Ten people have been killed in violent protests against the killing of four people in a night-time raid by foreign forces in north Afghanistan.
The head of the provincial hospital said 50 more people were wounded in the protests.
Local police and residents said the two men and two women killed late yesterday in the usually peaceful northern town of Taloqan were civilians, while NATO-led forces said they were armed insurgents.
Female fighters are very rarely found among insurgent ranks in Afghanistan and the few who have been identified are mostly foreigners.
A NATO spokesman said he did not know the nationalities of the dead women.
Early today, a crowd of angry demonstrators armed with spades and axes took to the streets of Taloqan.
They were protesting against the raid, chanting 'death to America', and 'death to Karzai', and tried to storm a foreign military base nearby.
Police and Afghan security guards opened fire to disperse the crowd, which police chief Noori estimated at 3,000 people, after the violence mounted.
'There is no more room in the hospital, it is already packed with wounded,' Hassan Baseej, head of the provincial hospital, told Reuters.
He added that most of the casualties had gunshot wounds.
Civilian casualties are a major source of friction between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his Western backers, and complicate efforts to win support from ordinary Afghans for an increasingly unpopular war.
General David Petraeus, the commander of foreign troops in Afghanistan, has stepped up night raids since taking over last year, despite calls from Mr Karzai for night raids to be banned.
