ASIA-PACIFIC A Dutch F-16 fighter jet dropped a bomb on a house in southern Afghanistan, killing an unknown number of civilians inside, the Dutch defence ministry said on Thursday, in the latest accidental deaths of noncombatants caused by western troops.
British forces on the ground in Lashkar Gah, the capital of the southern province of Helmand, called in the air strike against Taliban fighters who took shelter in the house during fighting on Wednesday.
A defence ministry spokeswoman in The Hague expressed regret and said a review by the Dutch military had concluded that their pilot had followed procedures aimed at avoiding civilian deaths before dropping the precision-guided bomb. “If there is any doubt at all we abort the mission,” she said.
Civilian deaths, especially those resulting from the use of air strikes by Nato troops, have infuriated Afghans and increased hostility towards Nato’s presence in the country. An air strike ordered by German troops in the north of the country last month killed 50 people. A UN report last week concluded that 1,500 civilians had died in the first eight months of the year, a fifth of them due to Nato air strikes.
The incident also comes amid growing dissatisfaction with the Afghan campaign in the Netherlands, which has 2,000 troops and four F-16s deployed in the country. Some 1,400 of the troops are based in the Uruzgan province and are due to pull out in 2011.
There is increasing tension within the ruling coalition over any extension of the Dutch mandate, with the Labour and small Christian Union parties this week calling for a definitive withdrawal of troops by 2011 and the Christian Democratic party of Jan Peter Balkenende, prime minister, leaving the door open to an extension of the Dutch mission.
The US and Britain have been lobbying continental Europeans to continue to back operations in Afghanistan against the backdrop of increasing disquiet about the prospects of the eight-year-long war. The deaths of six Italian soldiers at the hands of a suicide bomber in Kabul last month prompted renewed calls for a withdrawal of Italy’s 2,800 troops.
The Dutch defence ministry said Nato troops on the ground were conducting an investigation into the accidental bombing of the house.
