KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Four U.S. Marines were killed Thursday when a roadside bomb struck their vehicle in western Afghanistan, driving up Western military deaths at a pace that would make August one of the deadliest months of the war.
Civilian casualties have also been sharply rising, and a southern Afghan police chief said a U.S. airstrike had killed five farmers picking their cucumber crop at night. The U.S. military said the men were insurgents, but offered conflicting accounts throughout the day of the reason an American helicopter opened fire.
At least 15 Western troops have been killed in Afghanistan in August. Attacks killed at least 44 U.S service members and 31 from other international military forces in July, according to military reports.
Casualties among Afghans and international troops are climbing as Western forces push deeper into Taliban territory ahead of Aug. 20 presidential elections. Most violence takes place in the south and east, the traditional bases of the ethnic Pashtun insurgents. But the Taliban has also been ramping up attacks in the relatively calmer west and north.
NATO declined to say exactly where the Marines were killed or immediately release other details of the attack.
In southern Afghanistan, thousands of additional U.S. and British forces have been trying to secure roads and population centres ahead of the vote. The insurgents have pledged to disrupt the election and have dramatically increased their use of roadside bombs against foreign and Afghan forces.
The U.S. and NATO have said protecting civilians is their highest priority and placed new restrictions on airstrikes last month in an attempt to limit civilian casualties.
But a police chief in the southern province of Kandahar said a Western airstrike Wednesday night killed five farmers loading cucumbers into a taxi. A U.S. spokeswoman initially said the men were militants who had been seen placing weapons into a van.
"We watched the guys loading small arms into a van for an hour before firing on it," said U.S. Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker, a press officer for NATO forces in Afghanistan. "Our information is that they were loading munitions not cucumbers."
The American military said later in the day that they had been seen planting wire-controlled roadside bombs.
When asked about the discrepancy Thursday night, U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer Brian Naranjo, a NATO forces spokesman, said the military wanted to fully review video taken by the helicopter that launched the airstrike before providing a complete account of the incident.
Sidenstricker said soon afterward that officials had reviewed the video and decided not to release it because the nighttime footage did not definitively show what had happened.
She said the military had tried to quickly release the information at hand throughout the day and officials were now certain that the men were clearly acting in ways that showed they were not innocent farmers.
"Initial reports are not always exactly accurate but some of the details, as we get more information, become clearer," Sidenstricker said. "We saw them running with concealed objects, moving very heavy objects around the road."
District police chief Niaz Mohammad Sarhadi said the five were trying to move their cucumber crop from the rural Zhari district to the city of Kandahar.
It is common for farmers to work at night in southern Afghanistan's blazing summer temperatures. Insurgents also plant bombs and move weapons in darkness, although U.S. aircraft can monitor them using night-vision equipment.
In neighbouring Helmand province, local officials said that roadside explosions had killed at least 10 other people, including members of a family who hit a mine on their way to a wedding party.
The family was travelling in a tractor with a trailer through Garmser district Wednesday morning when they hit a mine laid in the road, Helmand police chief Assadullah Sherzad said.
A spokesman for the governor of Helmand, Daud Ahmadi, said the driver of the tractor was killed along with his wife, two children and another woman. Two other women were wounded, Ahmadi said.
Afghan officials also said a roadside bomb killed five police officers and wounded three police in Helmand on Thursday.
Earlier in the day, the U.S. military reported that one of its service members had been killed Wednesday by a roadside bomb in western Afghanistan.
