Pro-government group died in attack carried out by mistake, say villagers, as cluster bombs claim more civilian lives
Rory McCarthy in Islamabad Monday January 28, 2002 The Guardian
Afghan villagers last night claimed that American special forces had botched a raid north of Kandahar, killing at least 15 pro-government local leaders who were negotiating the surrender of local Taliban fighters.
US troops have now been accused of blundering in several ground assaults inside Afghanistan since the Taliban regime fell last month. The new claims came as Hamid Karzai, the head of the interim government in Kabul, left for his first official visit to Washington.
The Pentagon said on Friday that the raid on Hazar Qadam, 60 miles north of Kandahar, destroyed a huge Taliban arms dump, killing about 15 people. At least 27 "relatively senior" Taliban were captured and taken to an American military detention facility in Kandahar, it said.
Yet villagers yesterday insisted the US troops had been badly misled. They said the victims of the attack at Hazar Qadam were headed by an ethnic-group leader called Haji Sana Gul, who had just disarmed a number of Taliban fighters still holding out in the area.
His brother Bari Gul said the men spent Wednesday night in the local madrassah, or religious seminary. Before dawn the next day US troops swept in, killing several people in the madrassah, including Haji Sana Gul himself.
Two of the dead had their hands tied behind their backs, Bari Gul said. Three more people were killed in a building a mile away.
Yusuf Pashtun, an aide to the Kandahar governor Gul Agha, said he too believed American commandos had struck the wrong targets. "It looks like it was raided by mistake," he said. "The people of the district centre are very much against the Taliban."
US military officials said an AC-130 flying gunship was used in the raid, strafing the compounds and destroying a large number of weapons on the ground.
Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem, the deputy director of operations for the US joint chiefs of staff, said on Friday that the village had been under surveillance before the attack."We have been watching this facility for a while," he said.
Yesterday, a Kandahar-based US army spokesman said suggestions that pro-government forces had been wrongly attacked "are not consistent with our intelligence".
American officials have acknowledged that they must frequently depend on information from members of rival ethnic groupings whose loyalties are frequently shifting.
On December 29, American bombers killed at least 100 people in a village in eastern Afghanistan. The Pentagon said Taliban and al-Qaida fighters were targeted. Survivors said those killed had been civilians attending a wedding.
A week earlier, a convoy of 100 Afghans travelling near Khost, in the east, were bombed by US jets, and at least 60 died. Again, the Pentagon said it believed the dead were Taliban and al-Qaida fighters, but survivors said they were elders going to Kabul to mark the new government's inauguration.