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Coalition: Taliban uses kids as shields

KABUL, Afghanistan - A powerful bomb killed an anti-Syrian lawmaker and six others Wednesday in a Christian neighborhood of Beirut, threatening to derail an effort by an already deeply divided Parliament to elect Lebanon's next president in voting to begin next week. The clash in Uruzgan province began when more than 20 insurgents attacked a joint Afghan and coalition patrol, the coalition said in a statement.

As aircraft prepared to bomb the site, "coalition forces as well as the aircraft identified several insurgents in one compound using children as human shields," the statement said. Ground troops and the aircraft withheld fire to avoid injuring the children, it said.

The soldiers did fight the insurgents when they tried to flee the compound, and more than a dozen suspected militants were killed, the coalition said. The report, which was impossible to verify independently, did not list any casualties among troops or civilians.

Maj. Chris Belcher, a coalition spokesman, said Taliban militants have used children as shields before. In June, insurgents forced women and children into a canal in Uruzgan while battling coalition forces, and many of the human shields died in the cross fire, he said.

The U.S.-led coalition and the NATO force in Afghanistan were strongly criticized this year by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and others for causing civilian casualties in airstrikes on suspected militant locations. The number of such casualties has dropped recently.

[Last modified September 20, 2007, 01:36:59]