U.S. GIs Wounded In Afghanistan

Explosions in southern and eastern Afghanistan killed three civilians and slightly wounded three U.S. soldiers, military and government officials said Monday.

The soldiers were injured on Saturday evening when their Humvee hit a landmine or a bomb on a road near Ghazni city, some 80 miles south of the capital Kabul, military spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty said.

Other members of the patrol detained three men near the scene, "including one who was hiding in an outhouse and one who was cowering under a burka," Hilferty said of the all-encompassing robe that many Afghan women wear in public.

Hilferty provided no further details about the suspects. He said the three wounded soldiers were from the 10th Mountain Division. Their names were withheld.

Meanwhile, there were conflicting reports about three civilian deaths in a remote village in southern Uruzgan province.

Haji Farooq, a government official in the Char Chino district, told The Associated Press a mine exploded as a military convoy passed through a village on Saturday afternoon, killing three bystanders and wounding six others. No soldiers were reported injured.

Farooq said there were four American armored vehicles in the convoy. But Hilferty said he had no information about any such incident in that area, some 250 miles southwest of Kabul.

"The armored car wasn't badly damaged," Farooq said by telephone. "They towed it away."

But district police chief Gulam Haider said the casualties were caused by U.S. and Afghan soldiers who opened fire after the explosion.

"They started firing immediately after the mine exploded," he said.

Haider said two children, aged 10 and 14, and one man had died. Seven more men were wounded.

Ghazni and Uruzgan are among a string of southern and eastern provinces wracked by a stubborn Taliban-led insurgency. More than 130 people have died in violence this year alone, some of it linked also to drug smuggling and warlord rivalry.

U.S. forces have vowed to crush militants this year with a combination of military operations and reconstruction they say should also help them track down fugitives like Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.

"Obviously spring is generally the beginning of the campaigning season in Afghanistan," said Hilferty. "It has been historically, and we do believe that the enemies of Afghanistan will begin to target softer targets."

"The weather here is warmer now," reports CBS News Correspondent Lara Logan. "The winter snows have thawed and that makes it easier for combatants on both sides to move around, which is why there's been an increase in enemy activity, what the U.S. would call enemy activity, and certainly an increase in the intensity of the U.S. operations here as well."