Military, Civilian Deaths | featured news

Far more civilians have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas than U.S. counter-terrorism officials have acknowledged, a new study by human rights researchers at Stanford University and New York University contends.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators take to the streets outside Damascus, in Homs and elsewhere in response to the lethal military assaults centered in the besieged city of Hama. The growing civilian toll intensifies international condemnation of the Syrian regime.

Afghan officials said Sunday that a NATO airstrike killed 14 civilians, all of them women and children, in the southern province of Helmand on Saturday night. Local officials said the strike was aimed at Taliban fighters and missed. NATO said it was investigating.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said on Tuesday that fighting in Libya would soon decline significantly, and he attributed criticism of the American-led military campaign to the “outright lies” by the Qaddafi government about civilian casualties.

The attack on the boys amounted to one of the worst cases of mistaken killings of children by foreign-led forces in the Afghanistan war.

The American military has not yet confirmed the deaths from Friday’s strike. It would be the worst civilian toll in an attack in almost a year.

Some 90,000 leaked U.S. military records posted online Sunday amount to a blow-by-blow account of six years of the Afghanistan war, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings.

Western military officials acknowledge that none of those in a car fired on by soldiers had links to the insurgency.

The investigative organization WikiLeaks on Monday released military video of what it describes as three incidents of an "indiscriminate slaying" by U.S. forces near Baghdad on July 12, 2007.

An Indonesian military transport plane crashed into a residential area in east Java early Wednesday, killing 97 people, military officials said.