Afghan President Hamid Karzai sent a government delegation Tuesday to investigate reports that 10 civilians, including eight students, were killed in fighting involving foreign troops in a tense area of eastern Afghanistan. Karzai condemned the deaths that reportedly occurred Sunday in a village in the Narang district of Kunar province. If true, the incident would represent the most serious accidental killings of Afghan civilians by Western forces in six months. Civilian deaths are one of the most sensitive issues for foreign troops in Afghanistan. Although far more civilians are killed by the Taliban, those triggered by foreign troops spark wide resentment and undermine international forces' attempts to weaken the Taliban. “The president was deeply saddened and angry when he heard this news,” Karzai's spokesman Waheed Omar said Tuesday. In a criticism of US and NATO-led troops in Afghanistan, Omar said that the Sunday operation should have been coordinated between international forces and the Afghan national army. “Our national army is now doing 60 percent of the operations,” Omar said. “When the Afghan national army is doing the operations, the civilian casualties are lower.” NATO said Tuesday it was working with its Afghan partners “and looking into the allegations of civilian casualties.” However, it said it had no operations in the Narang district of Kunar province “at the time of the alleged incident.” Gen. Zaman Mamozai, local border police commander, insisted Tuesday that those killed Sunday were insurgents. He told The Associated Press by telephone that he received photos from the forces involved in the fighting that show the young victims were armed insurgents planning attacks against international troops. Mamozai said coalition forces found homemade explosives in the house where the incident happened. “I don't see civilians in the photos,” he said. “The coalition said our target was insurgents who were planning to sabotage the security of the area. This operation looks like a successful operation. It seems like the men, ages between 25 and 30, were meeting in a room when they were struck.” The general, however, conceded that Afghan civilians often get killed unintentionally in such operations. “Sometimes those kind of incidents happen as civilians jump on the roofs and watch the attacks,” he said.
