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NATO says troops kill 11 "Taliban ambushers"

Posted on: Wednesday, 23 August 2006, 04:15 CDT

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)

Source: REUTERS

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