldier was killed and four others injured in an explosion in Helmand, the British defence ministry announced late Sunday.
Their vehicle was hit in the explosion outside of the provincial capital Lashkar Gar. The death brings to 61 the number of Britons killed in the nation since the US-led drive to overthrow the Taliban regime began in November 2001.
Two Estonian nationals with the 37-nation ISAF also died in a rocket attack in Helmand, their country announced.
A member of the US-dominated coalition was killed in the same province in fighting that also left an Afghan soldier and about a dozen rebels dead, the force said.
Three more Afghan soldiers died in separate Taliban bombings, officials said.
Six militants were killed in fighting in Paktika, the defence ministry said.
The police force said three of its men were killed in fighting Sunday in the Zhari district of Kandahar which was also believed to have claimed the lives of several Taliban.
The ultra-conservative Taliban took control of the Afghan government in 1996 in the chaos of a civil war. They were toppled five years later by a US-led coalition that is still here hunting leaders of the movement and its allies in Al-Qaeda.
