While the United States-led coalition forces in Afghanistan are trying to win people's support in the ongoing war on the Taliban and al-Qaeda network, local people's complaints against the troops' behavior are growing. "Contrary to our culture and tradition, the troops search our houses in villages and even occupy them for as long as 15 to 20 days and arrest and terrify the innocent locals on wrong intelligence reports," Gul Rahman, a member of a tribal delegation, told Xinhua.
The insulting treatment applied by the troops, according to him, prompted the residents of Barmal district in southeast Paktika province to send a delegation of tribal elders to Kabul to take the matter with President Hamid Karzai as well as coalition officials.
For the last three months, he added, the coalition troops had been combing up villages and taken dozens of innocents into custody...
"We are not Taliban or al-Qaeda rather we are law-obeying citizens and our demand for the Americans as well as for the government is to honor our cultural values and not to harass us arbitrary," another tribal elder Jahangir Wazir Khan told Xinhua.
In the meantime US military spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty downplayed their concerns, saying "spending one night in cold weather is better than living in 23 years of war." ..In over two years of US-led operations against terror in these rugged areas, according to the locals, dozens of innocent civilians have been arrested and some of them have even been shifted to Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba...A US military spokesman admitted that they understood people's anger, urging them to talk to their high-ups. "We understand their concerns. We feel this is an appropriate tactic for combat situation. We asked them to go to Argon and talk to our commander who can address them," Hilferty told Xinhua.
http://www.nni-news.com/current/world/news-02.htm
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