Kabul, Afghanistan ? NATO has an image problem in Afghanistan – and a U.S. soldier who fired a Humvee’s machine gun into a crowd of civilians after a deadly suicide bombing Saturday shows why.

Despite the Taliban quickly claiming responsibility for the car bomb attack on a U.S. convoy that left four Afghan civilians dead, people on the street became enraged after American bullets landed in the crowd, killing one and wounding two.

Some 50 to 100 people began chanting “Death to America,” and others jabbed their fingers at Afghan police.

“They are against us. They are against Afghans,” said one man, Abdul Rahim. He said the civilian deaths should be stopped. “Otherwise we will join hands and stand against them alongside the others” – a reference to the Taliban’s hard-line Islamic militants.

“They are killing Muslims,” he said.

Zalmai Khan, Kabul’s deputy police chief, and U.S. officials called the shooting an accident, saying the gun inadvertently fired when the soldier shifted it from one side to another.

But the gunfire was enough to change the headlines. International news Web sites no longer led with a suicide bomber killing four Afghans. One instead said: “U.S. forces kill Afghan haphazardly.” Another read: “U.S. troops kill Afghan civilians.”

The shooting came the same day that four senior officials in NATO’s International Security Assistance Force summoned journalists to discuss civilian casualties, which is hurting support – both in Afghanistan and in NATO’s European capitals – for the international Afghan mission.

An Afghan official at the briefing said civilian deaths “are currently the main concern” of Afghans, underlining the repeated calls from President Hamid Karzai for foreign troops to do more to prevent civilian casualties.

Speaking a day after a NATO defense ministers meeting in Belgium that stressed the need to avoid such deaths, the ISAF officials said they had avoided many casualties by calling off military missions that could have endangered civilians.

They also displayed a colorful graph showing the vast majority of civilian deaths are caused by Taliban bombs.

A much smaller, but still sizable, portion was attributed to the U.S.-led coalition, a separate command structure of 13,000 soldiers conducting anti-terrorist raids. Civilian deaths blamed on the 36,000-strong ISAF, which is responsible for fighting insurgents, represented the tiniest sliver.