October 24, 2001	Wednesday	Shaba'an 6, 1422

DUBAI, Oct 23: Qatar’s Al Jazeera television has said that US military strikes on Afghanistan on Tuesday had killed 93 civilians in a village near Kandahar, including 18 members of one family.

The satellite channel said that at least 40 other civilians were wounded in the attack by US warplanes on the village some 60kms northeast of Kandahar, which it identified as Chukar.

It said the 18 family members who died in the attack had fled Kandahar for safety in the village following US military strikes on the city, a Taliban stronghold.

Jazeera broadcast videophone footage provided by its correspondent in Kandahar, Youssef al-Shouli, showing a row of corpses wrapped in white shrouds lined up against the wall inside a room. At least one of the corpses was that of a child and a second was of an elderly man.

The television also broadcast footage of children, women and elderly men receiving treatment at a hospital in Kandahar.

UN CONFIRMATION: The United Nations said on Tuesday that a military hospital was hit in an airstrike outside Herat in western Afghanistan and US defense officials said there were indications a US weapon went astray, but gave conflicting accounts of whether it struck a building.

Taliban officials have claimed that more than 100 people were killed when the hospital was destroyed in an air strike on Herat on Monday, a claim that US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld initially disputed.

A UN spokeswoman in Islamabad, Stephanie Bunker, said the United Nations had received information late on Tuesday that “a hospital in Herat was hit and reportedly destroyed”.

“It was a military hospital in a military compound on the outskirts of the city,” she said, adding that she did not know if there were casualties.

A US defense official said: “What we can say at this time is that there are some indications that a weapon may have gone astray.”

He said there were indications a building was hit by the errant weapon, but that military officials were still trying to determine what kind of building it was.

“We do not have information at this time that leads us to believe it was a hospital,” the official said.

Two other defense officials said it appeared that the weapon missed its target but did not hit a building. One said it landed in an open field. The other said, “We may have secondary effects (from the explosion), but we don’t know of a bomb that hit a hospital.”

The struggle to shape the public’s perception of the conflict has emerged as a key battlefield, particularly in the Muslim world, where sympathy for the war’s civilian victims plays against US assurances the campaign targets terrorists, not Islam.

Pentagon officials insist the air campaign has focused on legitimate military targets, most of them in remote areas and chosen with an eye to minimizing the risk of civilian casualties or damage.

When asked on Monday about the reports that a hospital in Herat was hit, Rumsfeld said there was “absolutely no evidence at all that would suggest that that allegation you cited is correct. I’m sure it’s not”.

The Pentagon acted promptly on two previous occasions when it determined that bombing errors had led to civilian casualties.—AFP