3 NATO Soldiers Killed by Roadside Bomb, 16 Afghani Civilians Killed in US Air Strike Including Women and Children, Pelosi Meets Karzai

Three more soldiers killed in Afghanistan, Pelosi meets Karzai

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 15:05:59 GMT

DPA, Kabul -

The speaker of the US House, Nancy Pelosi met Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Saturday in Kabul for talks on a strategic review of the US mission in Afghanistan, which is currently under way in Washington, presidential palace said. Three US-led soldiers - whose nationality was not immediately revealed - were meanwhile killed in a roadside bomb attack in southern Uruzgan province.

And hundreds of Afghans blocked a key road links Kabul city to south-eastern provinces to protest the killing and arrest of Afghan civilians by US forces.

In the meeting with Karzai in his fortified presidential place, Pelosi assured the president of continued US military and reconstruction commitment to war-wracked Afghanistan, Karzai's office said in a statement.

An Afghan team, led by Foreign Minister, Rangeen Dadfar Spanta, was due to fly to Washington Sunday to participate in an inter-agency discussion on the strategic review, a foreign ministry statement said.

Pelosi arrived on a two-day-trip in Afghanistan on Friday and held several meetings with Afghan and NATO military officials, a US military spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, three NATO occupation soldiers (NATO countries media refer to them as US-led coalition soldiers or international soldiers) were killed in a roadside bomb blast in southern Uruzgan, the US military said.

The nationalities of the soldiers wee not revealed. Most soldiers serving under the banner of coalition forces are from the US.

President Barack Obama announced the deployment of 17,000 extra US troops for Afghanistan last week. With the new additional troops, the US military will have more than 50,000 soldiers in the country, while there are also around 30,000 more forces sent to Afghanistan from 40 other nations.

Nearly 40 international military personnel, with most of them US service-members, have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year.

More than 290 NATO occupation soldiers were killed in conflict last year, which marked it the deadliest year for the international troops since the ouster of Taliban regime in late 2001.

In another incident, hundreds of Afghan villagers blocked a highway that links Kabul city to south-eastern province for hours on Saturday to protest the killing of one civilian and the arrest of four other villagers by US forces in central Logar province, police and witnesses said.

The demonstrators burned tyres on the road, some 35 kilometres south of Kabul, and paraded the body of the dead man, who they claimed was "an innocent school student", witness Abdul Karim said.

The men ended their demonstrations after the provincial governor promised them to secure the release of four men, arrested by the US forces, said Din Mohammad Darwish, spokesman for the provincial governor.

Civilian casualties at the hands of foreign forces have become a delicate issue in Afghanistan. The mounting killings have created a rift between the Afghan government and its international military allies.

The incident in Logar came four days after Afghan officials said that at least six Afghan women, two children and eight men were killed in a strike by the US military force in Gozara district of western Herat province.

The US military also confirmed that their investigation conducted jointly with Afghan army officials found that 13 civilians and three militants were killed in the incident.

"Coalition forces confirmed three militants and thirteen noncombatants were killed during a Coalition forces' operation near Gozara district," the military statement said.

"We expressed our deepest condolences to the survivors of the noncombatants who were killed during this operation, "Brigadier General Michael Ryan, a commander for US Forces-Afghanistan, was quoted in the statement as saying.

More than 2,100 civilians were among over 5,000 people killed (NATO forces first claim they are Taliban fighters but usually they turn to be Afghani civilians, as mentioned above) in conflict last year, according to a report by the UN office in Afghanistan.