Airstrikes said to kill 16 Afghan civilians
U.S. military insists the dead are ISIS fighters
JALALABAD, Afghanistan — Afghan officials said Friday that U.S. warplanes killed 16 civilians as they tried to flee an area in eastern Afghanistan controlled by Islamic State militants, but the U.S. military insisted the dead had been extremist fighters.
Hajji Saz Wali, the governor of Haska Meena district in the southern part of Nangarhar province, said the victims included women and children, with eight of the dead from one family, and four others from a second. It was the second time since July 24 that an airstrike in that district killed civilians, according to Afghan officials.
The latest victims died Thursday afternoon when the vehicles they were traveling in were hit by U.S. airstrikes believed to be targeting Islamic State militants in the area, Wali said. It is not known how many were wounded, he added.
A spokesman for the U.S. military in Kabul said that those killed in the airstrikes had been seen loading weapons into a vehicle. “The strike was conducted in the middle of open terrain,” said the spokesman, Bob Purtiman. “There was zero chance of civilian casualties.”
Attaullah Khogyani, the spokesman for Nangarhar province’s governor, confirmed that casualties had occurred but declined to give details.
Mohammada Khan, 42, a truck driver, said in a telephone interview that he had lost six members of his family — including two children and two women — in the airstrike, which hit a minibus in which they were fleeing.
On July 24, Afghan officials said, nine civilians were killed in a U.S. airstrike on a prayer ceremony held in Haska Meena, near the border with Pakistan, by relatives of Islamic State members who had been killed.
The U.S. military asserted that that strike, too, targeted fighters. “This is the second false claim of civilian casualties in the same district within the last three weeks,” the military said.
Claims of civilian deaths from airstrikes have occurred this year in Kunduz in the north and in Helmand province in the south, often as a result of fighting in areas where it can be difficult to distinguish insurgents from civilians. The U.S. military has deployed Special Forces and airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Afghanistan and says it has killed dozens of the group’s leaders and hundreds of fighters this year.
Casualties among Afghan civilians have risen to a record this year, according to a report from the United Nations. Most of those deaths have been attributed to insurgents, particularly through suicide bombings, rather than to airstrikes, the report said.