KABUL, Afghanistan—Furious anti-American demonstrators poured into the streets of a northern city on Wednesday, shouting out objections to an overnight US-led military raid that killed four people, including two women. Subsequent clashes with security forces trying to quell the demonstration killed an additional 12 people, provincial officials said.
President Hamid Karzai issued a strongly worded statement condemning the raid on the outskirts of Taloqan, the capital of Taher province, and dismissing Nato’s contention that the four people killed in it were all armed insurgents. The raid and its explosive aftermath pointed up the striking degree of discord between Nato and ordinary Afghans over nighttime operations aimed at capturing or killing insurgent figures.
Many people here are skeptical of Western military claims that the targets are carefully vetted, and believe in any case that such home invasions carry too great a risk of harming or killing innocent people in the confusion of nighttime.
They particularly fear that US forces, flush with success over the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani garrison city, will increasingly rely on the tactic of swooping down in darkness on residential compounds.
This marked the third instance this month of a nighttime raid that Nato was forced either to apologize for or to pledge to investigate. A spokesman for the coalition said the circumstances of the strike in Taloqan were being examined, but the Western military stood by its claim that those killed were combatants.
Within hours of the deaths, up to 1,500 protesters poured into the streets, clashing with Afghan police and trying to overrun a Nato outpost manned by German troops.
In addition to at least a dozen dead, about 50 people were hurt in the unrest, provincial officials said.
In what has become a common pattern in such incidents, local officials claimed they were unaware of the planned raid, while Nato said the governor’s office was told ahead of time of the coalition’s intentions.
“Nato’s reasons for conducting this operation were not persuasive for me,” said Abdul Jabar Taqwa, the Takhar governor. He added that “we have not been informed about the operation” beforehand.
Nato said in a statement that the two women killed were brandishing weapons—a claim that many protesters said they flatly disbelieved.
Although women are occasionally recruited as suicide bombers because of their ability to approach sensitive military and government buildings clad in all-covering burkas, there are very few documented instances of adult females—normally kept secluded in conservative tribal areas—actively fighting alongside male insurgents.
Western military officials said the intended target of the raid was a figure in the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a violent insurgent group that has been making increasing inroads in the once-quiet north.
Karzai’s statement included “heartfelt condolences” to the families of those killed and demanded “clarification” from Nato’s International Security Assistance Force.
The president also noted that in the past he had called repeatedly on Nato to refrain from nighttime strikes, and insisted that any raids on residential compounds should involve only Afghan forces.
Even so, many of the protesters vented anger at their president as well as the Western military, shouting anti-Karzai slogans along with anti-American ones.
The clash comes amid a surge in violence that usually accompanies the advent of warmer weather and the start of the “fighting season.” Nato said a service member died Wednesday as a result of an insurgent attack in southern Afghanistan, but gave no further details, including nationality. Two days earlier, four Americans were killed by a roadside bomb in the south.
