Kunduz (Afghanistan), Sep 5 (DPA) The top NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, travelled to the northern province of Kunduz Saturday to visit the site of a deadly NATO airstrike, where villagers claimed that “scores” of civilians were killed.
Teams from the Afghan government, NATO military and the UN are investigating the incident, in which trucks hijacked by the Taliban were hit in a US jet strike ordered by the local German command of the NATO-led force.
The air raid killed up to 60 of people – mostly insurgents, but also civilians, according to Afghan officials.
After appearing on national television channels to assure Afghans of NATO’s commitment to curbing civilian casualties during the alliance forces’ operation, McChrystal travelled to Chardarah district.
“Today the NATO commander, along with other Afghan and NATO officials came here to have first hand information from the area,” Mohammad Omar, Kunduz’s provincial governor, said.
Since taking office earlier this year, McChrystal has made protection of civilians the alliance’s main strategy. In a new guideline released last week, he gave protecting civilians higher priority over killing insurgents.
On Saturday, hundreds of villagers gathered in five main sub-villages of Omarkhel in Chardarah district to mourn the “scores” of people they claimed were killed. Some of the villagers put the death toll as high as 150, with many of the deceased civilians.
“I can say for sure that 150 people were killed in these five villages of Omerkhel area,” Haji Abdul Rahim, a tribal chief in Yaqoubi, one of the five affected villages, told the German Press Agency DPA.
Talking in a mosque, where prayers were being said for the dead, Rahim said his son and two of his nephews were among those killed. He said more than 50 other villagers were wounded in the blasts.
A DPA reporter who visited the two villages of Yaqoubi and Maulawi Nahim counted around 60 fresh graves, while villagers claimed that another 80 people were killed in Haji Amanullah, Rahmatbay and Zadran villages.
The German military in Berlin said that the air raid left more than 50 insurgents and no civilians dead, while Afghan police said some civilians lost their lives, but did not provide any figures.
German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung defended the decision of the German commander to call in air support.
He told ARD television the Taliban had threatened to launch attacks in the run-up to the German general election Sep 27.
“It was, therefore, a very dangerous situation when the Taliban came into possession of two petrol tankers and posed considerable risk to our soldiers,” Jung said.
Haji Mohayodin, another tribal chief from Yaqoubi village, who said he also lost a son in the incident, admitted that there were some Taliban fighters present at the time of the raid.
But he insisted that most of the victims were innocent villagers who rushed to the scene with all kinds of containers they had available at home to get free fuel which the Taliban wanted to get rid of after the trucks got stuck in mud in a river.
“Our people are jobless and poor, so everyone rushed to the trucks to get as much fuel as they could,” he said.
Inside the mosque, among more men who lost family members, 14-year-old Gul Rahim said he lost his father and two of his elder brothers in the attack.
In his televised remarks, McChrystal said military forces would cooperate with Afghan officials for an investigation. He pledged treatment to all civilians wounded in the attack.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai said that targeting civilians for any purpose was unacceptable and appointed a delegate to investigate the incident. Karzai’s office had said Friday that around 90 people were killed or wounded in the attack.