US troops injured a new-born baby girl, her mother, a boy of six and three other Afghan civilians when they fired at vehicles that ignored orders to stop, local police said Tuesday.
Separately coalition soldiers killed five suspected militants as the US-led force pushed on with its biggest anti-insurgent operation this year in increasingly restive Afghanistan, the US military said.
The mother, baby and two other women were returning home from a clinic in the eastern province of Khost where she had just given birth late on Monday, police chief Mohammed Ayoob said.
US soldiers fired at the car when it did not halt, hitting the mother in the chest and leaving the other women with bullet wounds, Ayoob added.
The baby was hit in the forehead by shattered car glass, Khot province's public health director Amir Badshah Mangal said.
The mother and baby were taken to a local hospital in Khost city, he said.
"The mother is in a stable condition though she'd lost lot of blood - during the delivery and from the wounds she received later," he said. A second woman was also brought to the local hospital with bullet wounds and was in stable condition while the third women had minor injuries and was not taken to the hospital, Mangal said.
"They are our neighbours. The villagers are very angry about it," said witness Esmatullah. "This is not the first time that the US forces have attacked civilians. We're very angry."
On Tuesday, also in Khost, US soldiers fired at a lorry, which failed to halt at a checkpoint and injured the driver and six-year-old boy, Ayoob said.
The boy and the driver received bullet wounds and were sent to a coalition base in Khost for treatment.
The incidents came three days after coalition forces killed seven civilians during a gunbattle with suspected Taleban militants in the eastern province of Kunar.
Kunar is the scene of the coalition's "Operation Mountain Lion" in which hundreds of foreign troops backed by more than 1,000 Afghan soldiers have been hunting rebels since last Wednesday.
Five insurgents were killed by coalition forces in Kunar on Monday, the military said in a statement. "Coalition forces continued to improve security in Kunar Province late yesterday, killing five terrorists after a patrol spotted seven enemy fighters manoeuvring in the open west of Asadabad," it said.
Early on Tuesday a local police chief was wounded when Taleban fighters stormed his headquarters in southern Helmand province, sparking a fierce half-hour gunbattle, local officials said.
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