Wedding guests wonder why they became targets

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- It was just after 2 a.m. Monday, and the village wedding party was in full swing. At one house, women were dancing and clapping and beating drums. At another, in keeping with rural Afghan tradition, men were firing off rifles.

"Everyone was making so much noise that we never heard the sound of the planes. Then the bombs came and we started running," said Shahbibi, 30, a seamstress whose leg was broken in the stampede of fleeing women. "There was so much dust we couldn't see."

When the air finally cleared over Miandao village and three nearby hamlets in Uruzgan province, all bombed or strafed that morning by U.S. military forces who believed they were under attack, at least 40 people had been killed and 100 injured, Afghan officials say.

According to half a dozen survivors from two of the affected villages, there were no attacks on U.S. forces in their vicinity, only a raucous late-night wedding celebration of about 300 people that included the traditional, exuberant spraying of rifle fire into the air.

"It was my brother Malik's wedding. We were all so happy and clapping. Then the bombs came and I saw people running and shouting and falling," said Chemana, 18, who was lying in the hospital with a broken leg. Her hands were painted with henna dye for the wedding. A blood-spattered baby cried in a bassinet beside her.

The bride and groom were not at the party and survived, but many of their relatives were killed, said the survivors, interviewed Wednesday in Kandahar where they were recovering from injuries or had brought wounded relatives for treatment.

"Fifteen people from my home are dead. My wife, my brother, everyone is dead. We don't know why the Americans hate us," said Abdul Bari, 30, a farmer from Kakarak village who was glumly cradling his heavily bandaged, 6-year-old nephew in a hospital bed.

The boy, Ghulam, rocked and whimpered incoherently, asking for water and pleading for someone to remove the painful shunt in his badly injured chest, which was being drained to remove fluid. Doctors at Mirwais Hospital said Ghulam, whose parents were killed, almost died Monday night but was stable and improving Wednesday.

U.S. officials have said ground and air forces were patrolling the area because of reports that Taliban or al-Qaida forces might remain there, and some Afghan officials said they believe Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader, might be hiding in the remote, largely roadless region about 100 miles northwest of here.

But Bari and other survivors said there were no Taliban or al-Qaida fighters in Kakarak or nearby Miandao, which were celebrating the wedding alliance between two prominent tribal families. They said that they were supporters of the Afghan government, led by President Hamid Karzai, and that many were from his ethnic Pashtun tribe.

"If there were Taliban or Arabs in the area, they would never have let us make such a wedding party," said Amillah, 35, a farmer and the husband of Shahbibi who brought her to the hospital Monday. "They did not allow people to make music or dance or beat drums. They said it was not Islamic."

Several survivors described seeing their friends and relatives blown to bits before their eyes, but others said there was too much darkness and confusion to find their loved ones as they fled. One woman said a number of children had been sleeping on a roof and were killed instantly by bombs.

Bari said American troops had entered his village shortly after the bombing and had treated several injured children, but other survivors complained that U.S. and Afghan forces had blocked the roads and refused to let anyone but wounded victims drive to Kandahar on Monday.

The survivors insisted that "firing from happiness" was a routine custom at weddings in rural Afghanistan, where most men own rifles and armed clashes are common in disputes among tribal groups.

But several women injured in the bombing said they had previously asked their male relatives to stop the dangerous practice, and Karzai issued a plea Tuesday for Afghans to refrain from wedding fire as long as foreign military forces are patrolling the country and might mistake their actions as hostile.

Monday's incident, widely reported on Afghan-language radio here, has upset and angered many people in this bustling, Pashtun-dominated city that was once the Taliban's religious headquarters. Some asked why the U.S. military, with its sophisticated weaponry and operating methods, could not be more accurate in picking and attacking targets.

"We have heard that this is a computerized war, and we have seen on television that the American planes can pick out objects as close as 4 millimeters from the ground," said Ahmed Jawad, a doctor at Mirwais Hospital. "How can they mistake a wedding party for an attack?"

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