Nato air strike, Afghan attack kill 41

A Nato air strike killed up to 27 Afghan civilians, including women and a child, sparking fresh anger from Kabul yesterday against US-led forces pressing a major offensive to defeat the Taliban.

In a further blow to efforts to quell the eight-year insurgency, a suicide bomber killed an influential Afghan leader and 13 other people in a relatively peaceful eastern province on the Pakistan border yesterday, police said.

Top US commander Stanley McChrystal, who has made winning Afghan hearts and minds the focus of plans to end the increasingly costly war, was forced into another apology over civilian deaths after the third incident in a week.

"We are extremely saddened by the tragic loss of innocent lives," he said. "I have made it clear to our forces that we are here to protect the Afghan people, and inadvertently killing or injuring civilians undermines their trust and confidence in our mission," General McChrystal added in a statement.

A statement from Afghan President Hamid Karzai said General McChrystal had visited him at his palace on Sunday to personally apologise for deaths.

General McChrystal and his superior, General David Petraeus, mapped out an offensive lasting 12-18 months that would strike beyond the current focus of operations in the southern province of Helmand.

But the third mistaken Nato air strike reported by Afghan officials in a week risked undermining the campaign's strategic goals.

The government said four women and a child were among the civilians killed in Gujran district of Daykundi province on Sunday when Nato forces mistook their convoy for Taliban militants.

A statement from the council of ministers, chaired by President Karzai, condemned the incident as "unjustifiable", saying that 27 people were killed and 12 wounded.

The air raid came days after a Nato rocket attack on a house killed at least nine Afghan civilians - for which General McChrystal also apologised.

Civilian casualties are a sensitive issue in Afghanistan, where Mr Karzai and his Western backers are trying to win a war of perceptions.

Last Thursday, a Nato bombing raid in the northern province of Kunduz killed seven Afghan policemen, according to hospital and government officials. On February 15, Nato acknowledged that five civilians were killed accidentally and two others wounded in an air strike in southern Afghanistan.

Mr Karzai used Saturday's opening session of Parliament to repeat his call for civilians to be protected as 15,000 Afghan, US and Nato troops press Operation Mushtarak (Together) in Helmand into a second week.The assault on the Marjah and Nad Ali areas in southern Afghanistan's poppy growing region is the first key test of a US surge that will boost the total number of foreign troops in Afghanistan to 150,000 by August.

But the enormity of the challenge in reversing the Taliban insurgency was underlined yesterday when a suicide bomber strapped with explosives walked up to a tribal gathering in the eastern province Nangarhar and killed 15 people, injuring a further 20.

Police spokesman Colonel Abdul Ghafour said the dead included influential tribal leader Mohammad Zaman Ghamsharik, a former jihadi commander during the fight to evict Soviet troops in the 1980s.