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US forces kill MPâ€™s relative in botched night raid

30 April 2010 02:41 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. American special forces have raided the home of a prominent Afghan woman MP, killing one of her relatives in an operation that provoked public protests yesterday, APA reports timesonline.co.uk website.

The incident occurred as a Pentagon report suggested that there was tenuous support for the Western-backed Afghan Government in a majority of the countryâ€™s most strategically important districts.

Safia Sidiqi, an MP in the eastern province of Nangahar, was not at home when Afghan and foreign forces raided her property on Wednesday night and abused her family, she said. Speaking from the funeral by phone, she told The Times that her nieceâ€™s husband, who lived in a neighbouring home, was killed after seizing a shotgun to confront what he thought were robbers entering his property.

A popular backlash against night-time property searches and claims that civilians have been mistakenly killed in such raids forced General Stanley McChrystal, the Nato commander, publicly to order last month that they be limited to actions of â€œlast resortâ€, although he refused requests from President Karzai to ban them outright.
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Scores of local people paraded the body of the dead man along a main road through the province yesterday chanting: â€œDeath to Americaâ€.

Nato said after the attack that an armed individual was killed after ignoring demands, made through an Afghan interpreter, to lower his weapon. The statement said that the joint Afghan-US operation was targeting â€œa Taleban facilitatorâ€. It did not mention the MP.

â€œThe Americans went to my house. It was not a mistake, they knew it was my house. They killed my relative,â€ Ms Sidiqi said. â€œThere were more than 100 soldiers and they completely destroyed my home and my neighbourâ€™s home. These actions are creating the distance that exists between the Afghan Government and the people.â€ The dead man left five children. â€œThe Americans have created five more enemies,â€ she added.

Ms Sidiqi said that US forces were being fed false intelligence by local spies. â€œMost of the spies work with the Americans, hate America and try to give a bad name to the Americans in order to make the Afghan people hate them,â€ she said.

US commanders maintain that the raids are a legitimate military tool that is steadily eroding Taleban leadership structures. Colonel Abdul Ghafur, a spokesman for the Afghan police in Nangahar, said that a police investigation had been launched into the incident. â€œWe canâ€™t say whether the man killed was an insurgent or not,â€ he said.

The latest public relations trial for Nato came as a detailed report released by the Pentagon suggested that there have been some military gains by Western forces against the Taleban but that the Afghan Government enjoys tenuous support in key areas of the country.

â€¢ Embattled French troops mistakenly killed four Afghan civilians and seriously wounded one during a clash with insurgents in the Tagab Valley, east of Kabul.