KABUL, AFGHANISTAN, AND ISTANBUL, TURKEY — The U.S. military acknowledged Saturday that 37 civilians were killed and 35 injured during fighting last week in Kandahar province between insurgents and coalition forces.
Although the American statement stopped short of taking direct blame for civilian casualties in a southern province that is one of the country's most active battlefields, it demonstrated an unusually swift public response to claims of mass casualties made by Afghan officials.
The finding came just three days after provincial officials and the Afghan president's office asserted that three dozen people had died in an errant U.S. airstrike on a wedding party in a village outside the city of Kandahar.
The city, the main population center in Afghanistan's south, was the onetime stronghold of the Taliban. Militants and coalition forces clash almost daily in surrounding Kandahar province, which is a center of Afghanistan's drug trade.
The new head of the U.S. Central Command, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, responsible for American forces across the Middle East, was in Afghanistan last week to look at ways to revamp the Western military strategy in the wake of a dramatic resurgence by Taliban-led militants over the last two years. During his visit, Afghan defense officials told him that civilian casualties were sharply eroding public support for the presence of foreign forces.
The deaths and injuries of noncombatants also have become an extremely sensitive issue between the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai and Western forces.
On Wednesday, hours after Sen. Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election, Karzai used what was to have been a congratulatory news conference to plead with the president-elect for an end to civilian fatalities.
The investigation of the deaths in Wech Bagtu village was carried out by Afghan officials, the Afghan army and the U.S.-led coalition, the American military said in the statement. That is a departure from the days when U.S. officials were sometimes reluctant to involve Afghan authorities in such inquiries, though such cooperation has become more common.
In releasing the findings, the U.S. military emphasized that during the battle Monday militants used villagers' homes for cover.
"Village elders told the joint investigation team that insurgents who were not from their village . . . fired at [Afghan] and coalition forces," the statement said. Residents were prevented from leaving the area during the battle, it said.
