How To NOT Fight A War

While the US-led coalition has denied killing civilians -saying only militants were killed- it says it is looking into the allegations. President Hamid Karzai appointed high-level teams to investigate the claims, which have now attracted criticism from the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Afghan parliament.

The team that looked into Sunday’s strike in the remote Deh Bala district of Nangarhar told the AFP they were shown the bloodied clothes of women and children killed in the strike that hit a wedding party and turned left buildings into rubble.

“We found that 47 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed in the air strikes and another nine were wounded,” said the head of the mission, Burhanullah Shinwari, who’s also deputy speaker of Afghanistan’s senate.

“They were all civilians and had no links with Taliban or Al-Qaeda.”

Local officials said earlier the strikes had hit a party of mainly women and children escorting a bride to her groom. The bride was among the dead, they said.

Jesus.

A separate investigation into Friday’s strike in the northeastern province of Nuristan had found that 17 civilians were killed there, said General Mohammad Amin, a defence ministry official who headed the team.

“We found that in the bombing 17 people were killed and nine were wounded. They are all civilians.”

Afghan authorities said before that the dead included two doctors and two midwives who were leaving the area after the coalition said it was preparing an operation there.

The relatives of some of the victims were paid compensation, Amin said, warning the killings could see a backlash against the government and the international troops helping it to fight an extremist insurgency.

“If the government keeps quiet about these civilian casualties in Nuristan like in the past, it will be bad for the security of the province.”

A coalition spokeswoman, Nielson-Green says: “Any loss of civilian life is tragic. We never target non-combatants. We do go to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties.”

The United Nations said last month that nearly 700 civilians had lost their lives in Afghanistan this year, about two-thirds in militant attacks and about 255 in military operations.

War sucks. Why can’t we just handle disputes in a soccer match or something?

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