Afghanistan: NATO Confesses Killing of Children

On Monday the NATO led forces in Afghanistan said that Afghan children were mistakenly killed in an air strike which has infuriated the Afghan government as well. NATO said further that these killing might be linked to an anti-insurgent operation being carried out in the area. On Wednesday, the air strike took place in the village of Giawa, situated in the eastern Kaspia province, and similar bombings, in which the death toll has always evoked tensions between the Afghan government and NATO forces, due to the increasing number of civilian casualties in the last five years.

The spokesman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (ISAF), Brigadier General, Carsten Jacobson said that in the Najrab district of Kaspia, children were killed as NATO ground forces and air strikes killed the insurgents in an open area. Jacobson told reporters, that at this point in their assessment, they can neither conform it nor deny, with sufficient assurance of any link to the engagement. However, the killing of children in any armed conflict is indeed a tragedy.

The officials of the Afghan government showed some gory photographs of eight dead boys aged between six to fourteen, while one was eighteen years old. They said that these innocent boys were twice bombed while herding sheep in freezing cold and had lit a fire to keep them warm. A member of the parliament, Muhammad Tahir Safi, was appointed by President Hamid Karzai to investigate the matter and said that the rights of these children were gravely violated. Did the dead children also have rights to live as a part of the world community?

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Tags: afghanistan, Air Strike, children, Killings, nato