Afghan civilian deaths: Who is to blame?

That, they say, is when the bombs fell.

Nine-year-old Nazbibi, whose large brown eyes were half hidden by swollen eyelids with eyelashes burned away, remembered falling asleep with her mother and 10-year-old sister by her side.

"I heard a big boom, and I was buried except for my head," she said. "Everything collapsed -- the roof was on me, and there were flames. I was so frightened."

Her sister, Gulbuddin, was killed. Her mother, Sanam, suffered burns but survived, although the night's events so unhinged her that she apparently suffered a mental collapse.

Because of the seriousness of their condition, the girls were eventually brought to the country's best burn treatment center, at the regional hospital in Herat, about 150 miles north of Farah City.

Marie-Jose Brunel, a nurse working for a French humanitarian group that helps run the unit, grimaced when asked if they would live. She thought yes, but wasn't sure.

Nurses and doctors said Nazbibi's father, Saeed Malham, rarely left her bedside. Like many of the village's men, he works as a laborer across the border in Iran, and did not learn of the catastrophe that had befallen his family until two days later.

"When they told me what had happened, I fainted under a tree," he said. Then he rushed home, returning to a village marked by destroyed homes and fresh graves.

The father of the other three girls in the burn unit, Saeed Barakat, was also separated from his wife and children at the time of the bombardment. He had gone to the mosque in the early evening, and then to the home of an elder married daughter to spend the night.

When the alarm was raised, he hurried to the compound where his family had been sleeping. There he encountered a nightmarish landscape of blood-covered rubble and severed limbs. A hand was found in a nearby tree. Only seven of more than 70 people inside were alive, according to Barakat and others interviewed.

Echoing sentiments that would be expressed in the following days by many other villagers, Barakat aimed his bafflement and fury squarely at the U.S. military.

"We blame America," he said. "With all their technology, they don't determine who is a fighter and who is an innocent. Now my house is gone. My wife is dead. My children are burned."

But the other father, Malham, was angrier at the Taliban.

"I say this to them," he said in a low voice, glancing over to make sure he was not frightening his daughter with the vehemence of his tone. "May God bring their houses down on their heads."