US Forces Kill 14 Year Old Afghani Girl

If there's one thing that is consistently frustrating about the US military, it's the fact that every time they kill civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan they quickly label them suspected terrorists or insurgents in order to provide themselves cover for what they know will be scathing rebukes and rarely do they ever admit that those characterizations are fabrications even when they're faced with evidence to the contrary.

...U.S.-led forces killed at least four people in the southeastern province of Khost where the Taliban and their Islamic allies are highly active.

But there were conflicting accounts about who was killed in the pre-dawn raid in Dornami village.

Residents say the U.S.-led force, backed by Afghan militias, broke into a house, drawing fire from the occupants who thought they were thieves. Four people were killed and seven wounded -- all of them civilians, they said.

The U.S.-led coalition said in a statement the raid killed five people -- four suspected terrorists and a young girl. The troops requested the surrender of those in the compound.

HUMAN SHIELDS

"The suspected terrorists refused to comply with verbal warnings and began firing," the statement said.

"Enemies of the Afghan government continue to place women and children in harm's way by conducting illegal activities within common living areas, placing entire families at risk," the statement said.

See how easy it is for the US military to avoid taking responsibility? All they have to do is claim that these so-called 'suspected terrorists' are using children as human shields and they do that in practically every single case like this if they think they can get away with it. It certainly isn't unreasonable to believe that the residents of this home really did think thieves or worse were at their door.

The BBC has more:

Security forces had "credible information" that the place was a refuge for "terrorist facilitators who posed a serious threat to peace and stability in Afghanistan," coalition spokesman Col Thomas Collins said

An eight-year-old girl was also wounded during the raid, the coalition said

Local people contacted by the BBC said the dead men and dead girl were all members of the same extended family.

They said one of them was a policemen and that none of them had links with the Taleban or Al Qaeda.

Surviving family members said they had been attacked by the Taleban before.

They said that when they realised their house was surrounded, some of them went outside with their rifles and came under fire from the coalition troops.

The other news coming out of Afghanistan today is the suicide bombing aimed at Mohammad Daud in Helmand, whom the Karzai government recently sacked as governor at the behest of the CIA much to the dismay of the Brits who supported him.

Four police, two army soldiers and two civilians were killed in the attack in Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital of Helmand, a Taliban stronghold and the main drug-producing region of the world's leading heroin producer.

"It was a suicide attack and the target was the governor," Helmand police chief Mohammad Nabi Mullahkhail said.

Daud survived and as The Independent reports, he has been the target of several assassination attempts by the Taleban.

It seems that even though the brutal winter season is almost upon Afghanistan which typically causes a slowdown of violence in the country, that trend may not hold this year with increased suicide bombings and fighters increasingly arriving in the country from their training bases in Pakistan.

Update: During question period today, Harper accused the BQ's Gilles Duceppe of 'playing games on the backs of our soldiers' because Duceppe has threatened to bring down the government over the Afghan mission. If there's anyone who has 'played games' at the expense of the troops, it's the Harper government with its spring motion to extend the mission without any study or inquiry whatsoever.