NATO says troops kill 11 “Taliban ambushers”

KABUL (Reuters) – NATO troops killed 11 Taliban insurgents
planning an ambush in southern Afghanistan, while separately,
one of four Canadian soldiers wounded in a suicide attack died
of his wounds, a NATO spokesman said on Wednesday.

Residents of the southern province of Kandahar said the 11
people killed by the NATO force late on Tuesday were not
Taliban but ordinary civilians who had been picking grapes.

Afghanistan is going through its bloodiest phase of
violence since U.S.-led troops overthrew a Taliban government
in 2001. About 2,000 people, most of them militants but
including more than 90 foreign troops and scores of Afghan
soldiers, police and civilians, have been killed this year.

The NATO-led peacekeeping force said a 15-strong group of
Taliban ambushers was spotted near a main road in Kandahar late
on Tuesday.

Upon realizing they had been detected, the insurgents moved
to a nearby compound, said Major Scott Lundy, a spokesman for
the force.

After confirming there were no civilians present, a NATO
aircraft dropped a precision-guided bomb on the compound.

“Eleven Taliban were killed in the airstrike, while two
insurgents were later seen leaving the compound,” Lundy said.

But civilians in the Zhari area to the west of Kandahar
city, said the dead were farmers who had been working in their
grape fields in the cool of the evening.

“Those people who died in the bombing were civilians,” one
resident of the area, Ahmad Shapour, said by telephone.

Separately, Lundy said one of four Canadian soldiers
wounded in a suicide car-bomb attack in Kandahar city on
Tuesday, had died from his wounds. The others were in stable
condition.

Canada has about 2,300 troops in the Afghan south.

Lundy also confirmed that a teenager was shot dead and
another wounded in firing by NATO soldiers after the pair, who
were riding a motorbike, had ignored soldiers orders to stop
near the site of the attack.

Civilian deaths in the war against the Taliban are highly
sensitive for foreign forces and for the Western-backed
government of President Hamid Karzai.

The war and its disastrous impact on the economy are among
the main issues undermining support for President Hamid Karzai,
who has led the country since shortly after the Taliban were
ousted, analysts say.

Karzai last week urged foreign forces to exercise extreme
caution while conducting operations against militants.

On Wednesday, three civilians were killed in two separate
blasts on a road near Kandahar air base, the main base for
foreign troops in the Afghan south, a provincial official said.

NATO last month assumed security responsibility for the
south from a separate U.S.-led force. It is the alliance’s
biggest ground operation in its history.

(Additional reporting by Mirwais Afghan in Kandahar)