Sunday, January 25, 2009

Afghans Protest Over Civilian Deaths

This article discusses how thousands of Afghans recently protested the killings of innocent civilians. The accidental killings of Afghan civilians has been a major cause for the disapproval of the Karzai government and the foreign troops backing it. The operation causing the latest controversy happened this week in eastern Laghman province. The U.S. military said on Saturday that troops, backed by air support, had killed 15 militants in an overnight operation.
Assadullah Wafa, a Karzai adviser investigating the deaths, said on Sunday that "16 civilians, many of them children and women, were killed" in the operation. A spokesman for the U.S. military said it planned to jointly investigate the incident with the Afghan government this week. Malik Hazrat, one of the protest leaders said, "If the foreign troops do not put an end to their operations, we will launch jihad." This is a complicated situation on one hand innocent civilians are being killed and on the other a large number of dangerous terrorists are still intermingled with the general population making any kind of effort to bring them down that much more complicated.

By: Brian Meents

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/01/25/world/international-us-afghan-protest.html?hp

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