95 dead after Nato air strike

Western forces were engulfed in bitter controversy yesterday after Nato air strikes on two oil tankers hijacked by the Taliban in northern Afghanistan led to carnage with a fireball killing 95 people, dozens of them civilians.

Most of those who perished were burned to death. Nato initially insisted that all the dead were Taleban insurgents. Later, after angry protests from local residents and officials, they acknowledged there had been civilian deaths.

The injured were ferried by ambulances, taxis, tractors and carts to the central hospital in Kunduz. Sitting in a corridor as a stream of people were taken into adjoining wards, Ghulam Yahya wept: "My brother was burned when the aircraft bombed the fuel tankers, I don't know whether he is dead or alive".

The attack at the village of Haji Aman, around seven miles from Kunduz, could not have come at a more volatile time in Afghanistan, with intense anger over civilian casualties and an intensifying clash between President Hamid Karzai and Washington over the disputed national election. The incumbent President has repeatedly complained about civilian deaths from Nato air strikes.

The chain of events leading to the Kunduz bloodshed began with Taliban fighters hijacking two fuel trucks near a Nato base on Thursday night.

The truck drivers were said to have been beheaded at the roadside before the militants made off with the vehicles.

An unmanned drone aircraft was dispatched to track the vehicles. What happened subsequently is unclear.

The commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, last night contacted Mr Karzai to say that he was committed to investigating the incident.

Questions were being raised specifically over how what happened at Kunduz sits with orders issued by General McChrystal that air strikes should not be authorised unless it is first confirmed that there is no prospect of civilian casualties, or allied forces are in imminent danger. The directive is part of the General's new strategy of "protecting the people".

The killings and the subsequent row also take place against the backdrop of dwindling support for the Afghan war in Europe and America, with Gordon Brown forced yesterday to defend the continuing presence of British troops.

The deaths also came just 24 hours after the US defence secretary Robert Gates denied that the war in Afghanistan was "slipping through the administration's fingers".

He moreover dismissed suggestions that it was time to pull all US troops out of Afghanistan and fight the war only with air strikes and drones.

"The notion that you can conduct a purely counterterrorist kind of campaign, and do it from a distance, simply does not accord with reality," Mr Gates said.

As President Barack Obama reviews a report from General Stanley McChrystal, on recalibrating the war, he also knows that public support for it is diminishing rapidly. A CNN poll this week showed that 57 per cent of Americans are now opposed to the war.

The United Nations expressed its "deep concern" about what had happened. Peter Galbraith, the deputy head of the organisation's mission to Afghanistan, said: "Steps must also be taken to examine what happened and why an air strike was employed in circumstances where it was hard to determine with certainty that civilians were not present."

Two local MPs said feelings against foreign forces were running high in the area. "We are very upset; a lot of ordinary people have been killed," said Mohammed Amin Qaneh. "Why did they have to bomb the tankers? Does Nato put the price of oil higher than the price of blood? We want justice; we want those responsible punished."

Fellow parliamentarian Qaari Niamtullah continued: "Everyone is very angry and the Taliban will just exploit this to get support."

Local people said the hijackers had faced difficulty when they reached Kunduz river at the Haji Aman crossing, and asked villagers to help themselves to the diesel. This is when the bombing happened. According to German officials, the unmanned plane's cameras showed no presence of civilians.

Later yesterday a Nato spokesman, Brigadier-General Eric Tremblay, said: "It would appear that many civilian causalities are being evacuated and treated in the local hospitals. There is perhaps a direct link with the incident that has occurred around the two fuel trucks."

- THE INDEPENDENT