Many Afghans dead after US bombings

Hurriyet Daily News with wires

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As the U.S. military sent a brigadier general to the region for investigation, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he would raise the issue in talks with President Barack Obama, the president's office said. "In general 100 people have been killed in the two villages," provincial police chief Abdul Ghafar Watandar told Agence France-Presse, correcting information he gave earlier indicating that "more than 100 non-combatants" had been killed.

"Now we are trying to find out what number of them are combatants and what number are civilians," he said. Watandar said earlier that "the number of civilians killed in this operation is way more than 30, but we do not have an exact figure at this stage."

A team from the International Committee of the Red Cross traveled to Bala Baluk district in Farah on Tuesday, where the officials saw "dozens of bodies in each of the two locations that we went to," spokeswoman Jessica Barry told The Associated Press.

If confirmed, the figure of 30 would one of the highest civilian death tolls in airstrikes by foreign forces who invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to oust the extremist Taliban regime and then remained to root out militant insurgents. An Afghan commission previously found that an August 2008 operation by U.S. forces killed 90 civilians in Azizabad, a finding backed by the U.N.