A police commander for western Afghanistan said Wednesday at least eight civilian women and children were killed in a US attack in the western region, while the US military claimed all those killed were combatants, dpa reported.
Eight men were also killed in the attack against the nomad tents on Monday in the eastern outskirts of Herat city, the capital for the province of the same name, Ekramuddin Yawar, commander for the police forces in the western region said.
"Six women and two children were for sure civilians, but I can't say with 100 per cent certainty if the dead men were also civilians," Yawar said, adding an Afghan police investigator found pieces of AK-47 rifles near the tents.
The police team also found two stolen vehicles near the targeted area, he said.
The US military said in a statement that its forces targeted an insurgent commander named Gholam Yahya Akbari and his associates with a "precision strike."
"Killed in the attack were up to 15 militants suspected of associating with Yahya," the military statement said Tuesday night.
"There are no official reports of civilian casualties at this time," the statement said. "However, when we receive confirmed reports of civilian deaths we take those reports very seriously and investigate them along with our Afghan counterparts,"
Civilian killings at the hands of NATO and US forces, which together have around 70,000 troops in Afghanistan, have become a delicate issue. The mounting death toll from the international military operations has created a rift between the alliance and Afghan government.
More than 2,100 civilians were killed in Afghan violence in 2008, 55 per cent of them by the Taliban-led insurgents and 39 per cent by the pro-government forces, according to a report issued by the United Nations office in Kabul on Tuesday.
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