By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 3, 2002; 4:44 PM

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, July 3--It was just after 2 a.m. Monday, and the village wedding party was in full swing. At one house, women were dancing and clapping and beating drums. At another, in keeping with rural Afghan tradition, men were firing rifles.

"Everyone was making so much noise that we never heard the sound of the planes. Then the bombs came and we started running," said Shahbibi, 30, a seamstress whose leg was broken in the stampede of fleeing women. "There was so much dust we couldn't see."

When the air finally cleared over Miandao village and three nearby hamlets in Uruzgan province, all bombed or strafed that morning by U.S. warplanes whose crews believed they were under attack, at least 40 people had been killed and another 100 injured, according to Afghan officials.

If accurate, the casualty count would make Monday's incident one of the deadliest single episodes of civilian casualties in an American attack since U.S.-led troops and warplanes began operations last year to hunt down and destroy remaining pockets of Taliban and al Qaeda fighting forces. Monday's was the second such incident in Uruzgan, where U.S. Special Forces killed 21 villagers in a January raid.

The attack has drawn sharp criticism from Afghan officials, who refrained from protesting after several earlier incidents of unintentional civilian killings because of their close alliance with the U.S.-led anti-terrorist campaign and their dependence on Western military forces to maintain security in Kabul and other vulnerable areas. Foreign Minister Abdullah demanded on Tuesday that "this situation has to come to an end," adding that "our people should be assured every measure has been taken to avoid such incidents."

A delegation of Afghan and U.S. officials reached one of the bombed villages today by road. Officials in Kabul, the capital, said the group plans to remain in the area until Friday, trying to learn how and why the attack occurred and whether there had been any hostile fire beforehand.

U.S. military officials in Washington and Afghanistan have expressed condolences and acknowledged some errors in Monday's raids over Uruzgan by B-52 bombers and AC-130 gunships, but they have insisted that U.S. forces in the area were responding to a deliberate attack by antiaircraft guns or other weapons.

Maj. Gary Tallman, a U.S. spokesman with the group, said U.S. aircraft had flown over the area hourly for two days before the Monday attack and each time an antiaircraft artillery piece had opened fire from inside a walled compound, the Associated Press reported from Kakarak. Tallman acknowledged that investigators had found no wreckage of a gun when they visited the area but said the compound had been identified by U.S. troops on the ground and verified by global positioning satellites and lasers.

At the Pentagon, senior officials still appeared at a loss for details about the episode. Although Pentagon officials have acknowledged that an Air Force Special Operations AC-130 gunship opened fire on six locations in the area early Monday after a U.S. ground controller reported antiaircraft fire, they have been reluctant to confirm that U.S. airstrikes were responsible for any of the casualties.

Although U.S. ground forces were in the vicinity of the villages at the time of the attacks – and have been described by Pentagon officials as directing the airstrikes – Pentagon officials continued to insist they had little information and were awaiting the findings of the joint U.S.-Afghan inspection team.

"They have just begun their inquiry, so it'll take some time to develop richness of detail to know precisely what happened," Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, director of operations on the Pentagon's Joint Staff, said at a news conference.

The general did provide fresh details about recent military operations in the area, suggesting that U.S. forces had good reason to consider the region dangerous. Afghan and other coalition forces on reconnaissance missions had engaged in sporadic gun battles in the area, and U.S. warplanes had encountered occasional antiaircraft fire.

"This is an area of enormous sympathy for the Taliban and al Qaeda," Newbold said.

According to a half-dozen survivors from two of the affected villages interviewed at a hospital here in Kandahar, however, there were no attacks on U.S. forces in their vicinity, only a raucous late-night wedding celebration of about 300 people that included the traditional, exuberant spraying of rifle fire into the air.

"It was my brother Malik's wedding. We were all so happy and clapping. Then the bombs came and I saw people running and shouting and falling," said Chemana, 18, who was lying in the hospital with a broken leg. Her hands were painted with henna dye for the wedding. A blood-spattered baby cried in a metal cradle beside her.

The bride and groom were not at the party and survived, but many of their relatives were killed, said the survivors in Kandahar where they were recovering from injuries or had brought wounded relatives for treatment.

"Fifteen people from my home are dead. My wife, my brother, everyone is dead. We don't know why the Americans hate us," said Abdul Bari, 30, a farmer from Kakarak village who was glumly cradling his heavily bandaged, 6-year-old nephew in a hospital bed.

The boy, Ghulam, rocked and whimpered, asking for water and pleading for someone to remove the painful shunt in his badly injured chest, which was being drained. Doctors at Mir Weis Hospital said Ghulam, whose parents were both killed, almost died Monday night but was stable and improving today.

American officials have said U.S. ground and air forces were patrolling the area because of reports that some Taliban or al Qaeda forces might remain there, and some Afghan officials said they believe Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader, might be hiding in the remote, largely roadless region about 100 miles northwest of here.

But Bari and other survivors said there were no Taliban or al Qaeda fighters in Kakarak or nearby Miandao, which were both celebrating the wedding alliance between two prominent tribal families. They said they were supporters of the Afghan government, led by President Hamid Karzai, and that many were from his ethnic Pushtun tribe.

"If there were Taliban or Arabs in the area, they would never have let us make such a wedding party," said Amillah, 35, Shahbibi's husband, a farmer who brought her to the hospital Monday. "They did not allow people to make music or dance or beat drums; they said it was not Islamic."

Several survivors described seeing their friends and relatives blown to bits before their eyes, but others said there was too much darkness and confusion to locate their loved ones as they fled. One woman said children had been sleeping on a roof and were killed instantly by bombs.

One scenario offered by some U.S. defense officials today suggested the casualties may have been near the antiaircraft batteries targeted by the AC-130. Asked about this possibility, Newbold said he had no information that would confirm or dispute it. But he and the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Victoria Clarke, noted that it was not uncommon for al Qaeda and the Taliban to place weapons and fighters in civilian areas.

Bari said American troops had entered his village shortly after the bombing and had treated several injured children, but other survivors complained that U.S. and Afghan forces had blocked the roads and refused to let anyone but wounded victims drive to Kandahar on Monday.

The survivors insisted that "firing from happiness" was a routine custom at weddings in rural Afghanistan, where most men own rifles and armed clashes are common in disputes among tribal groups.

But several women injured in the bombing said they had previously asked their male relatives to stop the dangerous practice, and Karzai issued a plea Tuesday for all Afghans to refrain from wedding gunfire as long as foreign military forces are patrolling the country and might mistake their actions as hostile.

Staff writer Bradley Graham in Washington contributed to this report.