By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, May 26, 2006

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, May 25 -- Several thousand people were reported Thursday to have fled into this southern city from fierce fighting between Taliban insurgents and U.S.-led forces in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province.

In the capital, Kabul, officials of the Organization for International Migration said that between 2,000 and 3,000 people had escaped from the continuing combat, fearful both of attacks by Taliban forces and further assaults by U.S. warplanes, which killed at least 16 civilians Monday when they strafed village compounds where Taliban fighters had taken shelter.

"Entire families, including women and children, fled after days of some of the heaviest fighting," said an official of the group, which helps refugees and migrants.

The aid officials said some refugees were sleeping in tents and others had moved in with relatives in Kandahar, the capital of this conflicted southern province. Several hundred people have been reported killed in intense fighting in Panjwai and other districts in the past week.

President Hamid Karzai, making an unannounced visit to Kandahar, arrived in the city on a U.S. military helicopter Thursday and visited a hospital where many victims of Monday's air assault were being treated.

During a brief visit to the U.S. military base outside the city, Karzai said he had met with wounded children in the hospital who told him that their families had barred the doors but that the Taliban fighters had "barged in" and begun using their homes as hideouts to shoot at government and foreign troops.

Karzai also said that some of the hospital patients did not appear to be Afghan civilians at all, but rather "muscular, highly trained men who pretended to be deaf and dumb." He suggested the men were possibly foreign fighters. The president has accused Pakistan of harboring and supporting insurgents who cross into Afghanistan.

Karzai was accompanied on the visit by Army Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the senior U.S. military officer in Afghanistan. In an earlier statement in the capital, Karzai said he had told Eikenberry at a meeting to make "every effort" to ensure civilian safety in the fight against Taliban and other anti-government insurgents.

"We stand firm with the international community in their efforts to defeat terror, but they must ensure that civilians are not affected," Karzai said in a statement.

In Kandahar, he also attended a meeting at the governor's office with regional tribal leaders, who expressed concerns about the increasing violence. The president reportedly told them not to worry, that he would ensure the security of the region.

Aid officials in Kabul and Kandahar said many of the refugees arrived in Kandahar on foot or aboard trucks and tractors, with few possessions. The villagers were caught between threats from the Taliban and gunfire and air attacks by foreign forces allied with the Afghan government.

Afghan military officials said that the fighting in Panjwai was continuing and that the Taliban forces had not fully retreated. There have been three major clashes between insurgents and U.S.-led forces in that area in the past two weeks.