AFGHANISTAN: Another six Afghan children have been killed in US air strikes, raising to 15 the number of children killed this week.
The admission by US military officials in Kabul yesterday came after the bodies of six children and two adults were found in the rubble of a mud compound obliterated by US forces on Friday.
Diplomats in Kabul said the announcement could exacerbate anti-US feelings in southern Afghanistan, already raised since nine children were killed in another bungled US air strike on Saturday.
A US military spokesman said the latest child casualties occurred during a raid on an arms store belonging to a warlord called Mullah Jalani, a well-known enemy of Afghanistan's precarious government.
Under pressure from local journalists, Lieut Col Bryan Hilferty added: "After we went in there, we discovered the next day, when we were trying to clear it, the bodies of two adults and six children under a collapsed wall."
Col Hilferty said it was not clear whether the wall had collapsed as a result of the initial US air strike, or during the explosions that followed when the arms dump ignited.
Col Hilferty expressed regret over the civilian deaths, but said that sometimes they were impossible to avoid.
"We try very hard not to kill anyone. We would prefer to capture the terrorists rather than kill them. But in this incident, if noncombatants surround themselves with thousands of weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition and howitzers and mortars in a compound known to be used by a terrorist, we are not completely responsible for the consequences."
Col Hilferty described Jalani as an "opportunistic terrorist" allied to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
He was not captured in the attack, though nine militiamen were arrested by US special forces.
Afghanistan's government and the UN both expressed concern over the disaster and the delay in announcing it.
"The first news this week was bad enough, the second is obviously tragic," said Mr Omar Samad, a spokesman for the foreign ministry.
"It shows the need for better co-ordination, and that we need to look at our intelligence-gathering process."
UN spokesman Mr Manoel de Almeida e Silva expressed "regret and concern" over the latest children's deaths, and called for a public investigation into the incident.
Western diplomats in Kabul said yesterday's announcement risked "massively" increasing popular support for the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, its traditional stronghold.
"Two years after the Taliban fell, many of these people have seen no benefits whatsoever," said one diplomat yesterday.
"They're still poor, they've still got major security issues, and now America is bombing them too; or at least, that's how it looks to them. The risk is they turn their allegiance elsewhere."
The US military did not volunteer news of either of the bungled strikes, and both were revealed by Col Hilferty under considerable pressure from journalists.
The US was criticised last year for delaying the announcement of its most disastrous air strike - on a wedding reception in southern Uruzgan province - until journalists had already learned of it.
A US spokesman then said 34 people were killed and 50 wounded, but that the coalition plane had come under fire. According to the government, 48 people were killed, over 100 were wounded, and the US fighter pilot had mistaken the guests' celebratory shots for hostile fire.