Afghan War, Civilian | featured news

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales will be charged with 17 counts of murder and six counts of assault and attempted murder in connection with the massacre, a senior U.S. defense official tells NBC News.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Friday accused the United States of failing to fully cooperate with an investigation into the massacre of 16 Afghan villagers by a U.S. staff sergeant and questioned whether only one soldier could have been involved.

The call would soon become agonizingly familiar: A 28-year-old Army specialist from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, recently home from Afghanistan, had walked into a parking garage in Salt Lake City with a full set of body armor, ammunition clips and his AR-15 rifle.

The Taliban vowed revenge Monday for an "inhumane attack" in which an American soldier allegedly shot to death 16 civilians in southern Afghanistan and torched their bodies - an assault that has fueled anger still simmering after U.S. troops burned Qurans last month.

Afghan officials said Sunday that a NATO airstrike killed 14 civilians, all of them women and children, in the southern province of Helmand on Saturday night. Local officials said the strike was aimed at Taliban fighters and missed. NATO said it was investigating.

The attack on the boys amounted to one of the worst cases of mistaken killings of children by foreign-led forces in the Afghanistan war.

Platoon members charged with dismembering and photographing corpses, as well as hoarding a skull and other human bones, Army sources reveal.