Afghan and US-led coalition forces killed 25 Taliban insurgents and eight civilians after an ambush in southern Afghanistan, the US 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 US military said in a statement. The militants "then fled into a neighbouring compound where they held 11 non-combatants hostage, including several children and an infant," it said.
The insurgents then fired on the coalition forces from the compound and the troops called in an airstrike, but the statement said they did not know there were civilians in the building.
International forces are permitted to call in airstrikes when they are under attack even if they cannot be 100-percent sure there are no civilians in the area and this is where most mistakes are made, Nato officials say.
"The Taliban uses innocent civilians' homes, taking them by force to attack Afghan and coalition forces," the US military quoted Uruzgan Police Chief Juma Gul as saying. A suicide car bomber targeting foreign troops killed three Afghan civilians and wounded 12 more on the outskirts of the capital, Kabul, on Monday, a private television station said.