BOZ QANDAHARI, Afghanistan — A day after a battle in this village on the outskirts of Kunduz, residents readily pointed out the smears of what they said was American blood on a packed-dirt street. But they were less forthcoming about whether there had been any Taliban in their neighborhood when the Americans were killed on Thursday.
The dead-end street is so narrow, 10 feet across and hemmed in by the high mud walls around homes on either side, that the answer was obvious: The gunfire that killed two American Special Forces soldiers could have come only from their street.
“There are no Taliban here,” said Mohammad Ayub, an elder in Boz Qandahari, about four miles from the center of the city of Kunduz. A journalist visiting the village on Friday, just a day after the battle, however, saw two dozen armed Taliban militants lounging idly on the street and inside the walls around its houses.
The narrative by now is a familiar one. American ground forces get into trouble, and they respond by calling for airstrikes, which often kill civilians. According to the latest figures for Thursday’s clash, 36 civilians were killed, along with 14 Taliban fighters and at least five coalition soldiers.
In such cases, the Taliban quickly issue a social media bulletin blaming the Americans and their Afghan allies for any civilian deaths, survivors and relatives of the victims denounce the episode as an atrocity, the American military promises an investigation, and human rights groups deplore the senseless loss of civilian life.
On the ground, as Thursday’s events demonstrated, the reality is sometimes less straightforward.
There is no doubt that many civilians died on this street, including 25 relatives of Allahdad, 70, who works as a teacher trainer for a Western-financed aid group and who, like many Afghans, has only one name.
Allahdad lost a brother, four sisters-in-law, a cousin, three of his own children and 16 other relatives, mostly children 10 or younger. Three of his relatives’ houses, all on the same block of the street on which the Americans died, were heavily bombed and severely damaged. Nearby homes were untouched.
What Allahdad apparently did not lose were any fighting-age male relatives, and among the rest of the civilian dead there were only a handful; most were children, women and old people. Residents said their young men had all emigrated to Iran for work, but there were plenty of young men in the village on Friday, many of them heavily armed.
Around the corner from the scene, two armed Taliban fighters were guarding a compound where a captured Afghan Army Humvee was parked. The vehicle, too, had been bombed. They shooed away a reporter.
Funerals were taking place throughout the neighborhood on Friday, and at least 40 young men, apparently members of the Taliban, were visible. Most were not armed, but they carried walkie-talkies, and many wore heavy boots and combat fatigues.
Graffiti painted on the mud walls declared an “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” and listed the names of those newly martyred.
Yet Allahdad insisted that the airstrikes on his neighborhood had nothing to do with the Taliban.
“I am demanding that the government avenge this incident, arrest those who were involved and punish them,” he said. “They should also rebuild our houses destroyed in the airstrikes. If the government does not heed our demands we will do whatever we need to do, and we are ready to die in this way.”
Mr. Ayub, the village elder, was similarly adamant that the villagers’ human rights had, as he put it, been destroyed. “There were no Taliban in our houses when they bombed them,” he said.
“Americans are here to help us, they are not here to kill us,” he said. “We want them to be tried in international court. If the government does not accept our demands, we will block all routes, we will end our relations with the government, and we will stand with the Taliban.”
It was clear that many in the neighborhood already did stand with the insurgents. Abdul Basit, 25, who said the airstrikes had wounded two sisters, two uncles and many other relatives, guided a reporter to the scene.
Mr. Basit’s clothes were splattered with blood, which he said was from helping his wounded relatives. He himself had nothing to do with the Taliban, he said, although he also warned the reporter exactly where to walk to avoid hidden explosive devices on the street leading to where the Americans had been killed.
“If the Americans are trying to kill the Taliban, they shouldn’t come to my home,” Mr. Basit said. “They should go to where they are.” Later, apparently unaware of the contradiction, he pointed out the home of one of the Taliban fighters who he said an American soldier had killed.
Thursday’s events started when Afghan and American Special Forces troops received intelligence about a planned attack on Kunduz that was to be launched from Boz Qandahari. Militants were meeting to plan the attack in a house on the stretch of street here, and the troops decided to carry out a night raid on it, said Ahmad Jawed Salim, the spokesman for the Afghan Special Forces in the region.
Mr. Salim said 14 American Special Forces soldiers had quickly found themselves trapped on the dead-end street, taking small-arms fire from several of the houses.
“If there were no Taliban militants in the area, why did we suffer so many casualties?” he asked. In addition to the two American Special Forces soldiers who were killed, three Afghan Special Forces soldiers died in the fighting and seven other soldiers of both nationalities were wounded, he said.
The trapped soldiers called in airstrikes, which continued from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., according to residents, and the soldiers evacuated wounded and pursued Taliban leaders in the area. On the street where the Americans died, three houses were destroyed, but others close by were untouched by the bombing.
Afghan military officials said the raid had targeted the homes of two Taliban commanders, Mullah Zia al-Rahman Mutaqi, who was planning the attack on the city, and Mullah Zamir, a subordinate. The civilian dead, said Gen. Dawlat Waziri, the Afghan military spokesman, included four members of Mr. Zamir’s family and seven members of Mr. Mutaqi’s family.
At a news conference on Saturday, Brig. Gen. Charles H. Cleveland, the spokesman for the American military in Afghanistan, said, “Every aspect of this is clear that this was an effort to defend these troops who were down there trying to protect the people of Kunduz.”
Haroon Chakhansuri, the spokesman for President Ashraf Ghani, said: “The enemies of Afghanistan used the homes of civilians as shields in Boz Qandahari area. They did not care about their own families, which resulted in martyring of children and women.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/world/asia/afghanistan-taliban-kunduz.html?ref=asia&_r=0
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