Afghan commission: US troops took fire first

An Afghan army commander told a government investigative commission that U.S. and Afghan troops were fired on first from the Afghan village where the commission says scores of civilians were killed, a report released Sunday said.

The chief of staff for the Herat corps of the Afghan army told the head of the government’s investigative commission that shots were fired from the village of Azizabad at U.S. and Afghan troops in the early morning hours of Aug. 22.

But the report, released by the office of President Hamid Karzai, did not specify who fired the shots.

“When the ANA (Afghan army) and coalition troops got close to the village, firing started after the ANA unit stopped, and the coalition forces conducted the operation in the village,” the report said.

However, the report also said that, according to the people in Azizabad, security institutions and “the eyewitnesses of the delegation,” all of the victims of the operation were civilian.

“Among the victims, there is not any foreign or internal Taliban,” the report said.

The commission found that 90 people were killed in the Azizabad operation: 15 men, 15 women, and 60 children. That finding was backed by a preliminary U.N. report. The commission said eight houses were destroyed and seven damaged.

The U.S.-led coalition maintains that 25 militants and five civilians died in the operation. The U.S. has said it is investigating the incident.

The top NATO spokesman in Afghanistan, Brig. Gen. Richard Blanchette, told AP on Saturday that the U.S.-led coalition, Afghan government and the United Nations would launch a probe into the raid in Azizabad. A U.N. spokesman, Dan McNorton, said details of the investigation were still to be worked out.

The statement from Karzai’s office on Sunday did not mention a joint investigation, and no Afghan government officials have confirmed that the government would participate.

The U.N. mission in Afghanistan said Sunday it has delivered humanitarian assistance to around 900 people affected by what it called “the recent tragedy” in Azizabad. The U.N. said it delivered three truck loads of food, cooking utensils, shelter materials and medicines to 150 families.