ALI DAYA, Afghanistan, April 9 (Reuters) - The Afghan Army officer father of a seven-day-old boy said on Thursday his infant son died in an overnight raid by Afghan and U.S. forces, with the U.S. saying it was investigating the claim.
A female school teacher was also killed and the child's mother wounded, the father said, during the raid in Ali Daya village in Khost province, where Taliban fighters are active.
The U.S. military said in a statement it was aware of allegations the raid had caused "non-combatant casualties" and was investigating.
"We take the safety of Afghan citizens very seriously and we will immediately investigate to get to the bottom of this," Colonel Greg Julian, spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said in a statement.
AW says : If they take their safety so seriously how come they continue to kill them almost daily?
Janat Gul, the boy's father, told Reuters he was not at home when the raid happened and was not sure how his newborn child died. His son did not have any bullet wounds but he had died during the raid, Gul said. The boy's mother was in hospital and could not be reached for comment. Photographs showed the boy's body with trickles of blood from his nostrils and white dust on his forehead.
Earlier, U.S. forces released a statement saying they had killed four militants, including two women. Gul said four adults died, but none were militants, and one of the women was a schoolteacher. Violence in Afghanistan has reached its highest level since the U.S.-led invasion despite a growing number of foreign troops and has spread from the south and east to the outskirts of the capital, Kabul.
A provincial governor in south-eastern Afghanistan confirmed this on Thursday that US troops killed five civilians including two women and a 7-day-old child and wounded two other women in an operation against suspected militants.The whole thing happened in a village near Khost city, the capital of the province 'after they claimed that they were attacked by small arms fire,' Hamidullah Qalandarzai, the provincial governor confirmed what you are saying. US soldiers first surrounded the area and then killed five civilians in the firefight,' Qalandarzai said, adding that 'the dead people included two women, a 7-day-old boy, a 10-year-old boy and an adult man.'He said the joint forces targeted the house of Janat Gul, a local villager, but during the firefight three residents of a neighbouring house, which belongs to Colonel Zahir Shah, an Afghan army officer, were killed.
ReplyDeleteThey are claiming to have killed '27 Taliban' today. This is the usual spin to take the world's eye off botches like this:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/10/afghan-baby-shot-dead-in_n_185534.html
The United States said it regretted the casualties:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/0410/breaking42.htm
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