Special report

Sat Sep 20, 2008 7:47pm EDT

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A Palestinian woman died of injuries sustained on Sunday when she was shoved to the ground by Israeli soldiers conducting an arrest raid in her village in the occupied West Bank, witnesses and a medical official said.

They said Mariam Ayyad, aged around 60, had tried to block the path of troops who came to Abu Dis, near Jerusalem, overnight to detain students lodging in a property she owned.

"She went outside in order to prevent them arresting someone from her house," one of the students, who would only be identified by his nickname, Abu Yaffa, told Reuters. "They knocked her down and there was blood on her head."

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US raid kills 7 Iraqis including 3 women

Child pulled from rubble after airstrike on alleged insurgents, military says
The Associated Press
updated 5:23 a.m. MT, Fri., Sept. 19, 2008

BAGHDAD - The U.S. military says seven Iraqis have been killed in a raid by American troops backed by attack aircraft targeting al-Qaida in Iraq.

A military statement says those killed Friday in the Sunni town of Adwar include four suspected insurgents and three women. It says a child has been pulled from the rubble and is being treated at a nearby U.S. base.

The military says the U.S. troops were targeting a man believed to be the leader of a bombing network in an area north of Baghdad.

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John Pilger

Last month, “our” aircraft slaughtered nearly 100 Afghan civilians, two-thirds of them children aged three months to 16 years, while they slept

Try to laugh, please. The news is now officially parody and a game for all the family to play.

First question: Why are "we" in Afghanistan? Answer: "To try to help in the country's rebuilding programme." Who says so? Huw Edwards, the BBC's principal newsreader. What wags the Welsh are.

Second question: Why are "we" in Iraq? Answer: To "plant a western-style open democracy". Who says so? Paul Wood, the former BBC defence correspondent, and his boss Helen Boaden, director of BBC News. To prove her point, Boaden supplied Medialens.org with 2,700 words of quotations from Tony Blair and George W Bush. Irony? No, she meant it.

Take Andrew Martin, divisional adviser at BBC Complaints, who has been researching Bush's speeches for "evidence" of noble democratic reasons for laying to waste an ancient civilisation. Says he: "The 'D' word is not there, but the phrase 'united, stable and free' [is] clearly an allusion to it." After all, he says, the invasion of Iraq "was launched as 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'". Moreover, says the BBC man, "in Bush's 1 May 2003 speech (the one on the aircraft carrier) he talked repeatedly about freedom and explicitly about the Iraqi transition to democracy . . . These examples show that these were on Bush's mind before, during and after the invasion."

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AFGHANISTAN:
US-NATO Airstrikes Bring Higher Civilian Toll

Ali Gharib

WASHINGTON, Sep 8 (IPS) - Ramped-up U.S. and NATO airstrikes in Afghanistan are causing an increased civilian death toll, raising concerns about the fallout from civilian deaths on the war effort against the Taliban insurgency, according to a major new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) released here Monday.

The 43-page report, "Troops in Contact: Airstrikes and Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan", warned that the cost in civilian casualties caused by the increase in bombings goes well beyond the loss of human life and could put the nearly seven-year U.S.-NATO war effort at risk.

"The harm caused by airstrikes is not limited to the immediate civilian casualties," said the report, which also cited the destruction of homes and property and the displacement of their civilian occupants caused by the bombing.

"Civilian deaths from airstrikes act as a recruiting tool for the Taliban and risk fatally undermining the international effort to provide basic security to the people of Afghanistan," said Brad Adams, HRW's Asia director of HRW.

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Sep 8 09:19 AM US/Eastern

KABUL, Sept. 8 (AP) - (Kyodo)—Civilian deaths in Afghanistan caused by U.S. and NATO air strikes nearly tripled in 2007 from the previous year, a U.S.-based human rights group said Monday.

The combination of light ground forces and overwhelming airpower has led to large numbers of civilian casualties, controversy over the continued use of airpower in Afghanistan, and intense criticism of U.S. and NATO forces by Afghan political leaders and the general public, Human Rights Watch said in a 43-page report released Monday.

"In 2007, Afghan civilian deaths were nearly three times higher: 321 Afghan civilians were killed in 22 bombings, while hundreds more were injured," it said.

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The New York Times

September 8, 2008

Evidence Points to Civilian Toll in Afghan Raid
By CARLOTTA GALL

AZIZABAD, Afghanistan — To the villagers here, there is no doubt what happened in an American airstrike on Aug. 22: more than 90 civilians, the majority of them women and children, were killed.

The Afghan government, human rights and intelligence officials, independent witnesses and a United Nations investigation back up their account, pointing to dozens of freshly dug graves, lists of the dead, and cellphone videos and other images showing bodies of women and children laid out in the village mosque.

Cellphone images seen by this reporter show at least 11 dead children, some apparently with blast and concussion injuries, among some 30 to 40 bodies laid out in the village mosque. Ten days after the airstrikes, villagers dug up the last victim from the rubble, a baby just a few months old. Their shock and grief is still palpable.

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Related
B’Tselem to Attorney General: Stop reckless use of rubber-coated steel bullets


Added: September 04, 2008

Israel is denying using excessive force in the West Bank after two Palestinians were killed and a third was critically injured. Sky's Dominic Waghorn reports

Posted September 8, 2008

This morning two US Predator Drones attacked a small village two miles north of Miramshah in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency, killing at least 20 and wounding 25 others. According to an anonymous Pakistani military officer, none of those killed were militants. At least four women and two children were reported among the dead and most of the wounded are also reported to be women and children.

The attack centered on a religious school founded by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a religious scholar and veteran commander of the US-backed mujahideen who fought against the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Haqqani is well-connected in both militant and government circles, having been accused of ties with both al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence by US officials.

Haqqani has recently been accused of a role in the bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, and was also allegedly linked to an assassination attempt earlier this year against Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Incredibly enough, the United States attempted to install Haqqani as Prime Minister of Afghanistan, a position which he refused citing the number of Afghans killed in the 2001 invasion. Haqqani was reportedly in Afghanistan at the time of the attack.

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From The Times

September 8, 2008

Tom Coghlan in Kabul

As the doctor walks between rows of bodies, people lift funeral shrouds to reveal the faces of children and babies, some with severe head injuries.

Women are heard wailing in the background. “Oh God, this is just a child,” shouts one villager. Another cries: “My mother, my mother.”

The grainy video eight-minute footage, seen exclusively by The Times, is the most compelling evidence to emerge of what may be the biggest loss of civilian life during the Afghanistan war.

These are the images that have forced the Pentagon into a rare U-turn. Until yesterday the US military had insisted that only seven civilians were killed in Nawabad on the night of August 21.

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ISHTIAQ MAHSUD
AP News

Sep 02, 2008 23:47 EST

At least 15 people, including women and children, were killed in an attack involving U.S.-led forces in a remote Pakistani village near the border with Afghanistan, intelligence officials and a witness said Wednesday.

The U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan said it had no report of such an incursion, said to have happened in the militant-infested South Waziristan tribal region. Pakistan's army confirmed an attack but did not specify if it believed foreign troops were involved.

The U.S. and Pakistan, allies in the war on terror, have had tensions over cross-border attacks, including suspected American missile strikes in Pakistani territory. In one high-profile incident earlier this year, Pakistan said 11 of its soldiers died when U.S. aircraft bombed their border post.

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Monday, September 01, 2008

By our correspondent

PESHAWAR: At least 500 civilians were killed or wounded during the five-day US-led troops' ground and air operation in the Sangin district of Helmand province, a member of Afghanistan's parliament said on Sunday.

"Foreign forces have been conducting operation in Sarwan Qala area of Sangin district for the last five days in which artillery and aircraft are being used," Dad Muhammad Khan, member of Wolesi Jirga (lower house of parliament), told Afghan Islamic Press.

"The dead and injured were lying in the area and there is no one to shift the injured. Yesterday, I raised the issue in the parliament but the government has done nothing so far," he said.

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AFGHANISTAN: WITNESSES SAY 70+ CIVILIANS KILLED IN AIR STRIKE

(AGI) - Kabul, 1 Sept - Over 70 civilians have reportedly been killed in an air strike by international forces in the Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. Reuters received reports of this from a number of residents in Sangin, the district where the bloodshed allegedly occurred. At the moment the news has not yet been confirmed by the Afghan government, which last week threatened to reconsider the role of foreign troops after another air strike on 22 August, killed 90 civilians, including over 50 children. The command of the US-led contingent has not commented on the charges but said that last week in the Helmand province 220 suspected Taliban fighters had been killed. In Kabul, hundreds of Afghans have begun protesting in the streets against he death of four civilians, including two very young children, which happened this morning during an operation by foreign troops in the suburbs of the eastern part of the capital. This, at least, was claimed by the demonstrators, who showed journalists the bodies of two of the young children, saying that in an attack on a house in the Hoodkhail village a man and a woman also lost their lives. A witness, Mohammad Naweed, said that the international troops took the three men from the house after having blown up a bomb to open a passageway. It is not clear whether the woman killed was the mother of the two young boys. The commander of the ISAF contingent said that he did not have any reports on "our soldiers' involvement in this operation."

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By Amir Shah, The Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan - Foreign and Afghan forces killed five children in two separate incidents Monday, further inflaming tensions in the country over the killings of civilians by troops from the U.S. and other countries.

NATO said it accidentally killed three children in an artillery strike in eastern Afghanistan. It said NATO forces fired the rounds after insurgents attacked its patrol in Gayan district of Paktika province and one of the rounds hit a house, killing three children and injuring seven civilians.

In a separate incident, foreign and Afghan forces killed a man and his two children and during a raid near Kabul, police and witnesses said. Angry men gathered at the victims' house in the Utkheil area east of the capital, where the three bodies were displayed inside a mud-walled compound. The man's wife was wounded in the operation, said Yahya Khan, a cousin.

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www.chinaview.cn 2008-08-23

KABUL, Aug. 22 (Xinhua) -- An airstrike of the U.S.-led Coalition forces Friday in Sindand district of Heart province in western Afghanistan killed 76 civilians including women and children, the Afghan interior ministry said.

The ministry said in a statement that it has started investigation into the huge civilian casualties caused by international forces' air bombing.

The government-run RTA television quoted a member of parliament said there were up to 80 civilians, majority of whom are women and children, died in the Coalition airstrike.

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News CENTRAL/S. ASIA

US raid 'killed Afghan civilians'

Karzai said that attacks by foreign forces had only succeeded in killing civilians [EPA]

At least 20 civilians have been killed in an air attack by US-led troops in Afghanistan's Laghman province, according to Afghan officials.

The official disputed a statement by US military forces on Thursday that said more than 30 fighters were killed in the attack, which took place a day earlier.

A US-military spokesman said he had no knowledge of the non-combatant deaths.

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Related
British troops kill Afghan civilians


Independent.co.uk

In Lashkar Gah, the majority of female prisoners are serving 20-year sentences for being forced to have sex. Terri Judd visited them and heard their extraordinary stories

Monday, 18 August 2008

Beneath the anonymity of the sky-blue burqa, Saliha's slender frame and voice betray her young age.Asked why she was serving seven years in jail alongside hardened insurgents and criminals, the 15-year-old giggled and buried her head in her friend's shoulder.

"She is shy," apologised fellow inmate Zirdana, explaining that the teenager had been married at a young age to an abusive husband and ran away with a boy from her neighbourhood.

Asked whether she had loved the boy, Saliha squirmed with childish embarrassment as her friend replied: "Yes."

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Added: Aug 11 2008

Afghan, U.S. forces kill 25 Taliban, 8 civilians

1 hour, 13 minutes ago

Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces killed 25 Taliban insurgents and eight civilians after an ambush in southern Afghanistan, the U.S. military said on Monday.

The issue of civilian casualties has led to a rift between Afghanistan and its Western allies with President Hamid Karzai saying on Sunday that foreign airstrikes had only succeeded in killing ordinary Afghans and would not defeat the insurgency.

The Taliban launched multiple ambushes on a patrol in the Khas Uruzgan district of Uruzgan province on Sunday, the U.S. military said in a statement.

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