Afghan Civilians

Reporting from Lake Tapps, Wash., and Norwood, Ohio For those who grew up with him, Robert Bales seemed to have a place reserved on easy street. Captain of the football team and president of the sophomore class at his Ohio high school, Bales after just three years of college had an oceanfront condo in Florida. He was also pulling in more than $100,000 a year as a financial advisor. His investment work ran into trouble, though, and when the Sept. 11 attacks came, Bales felt what friends said was an irresistible call.

There are days here, in these war-haunted times, when it seems that death might come in any guise, and from any direction. From a bomb buried in the earth. From the sky. From a rusted motorbike haphazardly parked in a busy marketplace, with no one paying it and its deadly package any notice. Or from a soldier who breaks down doors in the dead of night, with murder in mind. Despite a shared sorrow and bewilderment, a jarring disparity has emerged in the way Americans and Afghans view the killings of 16 villagers in rural Kandahar province, allegedly at the hands of a lone U.S. Army staff sergeant named Robert Bales.

Relations between Afghanistan and the United States suffered another stunning setback Sunday when a rogue American soldier walked off his base in southern Afghanistan and went on a shooting spree that left 16 Afghan civilians dead, according to American and Afghan officials. The attacks - in which nearly all of the victims were women and children killed while they were sleeping - come less than a month after American military personnel were found to have burned Korans at Bagram air base, and two months after a video surfaced showing four U.S. Marines urinating on the corpses of three Taliban fighters.

Responding to reports that a U.S. serviceman killed 16 Afghan civilians in a shooting rampage in a village near Kandahar, President Obama called Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday to express his “shock and sadness.” Obama said in a statement that he was “deeply saddened by the reported killing and wounding of Afghan civilians.” “I offer my condolences to the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives, and to the...

The clusters of bodies heaped in a rural Kandahar hamlet have given rise to the inevitable question: Are U.S.-Afghan relations now too tainted for the nations to move ahead as allies in this war? On Sunday, a lone American serviceman slipped away from his base in southern Afghanistan before dawn and went on a methodical house-to-house shooting spree in a nearby scatter of Afghan homes, killing 16 people as they slept, nearly all of them women and children, according to Afghan officials who visited the scene.

An Army sergeant so sharp he looked like a recruiting poster — who had skulls tattooed on his leg said to represent the people he'd killed in Iraq — was convicted of three counts of premeditated murder Thursday in the most gruesome war crimes case to emerge from the war in Afghanistan. Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, 26, was also found guilty of keeping decomposing fingers, leg bones and a tooth as trophies from corpses, and organizing the gang beating of a fellow soldier he feared would report the rampant hashish use in what Army officials say was an "out of control" platoon.

A roadside bomb killed 22 people, many of them women and children, crammed into a minivan in western Afghanistan on Thursday, a grim reminder of the toll that the 10-year war against Taliban insurgents takes on civilians. The blast was one of two that struck civilians in the Owbeh district of the western province of Herat on Thursday morning. A separate roadside bomb killed an Afghan woman and injured seven people in a small Mazda truck, said Mohayuddin Noory, a spokesman for the Herat governor's office.

A roadside bomb killed 22 people - many of them women and children - crammed into a minivan in western Afghanistan on Thursday, a grim reminder of the toll that the 10-year war against Taliban insurgents takes on Afghan civilians. FOR THE RECORD: Afghanistan provinces: An earlier version of this online article misidentified the names of two Afghanistan provinces. Gardez is the capital of Afghanistan's Paktia province, not Paktika, and the Obeh district is in the province of Herat, not Heart.

The Afghan war claimed 15% more civilian lives in the first half of this year than in the same period a year ago, the United Nations said in a report Thursday that painted a picture of deteriorating safety across the country. The grim figures contrast with the relatively upbeat security assessments presented recently by senior U.S. military officials as an American troop drawdown gets underway. The U.N. said it had documented 1,462 civilian deaths from January to June, four-fifths of them caused by insurgents.

Buried bombs killed 30 Afghans in a 48-hour span, in the latest grim illustration of the dangers faced by civilians as the season's fighting heats up. Insurgents routinely seed roads and pathways with IEDs, or improvised explosive devices — their favored weapon against Western troops. But most often, those killed and injured by the hidden bombs are civilians. The latest casualties came Saturday in Zabul province, in southern Afghanistan, when a van filled with travelers struck a roadside bomb.