KABUL, Afghanistan — As Afghan officials reported more civilian casualties from coalition airstrikes on Thursday, witnesses to a strike that apparently hit a wedding party on Monday said the civilian death toll could be more than double the 40 reported so far by Afghan officials.
The U.S. military says it is conducting a joint investigation with the Afghan authorities into the strike on the wedding party, which took place in the Shah Wali Kot district of the southern province of Kandahar, where the Taliban insurgency has been strong.
On Thursday, U.S. officials offered their first account of the events, saying that insurgents had prevented civilians from fleeing the area, trapping them in a firefight pitting coalition and Afghan army forces against the militants who had ambushed those forces.
Referring to the deaths in both that strike and another reported Thursday, in which Afghan officials killed at least seven civilians in the northwestern province of Badghis, Col. Greg Julian, a spokesman for U.S. forces, said, "We hope that it's not from our fire, but we suspect it may well have been."
In a telephone interview, Julian accused Taliban forces of "immersing themselves" among civilians on Monday to deter U.S. forces from using airstrikes.
"Our close air support has been so devastating with the Taliban that they are trying to stop us using it" by provoking situations in which civilians are caught up in fighting and killed, he said.
People who said they saw the wedding party attack said the death toll among civilians was much higher than the official Afghan figure of 40. "I counted 90 dead bodies," said Abdul Rahim, 26, who said he was a survivor of the family that hosted the wedding party. "I saw them with my own eyes," he said in a telephone interview from Kandahar province. "I discovered them under the debris."
He said Taliban insurgents had fired some shots from the top of a hill toward a convoy of American vehicles, and the Americans had returned fire. About an hour later, the Americans called in an airstrike, he said. Four houses, including the house where the wedding party was under way, were destroyed, Rahim said.