Women and children feared dead after US airstrikes in Afghanistan

(The Guardian )- American airstrikes in Afghanistan’s Helmand province may have killed at least 18 civilians, mostly women and children, according to the UN and local sources.

The airstrikes took place late on Thursday in Sangin district, which has been highly contested for most of the Afghan war.

It is the first claim of civilian casualties at the hands of US forces in Afghanistan since Donald Trump assumed the US presidency, and two weeks after a botched US raid in Yemen allegedly killed dozens of civilians.

“On 9 and 10 February, international military forces conducted airstrikes in Helmand’s Sangin district reportedly targeting anti-government elements. [The UN’s] initial enquiries suggest that the airstrikes killed at least 18 civilians, nearly all women and children,” the UN said on Sunday.

A spokesman for the international coalition confirmed that the US conducted approximately 30 airstrikes in Sangin last week.

“We are investigating the allegations and working diligently to determine whether civilians were killed or injured as a result of US air strikes conducted in support and defence of Afghan forces in or around Sangin,” said the spokesman, Brig Gen Charles H Cleveland.

The Afghan defence ministry declined to comment but a government spokesman, Najeeb Danesh, said a delegation from the ministry was investigating.

Haji Ahmand, who lives in Sangin, was in Kandahar when a bomb hit his brother’s house about 2am. Waiting to visit his wounded relatives outside Emergency, a hospital for war wounded in Lashkar Gah, Helmand’s capital, he said two boys and two women from his family were killed. The bodies were dug out from under the rubble by Afghan national army soldiers and brought to the hospital, he said.

“What the Americans are doing in Helmand is not right. They target the locals instead of Taliban. The Taliban are far from my brother’s house,” Ahmand said. “We would prefer if the Americans would just leave us alone.”

In 2016, the UN documented the highest number of civilian casualties of the 15-year Afghan war. According to a new report, the number of civilians killed and injured in airstrikes doubled since 2015, with foreign forces responsible for half. Nearly 1,000 children were killed in the Afghan conflict in 2016, a 24% increase from the previous year.

In another attack in Helmand on Saturday, a car bomb targeting an Afghan army Humvee killed seven civilians, according to the UN, and injured at least as many. Most of the injured were child street vendors.