NATO kills Afghan police and civilians

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From AFP news agency:

04 April 2013 – 10H48

NATO air strike ‘kills Afghan police, civilians’

A NATO air strike killed four Afghan police and two civilians on Thursday, Afghan officials said.

A spokesman for the US-led NATO force in Kabul told AFP that the military was checking the information.

The attack happened after Taliban insurgents attacked a local police post in eastern Ghazni province before dawn and NATO planes were called in to support the officers under attack.

“The NATO planes went there to assist the police, but the post was bombed and four police were killed. Two civilians present were also killed,” Fazul Ahmad Tolwak, chief of Ghazni’s Deh Yak district, told AFP.

Ghazni provincial administration spokesman Fazul Sabawoon confirmed the incident and gave a similar account.

The issue of civilian casualties in coalition operations is highly sensitive in Afghanistan, where the United States and its NATO allies have been fighting the Taliban for 11 years.

In the past they have provoked harsh criticism from Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who is due to step down at elections next year, which coincide with the scheduled withdrawal of an estimated 100,000 foreign combat troops.

Last week Afghan officials said four civilians, including a child, were killed in a two-day raid against Taliban insurgents by Afghan and international forces in the province of Logar, south of the capital Kabul.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said it was also investigating those accusations.

After an air strike killed 10 civilians, mostly women and children, in February, Karzai banned Afghan security forces from calling in NATO air strikes.

However it is unclear whether the ban has been enforced and many operations are jointly run by NATO and Afghan forces.

Related articles

• Report: NATO Air Strike Kills Afghan Police, Civilians (rferl.org)
• NATO helicoper kills Afghan children (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Nato air strike ‘kills two children’ in south-eastern Afghanistan (guardian.co.uk)