A raid on a suspected suicide bombing cell in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday left four militants and two civilians dead, the coalition said, as protesting locals claimed only civilians were killed.A woman and a teenager were killed in a firefight that erupted when troops raided a compound in the eastern province of Nangarhar after “credible information” it was planning suicide car bombings, the US-led coalition said. “During the operation, coalition forces received small arms fire from several militants as they attempted to enter the compound. Coalition forces returned fire, killing four militants,” the coalition said in a statement. “An adult woman and a teenager were also killed in the crossfire between militants and coalition forces,” it said. The incident was in the Bati Kot area along the main highway to the Pakistan border, where US Marines were accused of opening fire on civilians after a March 4 ambush that killed about a dozen people.
After SundayÂ’s raid hundreds of people demonstrated on the highway, blocking it for several hours, saying the dead were all civilians and the government must call the coalition to account for its actions. The demonstrators were carrying the bodies of some of the dead, witnesses from the area said. The coalition said it was saddened by the loss of civilian lives.
NATO troops meanwhile pushed ahead with their largest-ever operation in the south in the opium heartland of Helmand province. In Nahri Sarraj district, a NATO service member was wounded on Sunday in a gunbattle with insurgents, NATOÂ’s International Security Assistance Force said. It provided no further details about the nationality of the wounded service member.
A young French woman freed by the Taliban after 24 days in captivity in Afghanistan arrived back in France early on Sunday, a source said. The source, who asked not to be named, said the aid worker had been taken “to a calm place where she is resting and will undergo a medical examination”. She will then be questioned, as is customary in such cases, by the French secret service that will try to find out as much as possible about her detention.