What a Wedding.KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan and U.S. officials headed to an Afghan village on Tuesday to investigate reports that a stray U.S. bomb killed 40 members of a wedding party during a major operation to track down Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.
A local official said bombs had also fallen elsewhere in the central province of Uruzgan, as U.S. and Afghan forces scoured the area for traces of Mullah Omar, who was born close to the bombed village but has been on the run since late last year.
Afghan officials said wedding guests near the village of Deh Rawud were firing into the air -- a tradition in Pashtun weddings -- when they were mistakenly bombed by U.S. forces.
But U.S. officials said a ground patrol had called in air support after feeling threatened by automatic weapon fire. The planes then met sustained and hostile fire that was not consistent with a wedding party.
"Normally when you think of celebratory fire, which is something that is not necessarily uncommon, it's random, it's sprayed, it's not directed at a specific target," U.S. Colonel Roger King told reporters at Bagram air base.
"In this instance, the people on board the aircraft felt that the weapons were tracking them and were making a sustained effort to engage them," he said, adding that the planes had then dropped seven 2,000 bombs on the area.
Raaz Mohammad, an official in the governor's office in the provincial capital of Tarin Kowt, told Reuters 40 people were killed.
"We have buried the bodies in Deh Rawud...including women and children," he said.
"Other areas of the province were bombed during the day on Monday. We have sent people out in the area to find out about the death toll from other attacks. There must be casualties."
A local aid agency said U.S. and Afghan soldiers were also searching houses on Monday in and around the village where the bombing occurred, some 115 miles north of the southern city of Kandahar.
"Afghan and U.S. troops are conducting house-to-house searches in the village," said Razique Samadi, of the Afghan Development Association, which is running projects in the Uruzgan region. "They are especially looking for people with weapons."
In the capital Kabul, peacekeepers from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) were on alert for possible reprisals,
"AMERICANS MADE A MISTAKE"
Afghan officials and U.S. investigators headed for the site on Tuesday. The United Nations said it was helping to arrange a government convoy of emergency medical supplies and burn kits to Tarin Kowt, with the help of the World Health Organization and International Committee of the Red Cross.
An Afghan Defense Ministry official, Dr. Gulbuddin, told Reuters: "More than 30 people were killed. It was a wedding ceremony...Americans have confessed that they made a mistake."
U.S. bombing also killed around 30 people in Tarin Kowt last October, according to officials and residents.
"The American special forces are in Uruzgan in pursuit of Mullah Omar who is believed to be here," Mohammad said. "We ask the Americans to use more caution in their attacks."
U.S. forces also killed around 15 people in the same province in January in a firefight which they later admitted was "ill advised." Afghan officials said the Americans had mistakenly killed an anti-Taliban commander and many of his men.
BOMB MISSED TARGET
The U.S. military's Central Command said from its headquarters in Tampa, Florida, that U.S. B-52 and AC-130 attack aircraft struck targets in the dark, including anti-aircraft artillery that was firing at Western warplanes. In Washington, the Pentagon said at least one bomb had missed its target.
King was the incident occurred during a coordinated operation aimed partly at "exploiting what intelligence had told us would be a sensitive site, that might be a place that would contain weapons, documents or personnel we were looking for."
He said the military was aware of four injured civilians, all children under the age of five. Three were evacuated to a military hospital in Kandahar, the other brought to Bagram, the staging post for U.S.-led coalition forces.
"The U.S. government extends its deepest sympathies to those who may have lost loved ones or who may have suffered any injuries," he said. "Coalition military forces take extraordinary measures to protect against civilian casualties."
U.S. HELICOPTERS FERRY WOUNDED
Villager Abdul Saboor told the BBC: "We managed to transfer some of the wounded to Kandahar in the morning. Some of the foreigners' choppers also came to help.
"There are no Taliban or al Qaeda or Arabs here. These people were all civilians, women and children."
In May, the U.S. army rejected reports it had mistakenly attacked a wedding party after the Afghan Islamic Press reported U.S. planes had pounded the village of Bul Khil in Khost province after mistaking traditional firing at a wedding for an attack.
Afghan weddings are traditionally as lavish as can be afforded, with generations of family members gathered to celebrate the nuptials.
One recent military investigation found that a U.S. fighter pilot did not follow procedures when he mistakenly bombed Canadian troops in Afghanistan in April, killing four soldiers and injuring eight. |
