KABUL, Afghanistan — Military specialists with the CIA were among an American force accused of killing more than 50 civilians during the hunt for a Taliban commander in Afghanistan.

Afghan community leaders in the Shindand district on the Iranian border say U.S. forces destroyed several villages during the operation last month.

The American mission was conducted outside the NATO command structure and was therefore subject to different rules of engagement.

It is understood that the special forces unit included men known in America as CIA paramilitaries, while support was provided by aircraft including the C130 Specter gunship.

“There were huge planes overhead,” said Haji Abdul Rasool, a tribal elder from Bakhtabad village. “I saw the bodies of children in the wreckage. After two nights we found one man alive under the rubble.”

His account is corroborated by teams sent to the area by the United Nations, the Afghan government and Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission.

” We have found 57 civilian deaths in this incident,” said Khazi Gulam Nabi Hakak, a human-rights commission investigator. “This includes 10 women and at least 11 children. Some were drowned escaping across a river.”

The United Nations said it had accounts of 49 civilian deaths and 1,600 families displaced by the violence. Staff at Shindand hospital said they treated 26 people, including women, children, and the elderly. The operation has caused anxiety at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels and in Kabul.

U.S. forces initially hailed the mission as a success. A U.S. Army press release claimed 136 Taliban fighters and one American soldier died in the fighting, while there were “no civilian casualties reported.”

Local MPs and tribal elders say people were incensed when American troops searched their houses for a local man, Mullah Akhtar.