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Military source: Battered village not a target



WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Military officials don't know yet if aerial attacks were responsible for an estimated 200 deaths last week in a small village in east-central Afghanistan, sources said Sunday.

Analysts are assessing what happened in Koram, a small village about 60 miles west of Jalalabad, a military source told CNN. The Taliban, Afghanistan's ruling organization, claimed U.S.-British air strikes killed some 200 people -- half village's population.

According to initial assessments, "the village was not on our target list," the source said.

Trying to figure out what happened in Koram last Thursday won't be easy, according to a Pentagon official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

First, officials must determine whether Koram was a target on a "tasking order" in the aerial assaults, meaning that investigators will have to check with different allied forces -- the Air Force, Navy and British forces, among others -- to learn if it was slated for aerial assaults.

Or, said the source, investigators may have to look to Taliban for an explanation. Koram may have been hit by a Taliban surface-to-air missile that went astray.



 
 
 
 



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