France shocked by Afghan deaths

PARIS (Reuters) - France reacted in shock on Wednesday to the death of 10 of its soldiers in an ambush in Afghanistan and questions began to be asked about the country's worst military loss in 25 years.

President Nicolas Sarkozy, who flew to Kabul on Tuesday, said France was committed to its engagement in Afghanistan where it took part in the 2001 invasion to topple the Taliban.

But the opposition Socialists called for a parliamentary committee to meet and doubts were expressed about the official account of the incident in which the 10 soldiers were killed and 21 wounded in a fierce mountain battle.

"Afghanistan -- should we leave?" ran the front-page headline of the Thursday edition of left-wing newspaper Liberation, which is strongly critical of Sarkozy's policies.

The daily Le Monde quoted an unidentified French soldier wounded in the ambush who said there had been communications breakdowns and long delays in relieving the outnumbered patrol.

It also said some soldiers had been hit by the allied air strikes called in to help them.

The Pentagon said there had been no reports of soldiers killed by close air support and the head of the French general staff denied on Tuesday there had been any major tactical errors made by the patrol.

But families of some of the men, whose bodies arrived in Paris on Wednesday night, reacted bitterly.

"We shouldn't have sent these young men to go and get killed," Roland Gregoire, the uncle of one of the dead, told Reuters. "What's certain is that they died in an ambush, like game animals," he said.

Army chief of staff General Elrick Irastorza said lessons would be drawn from the engagement to "improve procedures and our way of working".

HEAVIEST LOSS

The heaviest loss by the French army since a suicide bomber killed 58 paratroopers in Lebanon in 1983, the attack raised the number of French soldiers killed in Afghanistan to 24 and was the worst loss by allied forces there since the 2001 invasion.

Flags flew at half mast in the southwestern town of Castres, where the 8th Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment, the unit in which most of the killed and wounded served, is based.

French television carried live coverage of the arrival of some of the most seriously wounded in Paris and a commemoration was planned on Thursday at Les Invalides, the golden-domed palace where France's war dead are remembered.

Calls for a pullout have so far come only from the extremes of the political spectrum -- the Communist party and the leader of the far-right National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

But there were growing questions about the strategy followed by France and its allies in the region.

Socialist party leader Francois Hollande, who had previously criticized Sarkozy's decision to send an extra 700 troops to the region, said parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee should meet, although he held back from urging a pullout.

He expressed sympathy for the families and paid tribute to the soldiers and said there should be no instant decisions.

"But there also has to be a time for reflection on the sense of our presence in Afghanistan," he said. "The priority should first be reconstruction, rebuilding Afghanistan and above all training the Afghan army."

(Additional reporting by Elizabeth Pineau and Francois Murphy in Paris, Nicolas Fichot in Toulouse and Andrew Gray in Washington; Editing by Giles Elgood)