Afghan officials said yesterday that at least 17 civilians were killed in a US-led bombing raid in southern Afghanistan.
The victims were living in villages in the Baghran district of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, a Pashtun area where many had supported the Taliban regime.
Haji Mohammad Wali, a spokesman for the Helmand provincial authority, said the relatives of the dead had been pouring into local government offices.
"The people came crying, saying their relatives had died or were missing," he said. Their accounts suggested that mostly women and children had been killed.
US military officials based at Bagram, north of Kabul, said they had been conducting an operation along a mountain ridgeline in Helmand targeting suspected Taliban fighters. Colonel Roger King, a US military spokesman, said he had no information about civilian casualties.
If the account of civilian deaths proves accurate it would mark one of the most serious bombing errors by the US military in Afghanistan for several months.
Last July, 48 people were killed and more than 100 injured when a US gunship attacked a wedding party in Uruzgan province in central Afghanistan, the home of the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.
At the time the US military insisted its aircraft had come under fire and since then American soldiers patrolling in the Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan have faced growing resentment and guerrilla attacks.
US officials said the latest raids in Helmand began on Monday when ground troops saw 25 Taliban fighters taking up offensive positions. The men were armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
The troops called in B52 and B1 bombers which targeted the ridgeline for eight hours with 2,000-pound JDAM "smart" bombs. A Danish F-16 was also involved in the raid, dropping a 500-pound GBU-12 bomb.
On Tuesday after the bombing, US troops arrested 12 armed men believed to be Taliban suspects near the village of Lejay in the Baghran valley, Col King said. He said the operation, code-named Eagle Fury, was still under way.
"The intensity to a certain extent depends upon on the enemy," he said. "If the enemy presents itself in a posture to attack us, then we will engage them."
Jilani Khan, who runs a money-changing business in Baghran, near the site of the bombing, said US and Afghan soldiers had cordoned off the area. He said American soldiers had told villagers they were hunting for Mullah Omar.
In Helmand, Mr Wali said he had passed the accounts of civilian deaths to the central government in Kabul. There had been more bombing in the area on Tuesday night, he said, but it was unclear if there had been more civilian deaths.
A spokesman for President Hamid Karzai in Kabul said the government had asked the US not to launch bombing raids during the three-day Islamic Eid-al-Adha holiday, which began on Tuesday.
"The government prefers they shouldn't bomb in respect of Eid days, unless it is very necessary," said Tayab Jawad.
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