KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, 21 March 2004 — At least six Afghan civilians were killed and seven wounded in a US airstrike in Afghanistan’s central province of Uruzgan, officials said yesterday. Many of the casualties in the Friday night raid on a village were women and children, said a provincial government official who did not want to be identified.
Six people had been killed and seven wounded, said a police officer, who also declined to be identified. A Pakistan-based Afghan news agency said seven people had been killed — three women and four men.
US military spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty said he was unaware of any civilian casualties. He said US aircraft had pounded suspected Taleban positions in the area on Friday morning, not evening, in retaliation for the killing of two US soldiers on Thursday.
In other violence overnight, three militants were killed when several dozen suspected Taleban and Al-Qaeda fighters attacked government forces near a US military base at Shkin in Paktika province close to the Pakistani border.
The attackers struck from four directions, said Paktika police chief Mohammad Rahim Ali Khel. The rebels fled into Pakistan when US helicopters appeared, he said. The attack occurred just across the border from a major Pakistani military operation against hundreds of suspected Al-Qaeda militants in Pakistan’s South Waziristan region.
In another incident, US and Afghan forces repelled a major attack on a base on the Afghan-Pakistan border, leaving at least three suspected Taleban or Al-Qaeda fighters dead, an Afghan military commander said yesterday.
Afghan Militia Force commander Zakim Khan said the militants had fled from the Pakistani tribal belt where the military has launched a major operation to hunt down Al-Qaeda and Taleban fugitives, cornering up to 400 fighters.
“This group had came from Pakistan and fled back to Pakistan after the fighting,” he said. “Three Al-Qaeda fighters were killed and we believe seven to eight of them were wounded.”
Four people were killed and 109 injured yesterday as more than a million people thronged to religious rites in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif and the capital Kabul, state news said.
More than 80 people were injured according to hospital sources, some of the injured people are in a critical condition.
Two women, one elderly man and a child were among the dead in Mazar, where some million people had gathered Saturday to celebrate at the shrine which dominates the city centre, the Bakhtar news agency said. In Kabul, four people were in a coma and 25 more injured after they were crushed at a smaller shrine to welcome the New Year, police said.
One man was injured when he stepped on a land mine at the site, which police said had been there since the 1992-1996 civil war, Kabul police chief Gen. Baba Jan said.
