U.S. military acknowledges dozens of Afghan civilian deaths in the past week

The response to Afghan officials' claims is unusually swift. But the U.S. stops short of taking direct blame for 37 civilian deaths and 35 injuries during fighting with insurgents.

11:39 AM PST, November 8, 2008

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Istanbul, Turkey -- The U.S. military acknowledged today that 37 civilians were killed and 35 injured during fighting this week in Kandahar province between insurgents and coalition forces.

Although the American statement stopped short of taking direct blame for civilian casualties in a southern province that is one of the country's most active battlefields, it represented an unusually swift public response to claims of mass casualties made by Afghan officials.

The finding came just three days after provincial officials and the Afghan president's office asserted that three dozen people had died in an errant U.S. airstrike on a wedding party in a village outside the city of Kandahar.

The city, the main population center in Afghanistan's south, was the onetime stronghold of the Taliban. Militants and coalition forces clash almost daily in the province, also known as Kandahar, which is a center of Afghanistan's drug trade.

The new commander of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. David H. Petraeus, was in Afghanistan this week to look at ways to revamp the Western military strategy in the wake of a dramatic resurgence by Taliban-led militants over the past two years. During his visit, Afghan defense officials told him that civilian casualties were sharply eroding public support for the presence of foreign forces.

The deaths and injuries of noncombatants also have become an extremely sensitive issue between the American-backed government of President Hamid Karzai and Western forces in Afghanistan. On Wednesday, hours after Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election, Karzai used what was to have been a congratulatory news conference to plead with the president-elect for an end to civilian fatalities.

The investigation into the deaths in Wach Baghtu village in Kandahar province was carried out jointly by Afghan government officials, the Afghan army and the U.S.-coalition, the American military said in a statement. That represents a departure from practice in past years, when American officials were sometimes reluctant to involve Afghan authorities in such probes, though such cooperation has become more common of late.

In releasing the findings, the U.S. military stressed that villagers' homes were used for cover during a firefight between militants and coalition forces on Monday.

"Village elders told the joint investigation team that insurgentswho were not from their village . . . fired at [Afghan] and coalition forces," the statement said. Local residents were prevented from leaving the area during the battle, it said.

The military did not directly acknowledge having inadvertently bombed the wedding party in question, but said coalition forces used "close air support to suppress enemy fire." Compensation was paid to the families of the dead and injured, the military said without providing details.

The prompt investigation and findings stood in sharp contrast to some recent high-profile cases involving civilian casualties. Afghans were infuriated when it took weeks for the Americans to investigate claims by the Afghan government and the United Nations that 90 people, most of them women and children, were killed in an Aug. 22 airstrike in Herat province, in the west of Afghanistan.

After initially saying that five civilians were killed, a U.S. investigation ultimately concluded that 33 civilians had died. But that finding took six weeks, and the high-level investigation was launched only after videos surfaced that appeared to show large numbers of civilian dead.

"Civilians getting caught in the crossfire is the worst possible thing that could happen," U.S. Army Col. Greg Julian said of last week's deaths in Kandahar. "We regret this tragic loss of innocent lives."

Afghan weddings are traditionally large, drawn-out affairs, and wedding parties several times have been the target of errant airstrikes, in part because from the air the gatherings can appear similar to concentrations of Taliban fighters.

But in Afghanistan's clan-based tribal society, civilian deaths can cause otherwise peaceable villages to declare a vendetta against those they consider responsible for killing and injuring their kin -- in many cases, Western forces.

More than 1,200 Afghan civilians have been killed violently so far this year. A majority of these deaths are caused by insurgent attacks such as suicide bombings, but human rights groups and Afghan officials say hundreds have died at the hands of foreign forces during fighting with the Taliban and other militant groups.

Faiez is a special correspondent. King is a Times staff writer.

laura.king@latimes.com