KABUL, Afghanistan — The U.S. military acknowledged Saturday that 37 civilians were killed and 35 injured during fighting last week in Kandahar province between insurgents and coalition forces.
Although the American statement stopped short of taking direct blame for civilian casualties in a southern province that is one of the country’s most active battlefields, it represented an unusually swift public response to claims of mass casualties made by Afghan officials.
The finding came just three days after provincial officials and the Afghan president’s office asserted that three dozen people had died in an errant U.S. airstrike on a wedding party in a village outside the city of Kandahar.
The city, the main population center in Afghanistan’s south, was the one-time stronghold of the Taliban. Militants and coalition forces clash almost daily in the province, also known as Kandahar, which is a center of Afghanistan’s drug trade.
The investigation into the deaths in Wach Baghtu village in Kandahar province was carried out jointly by Afghan government officials, the Afghan army and the U.S.-led coalition, the American military said in a statement. That represents a departure from practice in past years, when American officials were sometimes reluctant to involve Afghan authorities in such probes, although such cooperation has become more common of late.
In releasing the findings, the U.S. military stressed that villagers’ homes were used for cover during a firefight between militants and coalition forces Monday.
The military did not directly acknowledge having inadvertently bombed the wedding party in question but said coalition forces used “close air support to suppress enemy fire.”
Compensation was paid to the families of the dead and injured, the military said without providing details.
