The already tense US and Nato ties with Afghanistan were dealt another blow yesterday when photographs appeared in an American newspaper of US soldiers posing with the bodies of dead Afghan insurgents.
Senior US officials and Nato's top commander in the country, US General John Allen, moved quickly to condemn the pictures even before they were published by the Los Angeles Times.
In one of the pictures a paratrooper posed next to an unofficial patch placed beside a body that read "Zombie Hunter"; in another, soldiers posed with Afghan police holding the severed legs of an insurgent bomber.
The appearance of the pictures, taken in 2010, comes at a sensitive time in US-Afghan relations, following the release of a video in January that showed four US marines urinating on Afghan insurgent corpses. The inadvertent burning of copies of the Koran at a Nato air base triggered riots that left 30 dead.
Last month a US army sergeant killed 17 civilians in two southern Afghan villages.
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