US air strike on Afghan village killed 30 civilians in August

New York, Oct 8 (PTI) A U.S. military investigation into
the American air strikes on an Afghan village in August this
year has concluded that the attack killed over 30 civilians, a
figure far more than commanders there have acknowledged.

The military investigator's report found that more than
30 civilians — not 5 to 7 as the military has long insisted —
died in the air strikes against a suspected Taliban compound
in Azizabad in western Afghanistan on August 22, the New York
Times reported.

The investigator, Brig. Gen. Michael W. Callan of the Air
Force, concluded that many more civilians, including women and
children, had been buried in the rubble than the military had
asserted, one of the military officials told the paper.

The air strikes have been the focus of sharp tensions
between the Afghan government, which has said that 90
civilians died in the raid, and the American military, under
Gen. David D. Mckiernan, the top American military commander
in Afghanistan, which has repeatedly insisted that only a
handful of civilians were killed.

While American commanders in Afghanistan have contended
that 30 to 35 militants were killed in the raid, the new
report concludes that many among that group were in fact
civilians, the military officials were quoted by the Times as
saying.

According to the report, fewer than 20 militants died in
the raid, which was conducted jointly by American and Afghan
forces, and in subsequent air strikes carried out by U.S.
warplanes in support of allied ground forces, the paper said.

The revised American estimate for civilian deaths in the
operation remains far below the 90 that Afghan and U.N.
officials have claimed, a figure that the Afghan government
and the U.N. said was supported by cell phone photos, freshly
dug grave sites and accounts of witnesses who saw dead bodies.

General Callan's findings ran counter to those of the
earlier American investigations, the Times pointed out.

Earlier U.S. Special Forces troops had conducted an
initial battlefield review, including a building by building
search, and four days after the strike, military investigators
travelled to the vicinity of the raid, the paper said.

General Callan found that the people who conducted those
investigations did not or could not do what was necessary to
establish the full extent of the civilian killings, the
military officials told the paper.

In contrast, they said, General Callan was able to review
the scene of the air strikes more extensively. They said his
team interviewed villagers, which the other military units had
not done before, and examined new evidence, like cell phone
videos and other images showing the bodies of women and
children that were not available previously.