WASHINGTON - After a week of sharp public disagreement over the civilian casualty toll in a US raid in western Afghanistan, officials with the United Nations, the Afghan government and the Nato force in the country have announced that all sides had agreed to a joint investigation, according to a media report. As many as 90 civilians, about two-thirds of them children, were killed in the Aug 22 raid in Herat province, the UN the Afghan government have said. But US military officials have sharply disputed those numbers, saying they believe that about 30 people were killed in the early morning strike on the village of Azizabad, only five of them civilians. The toll represents the greatest number of civilian fatalities caused by Western troops in a single incident since the US attack on Afghanistan  nearly seven years ago. In the wake of the raid, President Hamid Karzai made his most strongly worded appeal yet for greater caution by Western troops during combat operations in populated areas. He said the deaths and their circumstances warranted a broad re-examination of operations by coalition troops, who are trying to contain an increasingly powerful Taliban-led insurgency. "The issue is sensitive for all sides. The Afghan government is keenly aware that such casualties erode public support for the Western troop presence and heighten anger toward the US-backed Karzai administration," The Los Angeles Times said in a dispatch from Kabul. Western military officials claim that the Taliban were using civilians as pawns. Taliban fighters, they say, routinely place civilians in harm's way by using populated areas to stage strikes against Western forces, as well as carrying out suicide bombings that are far likelier to kill civilians than better-protected troops. Coalition officials also accuse the militants of trying to hide their own battlefield casualties by falsely labelling them as civilian dead. Further clouding the issue, compensation payments offered to the families of those accidentally killed by Western and Afghan troops sometimes spur false claims, military officials say. Continuing tensions among the parties were evident in the fact that plans for a joint probe were announced by the UN and the North Atlantic Treat Organisation's International Security Assistance Force - not the separate US-led coalition, whose forces took part in the raid. Meanwhile, the Minister for Hajj and Religious Affairs and head of the investigation team Nimatullah Shahrani said Saturday that the air strikes left 90 civilians dead and injured six others while presenting his report to President Karzai. Shahrani also said that eight houses were completely destroyed and seven others were partly damaged in the air strikes which lasted for six hours. "The locals had shown the body parts of the victims including hands, legs and heads of those killed in the tragic incident to the investigating team," said Shahrani. The US-led Coalition forces also took with themselves five more civilians after the bloody operation, the statement said. Based on the information of the locals, the investigation team stressed there were no militants in the areas where the air raids were carried out. Both the Coalition forces and Afghan Defence Ministry at the beginning disputed the claim, saying 25 insurgents and five civilians were killed in the raid. The Afghan cabinet also called for regulating the authority and responsibilities of international troops in the war-torn country after the huge civilian casualties in western Herat province.