US, NATO attacks kill 13 in Afghanistan
Police officers, civilians die in two episodes
KABUL, Afghanistan - US and NATO missile and mortar strikes continued to exact a heavy toll on Afghans over the weekend, killing at least 13 in two episodes that Afghan officials said were mistakes.
One NATO soldier was also killed in the eastern province of Khost yesterday. Although NATO did not give the nationality of the soldier, US forces are deployed in Khost.
Nine Afghan police officers were killed and five others were wounded in western Afghanistan when a convoy of Afghan and US forces called in air strikes on the officers, thinking they were militants.
A presidential spokesman, Homayun Hamidzada, said the strikes were a case of friendly fire.
At least four people were killed in the other episode when two mortar shells fired by the NATO-led force in Afghanistan went astray.
The US military announced it was mounting an investigation into the first episode, which occurred yesterday.
The Afghan and US forces were attacked in Farah Province by an unknown group while conducting operations in Ana Darreh district, a statement issued from Bagram Air Base said. The allied forces returned fire and then called in air strikes on the group attacking them.
The district's police chief was among those badly wounded, the deputy provincial governor said, according to Agence France-Presse.
In the second episode, a NATO statement said, at least four civilians were accidentally killed, and four other civilians wounded, in mortar strikes by the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in the eastern province of Paktika. The deaths of an additional three people had not been confirmed, the statement said.
The strikes occurred Saturday night at Barmal, on the border with Pakistan in an area where militants frequently cross from Pakistan's tribal regions.
The wounded civilians were taken to a NATO base and were evacuated by helicopter to a medical facility, the statement said, adding: "ISAF deeply regrets this accident, and an investigation as to the exact circumstances of this tragic event is now underway."
The humanitarian organization Oxfam used the opportunity to warn against the growing human cost of the war in Afghanistan in a statement yesterday.
"The security situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated, with an alarming increase in civilian casualties," the statement said.
"All parties to the conflict must do everything possible to avoid causing harm to civilians."
The statement also said that unless the next American president "builds on the existing commitments to help lift the Afghan people out of extreme poverty and protect civilians, it will be impossible for the country to achieve lasting peace."
The organization also urged the US government to stop spending assistance funds on expensive foreign contractors and instead to find more creative and sustainable ways to assist Afghans directly, especially in rural development.
Afghan governors and ministers who met Senator Barack Obama for dinner Saturday night asked that funding be funneled through the government so it could build up its own institutions, said Arsala Jamal, the governor of Khost.
When Obama asked what the governor needed most for his province, the governor said he needed roads since the entire border region has no paved roads.
American lawyers in Kabul working on the cases of Afghans detained in the US base at Bagram called on the US government to end the legal "black hole" in which hundreds of detainees are held by American forces in Afghanistan.
The lawyers, from the International Justice Network, cited the case of Jawed Ahmad, an Afghan journalist detained for about nine months at Bagram with some 650 other Afghan detainees.
None of the detainees has been charged and none is allowed a lawyer, according to the lawyers, Tina M. Foster, the director of the organization, and Barbara Olshansky, a human rights professor at Stanford University.
