WASHINGTON: The Pentagon on Monday came under the most intense questioning over civilian casualties since the start of the Afghan war, after allegations that US special forces executed and beat men wrongly suspected of being Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters, and tied up their women relatives.

On at least two occasions in the past month, the US raids were botched and anti-Taliban forces were targeted as a result of bungled intelligence. According to western officials in Kabul, village women were tied up by the Americans and hair samples taken for DNA analysis to try to establish links with Osama bin Laden. In village raids last month south of Kabul, the homes of mistaken Taliban suspects were burnt, the officials said.

The revelations add to the pressure on the Pentagon resulting from the mounting toll of civilian or innocent dead in Afghanistan from the US campaign in the air and on the ground. An investigation into the level of civilian casualties has found that thousands of civilians have died since the US launched its bombardment on Oct 7. While the precise figure remains unclear, experts and informed sources put the total deaths of innocents at between 2,000 and 8,000. “It is definitely in the four figures,” said a UN source in Kabul.

US military officials, who had routinely rejected earlier accounts of civilian casualties as enemy propaganda, were forced back on the defensive at a Pentagon press conference on Monday at which every question focused on targeting errors and the treatment of captives. The press grilling came on a day of potentially embarrassing revelations that cast doubt on the accuracy of intelligence used to trigger US attacks and the reliability of the Pentagon.

The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has ordered an inquiry into a special forces raid on Uruzgan, central Afghanistan, on Jan 24, in which 21 local men were killed and 27 taken prisoner. Two of the victims were found shot dead with their hands bound behind their backs, fuelling suspicion that they were handcuffed and then executed. The CIA has been distributing compensation of about $1,000 to the bereaved relatives, in what appeared to be the clearest admission so far that something had gone badly wrong. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.