Civilians

India has told Sri Lanka that military operations against Tamil rebels last week in which civilians were killed or wounded could hinder negotiations to end the island's ethnic conflict, officials said Sunday. Jyotindra Dixit, India's high commissioner in Colombo, said he told President Junius K. Jayewardene at a meeting Saturday night that military activity against civilians would not help plans under negotiation.

Re "Heady U.S. Goals for Iraq Fall by Wayside," Sept. 27: With the Bush administration's motto "Stay the Course," remember the Titanic? Apparently not! Roy Richardson Huntington Beach I was unsure whether to put the "international terrorist" bumper sticker bearing George W. Bush's portrait on my car, until I had seen one too many photos of U.S. warplanes pounding an Iraqi city. Our armed forces are conducting this activity in the country they "conquered" more than 18 months ago. Much to the chagrin of the entire civilized world, the U.S. continues to apply jet fighter-bombers to urban targets with the consequent "collateral damage" of eviscerated civilians.

In long, weary lines, more than 23,000 civilians trekked deeper into Thailand on Friday, away from the Cambodian resistance stronghold at Ampil where a major Vietnamese assault is expected within days. Describing Vietnamese preparations, a Thai general said the attack is shaping up to be the biggest clash in the six years since Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia.

A NATO operation killed six civilians, including a woman and a young girl, in a mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan, villagers and officials said. But the military alliance said its force killed four to eight militants. The governor of Kunar province, Sayed Fazelullah Wahidi, said four men also died in the airstrikes. Reports indicated there were foreign militants around the village, but Wahidi said all the dead were civilians. NATO's International Security Assistance Force said "four to eight enemy fighters" were killed and intelligence intercepts indicated "the hostile intent of the enemy to attack ISAF posts."

From our car keys to our hearts, we all lose things. But this universal fact of life has never had the kind of offbeat scrutiny it receives from the Civilians in "Gone Missing," the hit collaborative performance piece that began its Southland tour Wednesday at UC Santa Barbara's Campbell Hall. The Civilians' unique brand of experience-based musical theater begins with real-life stories -- in this case, interviews with New Yorkers about the loss of their most treasured objects.

The first phase of our military involvement in Afghanistan had a clear-cut purpose: toppling the Taliban. But with that mission accomplished, American-led military operations in Afghanistan are now doing more harm than good. First, there's the issue of civilian casualties. Speaking to reporters at a base north of Kabul on July 15, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz voiced his regrets about the killing of 48 civilians--including a number of children--in a July 1 U.S. air attack on a village in the Deh Rawod district of Uruzgan province.

Killings of civilians by the notorious militia led by the fugitive Joseph Kony have dropped dramatically in the last three years, according to a new analysis that tracks reports on the group. The Lord's Resistance Army has terrorized central Africa for years, eluding international efforts to halt its brutal campaign of mutilations, abductions and slayings. Kony himself is wanted for a long list of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder and forcing children to fight.

A top German official resigned Friday after admitting that the government had withheld information about Afghan civilian casualties after a NATO airstrike. Labor Minister Franz Josef Jung, who until recently was Germany's defense minister, said he took "political responsibility for the internal communication policy" of his former ministry. His departure came just one day after the resignation of Wolfgang Schneiderhan, the army's chief of staff, and Peter Wichert, deputy defense minister, over the German-ordered airstrike, the deadliest operation involving German troops since World War II. The three resignations followed the leaking of politically embarrassing video footage of the airstrike and military police reports of the September incident in which 142 insurgents and civilians died.

Angry demonstrations erupted in eastern Afghanistan on Friday as villagers accused Western troops of killing up to 11 civilians in an overnight raid. NATO said that eight people were killed, but that all were insurgents. The scenario was a familiar one: Coalition and Afghan forces sweep down on a compound in the dead of night in search of Taliban operatives. A firefight breaks out, and the identities of the dead are then furiously contested. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's International Security Assistance Force said that the eight men killed in the confrontation in the Surkhrod district of Nangarhar province included a Taliban subcommander, and that a weapons cache was recovered at the scene.