Steve Quayle News Alerts

July 3, 2002
By Denise Duclaux and Ahmad Masood

BAGRAM/KABUL, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Afghan and U.S. officials set out by road on Wednesday for a remote village in central Afghanistan to try and unravel a mass of conflicting reports about the reported death of 40 civilians.

Anger about the incident grew among ordinary Afghans, a factor which could complicate the task of the U.S. military as it continues its efforts to track down al Qaeda and Taliban fugitives in the country.

Afghanistan's government says wedding guests near the village of Deh Rawud were firing into the air -- a tradition at Pashtun weddings -- when they were mistakenly bombed by U.S. forces.

Many of the victims, it said, were women and children, including an entire family of 25. An Afghan aid agency working in the area said both the bride and the groom had died.

The Afghan government called for more careful targeting by U.S. forces, and closer coordination with local authorities, as anger rose among Afghans.

"The mistakes are too much," said 18-year-old Fateh Shah in Kabul. "This is not acceptable and has to be stopped, otherwise the feelings of Afghans will be provoked against all foreigners, let alone the Americans."

Razique Samadi, managing director of the Afghan Development Association, which has more than 40 staff in the province where the attack took place, said both the bride and groom had died.

"Our people on the ground said it was a mistake on both sides," he told Reuters. "The wedding guests knew there was a coalition operation going on in the area, still they fired their guns into the air, to celebrate the wedding."

Signs also emerged that the incident could complicate the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan by alienating local people.

A three-vehicle convoy of U.S. civil affairs and medical personnel was fired on as it returned from a hospital in the southern city of Kandahar on Tuesday evening, after visiting 19 wounded people brought there after the attack.

Kandahar was the stronghold and spiritual home of the Taliban, while its leader Mullah Mohammad Omar was born near Deh Rawud in Uruzgan province just to the north.

Information has only trickled out slowly from the U.S. military, with partial and initially slightly contradictory accounts emerging from the Pentagon and Bagram air base, the coalition's staging post for its operations in Afghanistan.

But the U.S. military has not accepted any blame for what appeared to be the worst "friendly fire" incident of its military campaign in Afghanistan and which occurred during a search in the area for fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.

At Bagram, Colonel Roger King said a U.S. ground patrol had called in air support after feeling threatened by automatic weapons fire.

The planes, he said, then met sustained and hostile fire from several locations around the village, including anti-aircraft fire, that was not consistent with a wedding party.

"The easiest and best way to avoid civilian casualties is to avoid firing at coalition forces in the proximity of innocent civilians," he told reporters on Wednesday.

At the Pentagon, Marine Corps General Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said an AC-130 gunship responded to what the crew thought was anti-aircraft fire from the ground. He said the gunship -- which rakes targets with 105 mm cannon and machine-guns -- had then attacked seven targets.

CONDOLENCES

There was a also a pre-planned U.S. attack in the area that night, with B-52 bombers dropping seven 2,000-lb bombs on a cave and tunnel complex as well as on a nearby anti-aircraft position, which had fired on coalition planes in the past.

One of those bombs went astray but ground spotters reported it fell on an uninhabited hillside.

"The pre-planned target was out of the village, on a ridgeline in another location," King said.

President Bush offered his condolences and said investigators were working to find out what had happened.

On Tuesday, a team including two Afghan government ministers and several tribal elders as well as five U.S. military personnel and an embassy staffer flew from Kabul to the provincial capital of Tarin Kowt, arriving mid-afternoon.

The team left for the bombed area on Wednesday morning, some 60 km (35 miles) away, a five-hour journey on the poorly maintained local road. King said they would spend at least a day and a half on the ground and were not expected back in the capital before Friday.

U.S. bombing killed around 30 people in Tarin Kowt last October, according to officials and residents.

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.

In May, the U.S. army rejected reports it had mistakenly bombed 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 for an attack.

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.

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