KABUL • Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered authorities yesterday to investigate the alleged killing of 16 civilians in an air raid by US-led forces battling insurgents in northeast Afghanistan.
Karzai was "deeply saddened" by Friday's incident in the mountainous province of Nuristan and told the defence and interior ministries and local authorities to investigate, his office said in a statement.
Provincial governor Tamim Nuristani said 16 civilians were killed as they were travelling out of the area after being warned by security forces to leave ahead of an operation against Islamist insurgents.
The interior ministry said 14 civilians were killed.
But the US-led coalition has insisted the dead were all militants who had been targeted after they had attacked a base of the separate Nato-led military force helping the government to defeat a Taliban-led insurgency.
Karzai's statement reiterated his call on international troops operating in Afghanistan to coordinate their operations with Afghan security forces to avoid civilian deaths.
An Afghan provincial governor confirmed yesterday that 16 civilians including women, children and doctors were killed in Friday’s US-led coalition air strikes but the force insisted the dead were militants.
In other violence, gunmen killed a legislator while 10 militants were blown up by their own bomb in troubled southern Afghanistan, authorities said.
Provincial governor Tamim Nuristani said 16 civilians were killed as they were travelling out of the area after being told by security forces to leave ahead of an operation against Islamic insurgents.
"They included two women, two children and workers and shopkeepers travelling in two pick-up vehicles," Nuristani said. Two doctors and a female nurse were also dead, he said.
But the coalition said on Friday and again yesterday the dead were militants who were escaping after attacking an Nato-led military base in the rugged area.
"The insurgents then entered two vehicles and began travelling away from the firing position. Ground forces called coalition attack helicopters for support," it said in a statement.
"The attack helicopters then destroyed the two vehicles, killing more than a dozen militants."
It said it was aware through the media of allegations of civilian casualties and was "engaging with Afghan officials on this matter."
There was some angry reaction in the province with the head of the government's provincial council there, Rahmatullah Rashidi, warning the body would stop work if "such killings continue."
The seven-year internationally supported campaign to fight a bloody Taliban-led insurgency has seen several incidents in which civilians were killed, as well as claims of civilian casualties that have proven untrue.
Such incidents are most often impossible to independently verify, as was the one in Waygal.
In more violence on Friday, two unknown attackers shot dead legislator and tribal leader Habibullah Jan as he was driving in his troubled home district of Zharai in Kandahar province, authorities said.
The legislator, aged around 55, was also the head of Kandahar's prominent Alizai tribe and a former commander of the 1979-1989 anti-Soviet resistance.
A spokesman for the Taliban, who are active in Zharai and have carried out several targeted killings, said it was not involved. "This is not our work," spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi said by telephone.
UN representative Kai Eide said the attack "underlines the risks faced by dedicated parliamentarians as they work tirelessly to forge a new future for the people of Afghanistan."
Jan was the 10th member of the lower house to be killed since Afghanistan's first democratically chosen parliament was elected in 2005, four years after the ouster of the Taliban regime in a US-led invasion.
In neighbouring Helmand province police said 10 rebels were killed late on Friday when a mine exploded as they were trying to plant it in a road near Musa Qala.
The town was a key Taliban base for 10 months until December last year when Afghan and Nato-led forces routed the rebels in a days-long operation.
Seven Taliban were killed in fighting with Afghan and foreign troops in the eastern province of Paktika late Thursday, while three others died when a mine they were planting exploded prematurely, the defence ministry said.
About 10 other militants were killed and wounded after ambushing an Afghan army patrol in Helmand's Marja district the same day, the ministry said in a separate statement.
Hundreds of civilians have been killed in international military action against insurgents, most of them in air strikes on remote areas even though the forces employ several measures to confirm the identities of their targets.
The United Nations said last month that nearly 700 Afghan civilians had lost their lives in insurgency-linked violence this year, nearly two-thirds in militant attacks and about 255 in military operations.
