The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, Kabul

Afghan President Hamid Karzai's office said Thursday that reports suggested 17 civilians, including women and children, were killed in a US raid in eastern Afghanistan this week.

The US military, however, reiterated that only 32 insurgents were killed in the operation Tuesday in Laghman province, east of the capital Kabul. The provincial government said it had sent a team to the area to investigate.

"Seventeen civilians, women and children among them, were killed in an attack launched by coalition forces on a Taliban hideout in the Alishing district of Laghman province, reports suggest," Karzai's office said. An official told AFP separately that the statement referred to intelligence reports received by the government.

Karzai condemned the killings and also the "using of civilians as human shields by the terrorists", his office said in a statement.

Civilian casualties in operations by international troops have been a source of tension between foreign forces and Karzai, who says such incidents threaten support for the fight against extremists.

Meanwhile, a bomb tore through a military patrol in southern Afghanistan on Friday, killing three US troops, while a suicide attack at a fruit market killed six Afghans, authorities said. The blasts came as the country braced for another tough year against an insurgency led by the extremist Taliban but which also sees attacks by other radical factions and groups linked.

to the massive opium and heroin trade.

The bombing of the patrol from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force took to 10 the number of foreign troops killed here so far this year. Two US troops were killed in a Taliban suicide attack Thursday.

"They were on a mounted patrol where they hit an IED (improvised explosive device)," said US military spokesman Colonel Jerry O'Hara.

"Three US soldiers were killed and one was wounded."

The blast occurred along Highway One, an often-attacked road linking the volatile south with the capital Kabul.

All of the other soldiers to die in Afghanistan this year-Australian, British, Canadian and US nationals-were also killed in the south, where insurgents hold sway in several districts.

In another attack, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a fruit market in the small southwestern town of Zaranj on the border with Iran, police said.