Two NATO soldiers, eight civilians killed in Afghan violence

KABUL, Aug 24, 2010 (AFP) - Two foreign soldiers died Tuesday fighting insurgents in Afghanistan, the NATO alliance said, as Afghan authorities said international forces had killed eight civilians in a recent operation.

NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said it was aware of the charges by some Afghan officials that its soldiers had killed civilians during a raid against Islamist rebels in the northern province of Baghlan.

"On Sunday we saw 11 helicopters coming," Mohammad Ismail, the district chief for Tala Wa Barfak, where the incident took place, told AFP.

"Some of the helicopters landed deploying troops. They carried out attacks there. They killed eight people, all civilians," he said.

Tala Wa Barfak is a remote district in Baghlan, where Taliban insurgents have established a significant presence in recent months.

The district chief said that about a dozen other people, "all of them civilians," were injured in the raids, which he said had lasted for "hours".

An ISAF spokesman said the claims were being investigated, adding: "However, current operational reporting does not support any civilian casualties."

Civilian casualties caused by foreign forces have fallen this year, with NATO troops responsible for about 22 percent of more than 1,200 non-combatant deaths in the first half of 2010, a recent UN report said.

Afghan civilian casualties in the war launched against the Taliban regime in October 2001 is a sensitive issue that sometimes leads to violent anti-West protests.

President Hamid Karzai has long been calling on his Western backers, the US and NATO members with 141,000 troops in Afghanistan, to protect non-combatants during operations against rebels.

Karzai has said that civilian casualties erode public support for his administration, already unpopular among Afghans because of rampant corruption among its officials and its failure to provide security.

Meanwhile, ISAF said two foreign soldiers were killed in southern Afghanistan Tuesday, bringing to 13 the number of troops killed in the country since the weekend.

An American soldier was killed by a bomb in southern Afghanistan, and an ISAF soldier whose nationality was not disclosed was killed in fighting against insurgents, also in the south, the NATO-led force said.

The latest deaths bring to 458 the number of international soldiers killed in the Afghan war so far this year, compared with 520 for the whole last year.

Thirteen international soldiers have been killed since Saturday, seven of them Americans, according to an AFP tally based on that kept by the icasualties.org website.

The force said it had killed 35 rebels during operations east of Kabul launched to secure troubled regions ahead of Afghanistan's September parliamentary elections. The figures could not independently be verified.

The violence is worsening as the militants spread into the north and west of the country from their traditional strongholds in the south and east.

The head of the US Marine Corps, speaking in the United States after a visit to Afghanistan, said he believed Afghan forces would not be ready to take over from US troops in Afghanistan's southern provinces for a few more years.

"It will be a few years before conditions on the ground are such that turnover will be possible for us," General James Conway told reporters, referring to Marines deployed in the provinces of Helmand and Kandahar.

His comments were the latest sign from US military leaders that a major troop withdrawal remained a long way off, despite the July 2011 deadline set by President Barack Obama.

burs/bsk/dk


by Sardar Ahmad
(c) 2010 AFP