NATO strike kills civilians, Afghans say

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan government said Monday that 52 civilians, including women and children, died when a NATO rocket struck a village in southern Afghanistan last week - a report disputed by the international coalition.

The allegation was raised as the founder of the organization WikiLeaks claimed thousands of U.S. attacks could be investigated for evidence of war crimes, and a leading human-rights group said NATO has an “incoherent process” for dealing with civilian casualties.

Some of the more than 90,000 secret U.S. military documents on the Afghanistan war posted Sunday on the Web by WikiLeaks included unreported Afghan civilian killings. Most of the documents, covering a span between 2004 and 2009, are reports from field-level commanders.

President Hamid Karzai’s spokesman, Waheed Omar, said the Afghan government was “shocked” that such a large number of documents were leaked, but said most of the information wasn’t new. He said Afghan officials studying the papers were particularly interested in those describing events that resulted in civilian casualties.

A statement by Karzai’s office said an investigation by Afghan intelligence determined that a NATO rocket slammed into the village of Rigi in the Sangin district of Helmand province, one of the most violent areas of the country.

Karzai expressed his condolences in a telephone conversation with villagers and called on the U.S.-led alliance to make protection of civilians “their priority during their operations.”

The U.S.-led command said a joint NATO-Afghan investigation into the purported attack “has thus far revealed no evidence of civilians injured or killed.”

“Any speculation at this point of an alleged civilian casualty in Rigi village is completely unfounded,” said Rear Adm. Rick Smith, communications director the command. “We are conducting a thorough joint investigation with our Afghan partners and will report any and all findings when known.”

Investigators determined that NATO and Afghan troops came under attack Friday about six miles south of the village and responded with helicopter strikes, according to the statement.

“All fires were observed and accounted for and struck the intended target,” the statement said. “Coalition forces reported six insurgents killed in the strike, including a Taliban commander, a report verified by ground observation and intelligence sources.”

Last Saturday, a man named Abdul Ghafaar told The Associated Press he brought seven children to a hospital in Kandahar after getting caught in the crossfire in Sangin the day before. Another man, Marjan Agha, said villagers began walking with a white flag toward NATO forces but that shots rang out and two people were killed on the spot.

Rising public anger over civilian deaths and injuries led former NATO commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal to issue orders last year curbing the use of air power and heavy weapons if civilians are at risk.

The U.N. said those rules, which have been maintained by McChrystal’s successor, Gen. David Petraeus, helped reduce the percentage of civilian deaths attributed to the coalition and Afghan government forces by 30 percent last year from 2008. But troops have said the rules give the advantage to the Taliban and put U.S. and NATO lives at risk.

The United Nations said at least 2,412 civilians were killed in 2009 - the deadliest year since the organization began systematically collecting casualty data in 2007. The 2009 deaths represented a 14 percent jump over the previous year, the U.N. said.

But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the secret f iles show that U.S. reports use “self-exculpatory language, redefine civilian casualties as insurgent casualties,downplay the number of casualties.”

He said he believed thousands of U.S. attacks could be investigated for evidence of war crimes, although he acknowledged that such claims would have to be tested in court. He said in London that what’s been released so far has “only scratched the surface” and that about 15,000 files on Afghanistan are still being vetted by his organization.

The human-rights group Amnesty International said the leaked documents point to an “incoherent process of dealing with civilian casualties” and called on NATO to provide a “clear, unified system of accounting for civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Pakistan said Monday that the disclosure of the documents wouldn’t affect its relations with the U.S. or its role in the Afghan conflict.

U.K. newspaper The Guardian, after a review of the documents, reported that “Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighboring Pakistan and Iran are fueling the insurgency.”

“These things have been regurgitated from time to time by the media or by low level officials without any endorsement by the U.S. government,” Farhatullah Babar, the spokesman for Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari,said. “There is nothing much in this.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also denied that his country supports the Taliban in an interview aired Monday night by CBS.

The Obama administration said the secret documents don’t reflect Pakistan’s recent cooperation against militant networks on its side of the border with Afghanistan, butalso acknowledged that despite a $7.5 billion aid package, U.S. authorities aren’t fully satisfied with Pakistan’s response.

“Our criticism has been relayed both publicly and privately,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. “We will continue to do so in order to move this relationship forward.”

Pentagon spokesman Colonel David Lapan said Monday that the U.S. military is just starting to assess the significance of the leaked material.

“We’ve only seen a fraction of the documents that are purported to be out there,” he said. “Until we get a look at all of them, we can’t know exactly what the extent of the damage might be” to the safety of troops and information gathering.

Assange said the documents “don’t include top-secret papers” or most reports from U.S. special forces, the CIA or reports by coalition partners.

Information for this article was contributed by Deb Riechmann, Rahim Faiez, Anne Gearan, Lolita C. Baldor and Heidi Vogt of The Associated Press, and by Roger Runningen, James Rupert, Viola Gienger, Tony Capaccio, Ken Fireman, Jonathan Stearns, Eltaf Najafizada and Andrew Atkinson of Bloomberg News, and by Laura King of the Los Angeles Times.