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Carnage at Bombed Afghan Village
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Oct 12 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Body parts, household belongings and at least one unexploded bomb litter the countryside around an Afghan village destroyed in a U.S. attack, a Taliban official who said he had witnessed the devastation told news agencies Friday.
Sher Sha Hamdard, an official with the Taliban's Bakhter news agency in the eastern city of Jalalabad, said the stench of corpses and rotting livestock around the village of Kadam was almost unbearable.
"I hate to say this, but I'm glad I saw these things because the world has to know what the Americans have done here," he told Agence France-Presse (AFP) after his visit to the village, some 24 miles west of Jalalabad, on Friday.
The veracity of his accounts could not be verified by Western sources, but Hamdard said a television crew had accompanied him from the Arab news station Al-Jazeera on the trip, which included a two-hour hike across difficult mountain terrain.
The Taliban also invited other international television stations to visit the scene, AFP said.
Hamdard said the village was totally destroyed, and a nearby cave system had collapsed, trapping an unknown number of people who were believed to have taken shelter there when the U.S. attack began overnight Wednesday.
Taliban troops were sifting through the rubble in search of survivors, but Hamdard said hopes of finding any seemed lost.
Dazed and confused villagers, including several with horrific injuries, were taking shelter where they could. The village has no clean water.
"I wish I had also died because now I have no one," the Taliban official quoted Laljan, a wounded villager, as saying.
Laljan, who goes by only one name, lost 11 members of his extended family in the attack.
Other survivors told similar stories of entire families being wiped out in the bombardment, which the U.S. insists is only targeting alleged terrorist training camps of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network.
Residents said they could not understand why a peaceful, impoverished village had been bombed.
The devastation contradicts U.S. claims that it is not targeting Afghani civilians, but rather Osama bin Laden and his network.
Earlier this week, reports of an additional 400 Afghan civilians being killed as a direct result of the U.S. strikes were reported by news agencies.
Another Taliban source in the city said four bombs had been dropped in the area overnight, and the injured villagers had reported that more than 60 homes had been destroyed.
Many people had taken refuge in nearby caves, which were also targeted. Hundreds of heads of livestock, the most valuable assets of many Afghan families, had also been killed.
"There used to be an old training camp there but since those people heard that the Americans were going to bomb they all left," Hamdard said, adding that the dead were "mostly women, children and the elderly because many of the men were away."
Hamdard said an unexploded bomb, measuring five feet long, was lying near the remains of the village.
"So far 160 bodies have been recovered, mostly women and children," a spokesman for Afghanistan's ruling militia told the Afghan Islamic Press earlier on Thursday.
"This is not an exaggeration. More bodies are still being recovered."
The Taliban claim at least 200 people died in the attack, mainly women, children and the elderly because the men were away on the frontlines fighting anti-Taliban opposition forces.
Jalalabad and the surrounding areas has been the target of repeated U.S. attacks since air strikes began Sunday.
The Taliban's education minister, Amir Khan Mutaqqi, said 10 members of the same family were killed in a separate attack when a stray U.S. missile struck their home near the government's customs house, about 2.4 miles east of the nation's capital Kabul.
"All 10 members of a family, including children and women, were martyred," Mutaqqi said.
The Pakistan-based AIP, which is well connected to the Taliban, but a generally reliable source of information about events in Afghanistan, said 30 people were killed in the Taliban's southern stronghold of Kandahar and its surroundings.
Only five civilian deaths have been "independently" confirmed. Four Afghans who worked for a United Nations-backed mine clearing agency were killed when a U.S. missile hit their office in Kabul Monday night, while residents near Kabul airport said a 12-year-old girl died when a bomb fell on their village.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday dismissed Taliban claims that Washington was targeting civilians, and expressed regret for the loss of any innocent lives.
"Everyone in this country knows that the United States of America does not target civilians. We have not, we do not," he told reporters.
He said the Taliban "have made a practice and a livelihood" out of targeting civilians.
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