KABUL, Afghanistan — Chanting “Death to America” and hurling rocks, hundreds gathered Thursday in western Afghanistan to protest American airstrikes that Afghan officials and villagers said had killed many civilians, threatening to stiffen Afghan opposition to the war just as the Obama administration is sending 20,000 more troops.
Villagers looked at the destruction after air strikes in Ganj Abad, in the Bala Buluk district of Afghanistan, on Tuesday.
The two-hour demonstration came a day after talks on Wednesday in Washington between President Obama and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, whose office called the civilian deaths “unjustifiable and unacceptable.” Afghan officials and villagers said the airstrikes had killed dozens and perhaps more than 100 civilians.
In the main city of Farah province, protesters gathered at a police station and the local governor’s office, chanting slogans against the American and Afghan governments, witnesses reported. Traders shuttered their stores and said they would not reopen them until the airstrikes had been fully investigated and the demonstrators’ demands had been met. Participants in the protest, interviewed by telephone, said demonstrators called for an American withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Outside the governor’s office, police opened fire on stone-throwing protesters and wounded three of them. Three high-ranking officials met the protesters and offered to resign in sympathy with the demonstrators, according to Allauddin Khan, a tribal elder among those who met with the local officials.
Another protester, Bismillah Khan, said the demonstrators accused American authorities of bombing civilians instead of Taliban fighters. He put the number of protesters at 2,000 from many parts of the province.
If the reports of a high death toll are borne out, the bombardment, which took place late Monday, will almost certainly be the worst in terms of civilian deaths since the American intervention began in 2001. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said there would be a joint investigation and she expressed regret at the loss of civilian lives, although she cautioned that the full circumstances were not known. Defense Department officials said investigators were looking into the possibility that Taliban militants were responsible for the civilian deaths.
One villager reached by telephone, Sayed Ghusuldin Agha, described body parts littered around the landscape. “It would scare a man if he saw it in a dream,” he said.
Civilian deaths — more than 2,000 Afghans were killed last year alone, the United Nations says — have been a decisive factor in souring many Afghans on the war. The International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed dozens dead so far in this bombing, in the western province of Farah.
The American military confirmed that it had conducted airstrikes aimed at the Taliban, but not the number of deaths or their cause.
“We have some other information that leads us to distinctly different conclusions about the cause of the civilian casualties,” said the senior American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan. He would not elaborate but said American and Afghan investigators were already on the ground trying to sort out what had happened.
In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to outraged members of the Afghan Parliament, the governor of Farah Province, Rohul Amin, said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed, according to a legislator, Mohammad Naim Farahi. Afghan lawmakers immediately called for an agreement regulating foreign military operations in the country.
“The governor said that the villagers have brought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred,” Mr. Farahi said. “Everyone at the governor’s office was crying, watching that shocking scene.”
Mr. Farahi said he had talked to someone he knew personally who had counted 113 bodies being buried, including those of many women and children. Later, more bodies were pulled from the rubble and some victims who had been taken to the hospital died, he said.
Early reports from American military forensic investigators at the scene raised questions about the Afghan account, according to a United States military official briefed on the inquiry.
Defense Department officials said late Wednesday that investigators were looking into witnesses’ reports that the Afghan civilians were killed by grenades hurled by Taliban militants, and that the militants then drove the bodies around the village claiming the dead were victims of an American airstrike.
The initial examination of the site and of some of the bodies suggested the use of armaments more like grenades than the much larger bombs used by attack planes, said the military official, who requested anonymity because the investigation was continuing.
“We cannot confirm the report that the Taliban executed these people,” said Capt. John Kirby, the spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. “We don’t know if it’s true, and we also don’t know how many civilians were killed as a result of this operation.”
Col. Greg Julian, a spokesman for the United States military in Kabul, confirmed that United States Special Operations forces had called in close air support in the area on Monday night, including bombs and strafing with heavy machine guns. “There is a heavy insurgent presence there,” he said.
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