KABUL, Afghanistan — The killing of at least nine men in a remote valley of eastern Afghanistan by a joint operation of Afghan and American forces put President Hamid Karzai and senior NATO officials at odds on Monday over whether those killed had been civilians or Taliban insurgents.
In a statement e-mailed to the news media, Mr. Karzai condemned the weekend attack and said the dead had been civilians, eight of them schoolboys. He called for an investigation.
Local officials, including the governor and members of Parliament from Kunar Province, where the deaths occurred, confirmed the reports. But the Kunar police chief, Khalilullah Ziayee, cautioned that his office was still investigating the killings and that outstanding questions remained, including why the eight young men had been in the same house at the time.
“There are still questions to be answered, like why these students were together and what they were doing on that night,” Mr. Ziayee said.
According to the NATO official, nine men were killed. “These were people who had a well-established network, they were I.E.D. smugglers and also were responsible for direct attacks on Afghan security and coalition forces in those area,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue.
“When the raid took place they were armed and had material for making I.E.D.’s,” the official added.
Senior American military officials cautioned that such episodes tended to be complex and that because of the anger about civilian casualties, Mr. Karzai was under enormous pressure to speak out quickly, sometimes before investigations were complete. NATO will investigate the killings in conjunction with Mr. Karzai’s staff, the official said.
But the conflicting accounts and Mr. Karzai’s public statements underlined the tensions over civilian casualties that have become among the most contentious between the Afghan president and his international backers, as well as one of the most politically fraught for Afghans.
Several members of Parliament from Kunar, as well as neighboring Nangahar and Laghman Provinces, walked out of a parliamentary session on Monday to show their anger over the deaths. They said that 10 people had been killed and that all were civilians.
“When this story first broke, the local officials were adamant that they were all Taliban” until several members of Parliament from the area called President Karzai, the NATO official said.
The deaths occurred in the village of Ghazi Khan, in the rugged Narang Valley, a rural area difficult to reach. The Taliban are active in much of the province, along with numerous wood and arms smugglers and gem traders.
While some conventional American forces are deployed in Kunar, in the more remote areas most operations are carried out by Special Forces.
A NATO spokesman had no comment on the killings and said that no NATO forces were operating in the area.
Attacks using homemade bombs killed one American service member on Friday and another on Saturday in southern Afghanistan.
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