At least four Afghans including a policeman were killed when police fired on an angry crowd in Afghanistan's volatile south on Friday, police said, after protesters claimed Nato forces had killed a number of civilians overnight. Civilian casualties caused by Nato-led troops hunting Taliban fighters and other insurgents have long been a major source of friction between Kabul and its Western backers, occasionally spilling over into violence.
The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul said there had been an operation targeting insurgents overnight in the Qalad district of Zabul province, which neighbours violent Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban. "We have no reports about civilian casualties during this operation," a spokesman for ISAF in Kabul said.
Zabul police chief Mohammad Nabi Elhaam said angry residents took to the streets after they said three Afghan civilians had been killed during a "night raid" by ISAF troops. "A night raid by Nato forces killed three civilians and that provoked people to go out on the streets," Elhaam said.
Afghans have long complained about the use of such raids and air strikes by ISAF targeting insurgents who often hide among the civilian population. However, UN figures show that at least three-quarters of violent civilian deaths in Afghanistan are caused by insurgents, whose indiscriminate use of roadside bombs kills many innocent Afghans at the same time as being their most effective weapon against foreign and Afghan troops. Elhaam said insurgents had infiltrated the crowd of demonstrators in Qalad, which he numbered in the hundreds, and that they had provoked violence. Gunmen among the protesters killed a policeman trying to control the crowd, he said.
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