The defence ministry in Kabul confirmed the strike conducted by Afghan and US forces was aimed at fighters belonging to IS, but refused to share details of civilians casualty caused by the attack.

Attaullah Khogyani, a spokesman for the provincial governor of Nangarhar confirmed the air strike. “The government is investigating the incident, so far nine bodies were collected from the attack site near a pine nut field.”

According to Jawaid Zaman, presidential adviser on tribal affairs, residents of the area had notified the authorities that they would be collecting dried fruit. As many as 50 people were in the fields when the aerial attack occurred, he said.

US forces in Kabul were not immediately available for a comment.

Malik Rahat Gul, a tribal elder in Wazir Tangi said the air strike happened at a time when tired workers, mainly daily wage earners, had gathered near their tent after harvesting pine nuts in a field nearby.

“The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone targeted them,” said Gul.

Angry residents carried 12 bodies to the provincial capital of Jalalabad on Thursday morning protesting the attack, said provincial council head Ahmad Ali Hazrat. Many more people are believed to be missing.

Meanwhile, a powerful early morning suicide truck bomb devastated a hospital in the south of the country on Thursday, killing as many as 20 people and wounding more than 90 others.

The Taliban, who claimed responsibility for the bombing, have carried out nearly daily attacks since peace talks with the US collapsed earlier this month.

Thursday’s massive explosion destroyed part of the hospital in Qalat, the capital of southern Zabul province, and left a fleet of ambulances broken and battered.

Local residents, many of whom had come to see their sick family members, used shawls and blankets to carry the wounded inside the destroyed building, while authorities scrambled to take the worst of the wounded to hospitals in nearby Kandahar.

In the hours immediately after the suicide truck bombing, there were contradictory figures of the dead and wounded. The provincial governor’s spokesman Gul Islam Seyal put the death toll at 12 but said authorities were on the scene sifting through the debris. Atta Jan Haqbayan, head of the provincial council, put the death toll at 20.

Morning prayers had just finished when worshippers were stunned by the ear-splitting blast that destroyed parts of a mosque near the hospital and the hospital building, said Mahboob Hakimi, a resident of Qalat.

Windows in his home nearly two kilometres away were shattered by the blast, he said.

A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahed, said in a tweet the target was a nearby intelligence office, which he claimed was destroyed and “tens of intelligence operatives killed/wounded”.

Haqbayan said the wall of the National Security Department (NDS) building was damaged. He could not say whether any personnel were among the casualties.

The provincial governor, Rahmatullah Yarmal, said many of the dead and wounded were women and children. On Twitter, a member of the Afghan National Security Forces posted a picture of a six-month-old child saying they were searching through the rubble for the parents and sought the public’s help.

President Ashraf Ghani’s spokesman, Sediq Sediqqi, condemned the attack in Zabul, tweeting that the Taliban “continue to target civilians while their leaders travel to Iran and Russia,” a reference to the Taliban negotiators recent forays seeking support abroad.

Suhail Shaheen, the Taliban’s spokesman for their political office in the Middle Eastern state of Qatar, said in a tweet that a ceasefire had been part of a US-Taliban deal before President Trump declared it “dead”. He did not elaborate and earlier defended Taliban attacks prior to an agreement signing, saying both sides in the conflict had carried out attacks.

Meanwhile, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai made an appeal to the Taliban to end their attacks and to negotiate with Afghans, saying that the country can construct its own peace deal without the US and asked for American troops to leave.

Karzai was speaking to local reporters invited to his home in the Afghan capital. He was critical of US air strikes and of Ghani’s decision early in his tenure to sign a forces protection agreement with the US, saying it gave Americans immunity from Afghan civilian deaths.

Karzai was a vocal critic of the so-called Bilateral Security Agreement during his time in office, refusing to sign it.

The former president, whose press meeting was televised, opposed upcoming polls saying, “elections can only happen in an independent, peaceful country, not now.”

Additional reporting by Associated Press