Villagers press claims of wrongful U.S. attack

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Distraught villagers trekked to Kandahar on Sunday to complain to Afghan authorities that Army Special Forces killed innocent people in a raid last week.

The delegation from the remote town of Khas Uruzgan pleaded its case to provincial officials as Prime Minister Hamid Karzai traveled Sunday to Washington, where he is expected to discuss military operations.

The villagers said they set out on the 100-mile journey just hours after Wednesday night's attack, in which Pentagon officials said about 15 people were killed, 27 captured and a large number of weapons destroyed during a raid on a Taliban arms depot.

Villagers, however, claimed U.S. forces bombed their town hall and clinic, and killed and arrested men loyal to Afghanistan's U.S.-backed interim leader, Hamid Karzai.

"I'm here to talk to these people working for the American Army," said Zainullah, a town council member who like many Afghans uses only one name. The people they have captured, they are working for Hamid Karzai. "If they arrest them, they should arrest me."

Fluid war

U.S. Army spokesman Maj. A.C. Roper said Sunday that the villagers' reports "are not consistent with our intelligence."

"Our soldiers are well trained. They're judicious and prudent in their use of force," Roper said. "This war is fluid. It's an ever-changing battlefield."

However, U.S. officials have acknowledged problems in gathering reliable intelligence in a country with a tradition of shifting loyalties.

"They were not Taliban. Not one was Taliban," said Zainullah, the town councilor. "It's impossible."

Yusuf Pashtun, an aide to Kandahar Gov. Gul Agha, also said the town's government building and clinic were attacked.

Kandahar officials presented the U.S. military with a list that villagers provided of some of the missing and have asked for confirmation of whether they were arrested, Pashtun said.

"This could have been a mistake, a situation of wrong information," Pashtun said.

But the aide also said three former senior Taliban officials were staying not far from the scene of the attack: former health minister Mullah Abbas Akhund and two aides to Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.

Pashtun said Agha told the villagers that if they had arrested the Taliban themselves, the raid never would have happened.

The Taliban were "living within a few kilometers of their town, how come you had not a chance to arrest them?" he quoted the governor as saying.

Despite the ouster of the Taliban and the routing of al-Qaida, key figures from both organizations remain at large, including Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Omar.

On Sunday, Vice President Dick Cheney said he believes both bin Laden and Omar are still in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. He was skeptical of reports that bin Laden may be dead.

In other developments:

Former Afghan king Mohammad Zaher Shah is preparing to return to Kabul by March 21 and may be accompanied on the trip from Rome by Prime Minister Karzai, an aide to the king said. The king hasn't been to Afghanistan since his 1973 ouster. He will eventually convene a council to pick a new government succeeding Karzai's interim administration.

Marjan the lion was to be buried today at the Kabul Zoo, where he suffered the torments of war and injuries from a grenade thrown by an Afghan guerrilla. The one-eyed lion, who became the symbol of the country's deprivations, was found dead in his cage Saturday morning.

The editor of the Kabul Weekly newspaper, Fahim Dashty, formally launched the publication Sunday and said he believes it will test the interim government's stated commitment to media freedom.