US blitz kills 100 Afghans

?During the aerial bombardment and ground operations, more than 100 people have died,? western Afghanistan police spokesman Abdul Rauf Ahmadi told AFP yesterday, basing his information on reports from police, the Red Cross and locals. ?Twenty-five to 30 of them are Taleban, including from Chechnya and Pakistan, and the rest are civilians including children, women and elderly people,? he said. If confirmed, those even higher figures could make the incident the single deadliest for Afghan civilians since the campaign to topple the Taleban in 2001. Afghan President Hamid Karzai called the civilian deaths ?unjustifiable and unacceptable.? He sent a joint Afghan-US delegation to investigate. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the Obama administration ?deeply, deeply? regretted the loss of innocent lives as a result of the US bombing and would undertake a full review of the incident. The bombings that lasted around an hour killed 50 members of Bibi?s neighbor Sayed Azam?s extended family, Azam said. US forces in Afghanistan acknowledge they were involved in fighting and airstrikes in the province?s Bala Boluk district, which began on Monday and continued into Tuesday after Taleban militants seized a village and clashed with Afghan troops. Survivors said they were frustrated that Afghan and foreign teams that visited the village had not offered any help. Taleban spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi confirmed there had been fighting and said all casualties from airstrikes were civilians. ?The government and foreign troops must compensate the affected people, we don?t want apologies any more,? he said by telephone from an undisclosed location; Kazinform cites Arab News. See www.arabnews.com for full version.