By Elyas Wahdat

MUQIBEL, Afghanistan, March 19 (Reuters) - U.S.-led coalition troops killed six civilians, including two children and a woman, in a raid in southeastern Afghanistan, the district chief and village residents said Wednesday.

The issue of civilian casualties is a sensitive one as it undermines public support for the presence of foreign troops and the pro-Western government of President Hamid Karzai.

"We will join the jihad" and "Death to Bush", chanted residents of the village of Muqibel in the province of Khost where the incident happened late on Tuesday.

Foreign troops raided two adjacent houses belonging to two brothers and killed three men, two children and a woman from the two families, district governor Gul Qasim told Reuters.

The children, both boys no older than 10-years-old bore bullet wounds to the head and chest, a Reuters witness said.

A large angry crowd of men gathered as villagers helped the local imam wash the bodies before burial. Women could be heard screaming and wailing from inside the houses.

Two men had been detained during the raid, residents said.

The troops belonged to the U.S.-led coalition, said a spokeswoman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The U.S.-led coalition has about 7,000 troops in Afghanistan, separate from the ISAF, involved in anti-terror operations.

The killings came on the same day two members of parliament said ISAF planes had killed more than 30 people, including civilians, in the southern province of Helmand.

ISAF strongly denies any civilians were killed in the airstrike which it said killed around 12 Taliban insurgents travelling in three vehicles on an isolated road some distance from any houses.

It was impossible to independently verify the conflicting accounts of the Helmand incident due to the poor security in the area, but such reports reinforce Afghan public perceptions that foreign forces are careless about civilian lives.

NATO and foreign forces say they take every precaution to avoid civilian casualties and ISAF says it tightened its procedures for launching airstrikes last June, a move it says has resulted in fewer deaths of ordinary Afghans. (Writing by Jon Hemming; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

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