8 women die in Nato airstrike

6 US jets destroyed

A North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) airstrike killed eight women and girls who were out gathering firewood before dawn on Sunday in a remote region on the east of the country, Afghan officials said.

Nato forces at first said that about 45 insurgents and no civilians were killed in the attack but spokesman Jamie Graybeal stressed later that they took the charge of civilian deaths seriously and were investigating the allegations. He said, however, that initial reports showed only insurgents were killed in the airstrike.

Villagers from Laghman province’s Alingar district brought the bodies to the governor’s office in the provincial capital, said Sarhadi Zewak, a spokesman for the provincial government. “They were shouting ‘Death to America!’ They were condemning the attack,” Zewak said.

Seven injured females were brought to area hospitals for treatment, some of them as young as 10 years old, said provincial health director Latif Qayumi.

Airstrikes have been a particularly sensitive issue between the Afghan people — who said civilians often end up killed along with or instead of insurgents — and Nato forces who maintain that they are a key tactic for going after insurgent leaders.

6 die in ‘insider’ attacks

In another case of insider attack, four soldiers fighting with the Nato-led alliance were killed in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, the coalition said, bringing the total number of deaths this weekend caused by Afghans turning on their allies to six.

Four Nato-led troops were found dead and two wounded when a nearby response team arrived at the scene from a nearby checkpoint, a spokesman for the coalition said.
Meanwhile, after making an assesment of the damage to a military base where Britain’s Prince Harry was deployed, Nato spokesman said six US jets were destroyed and two others significantly damaged.  

Lieutenant Colonel Hagen Messer conceded that the scale of damage, carried out by more than a dozen attackers dressed in US uniforms and armed with guns, rockets and suicide vests who managed to storm the airfield, was unprecedented.

Three coalition refuelling stations were also destroyed and six aircraft hangars damaged in the assault at Camp Bastion in southern Helmand province, one of the toughest battlegrounds of the war, the US-led force said.