Taliban Casualities of War

This LA Times article is pretty interesting.

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IN THE TALIBAN'S EYES, BAD NEWS WAS GOOD
By David Zucchino
LA Times
June 3, 2002

http://www.latimes.com/la-000039059jun03.story

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Early one morning last October, Mohammed
Yunus Mehrin was working the day shift on the city desk. He
was a reporter for the Taliban news service, hustling to the
site of an overnight American bombing raid.

Arriving at the Darulaman Palace military garrison in
southwest Kabul, Mehrin watched bulldozers unearth battered
bodies of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. He recognized their
black robes and turbans, and saw their weapons in the debris
of the flattened barracks. He counted nearly a hundred
corpses, he recalled. Among them appeared to be Afghans and
Pakistanis, Chechens and Arabs.

Writing in Persian script in his notebook, he gathered details
for his daily report. The U.S. bombing campaign was reaching a
climax in the capital, and he knew the deaths of so many
fighters was an important story. The next day, when he heard
his story on the Taliban's Voice of Shariat radio, Mehrin was
disgusted but hardly surprised. The radio said that U.S. bombs
had killed almost 100 civilians in a residential area. It
claimed that the attack was part of an American plan to sow
terror.

It was not the first time truth had suffered in time of war.
Nor was it the first time the Taliban had rewritten a news
report. In fact, said Mehrin and three other former Taliban
reporters, the Taliban routinely altered their reports to
inflate civilian casualties and minimize military losses.

If Al Qaeda commanders were killed in a safe house by an
American airstrike, they said, it was reported as Afghan
families wiped out. If two Afghan civilians were killed by an
American bomb, it was reported as a dozen dead. A destroyed
Taliban antiaircraft site was reported as a deadly attack on a
maternity ward.

"The Taliban put out some very big lies," Mehrin said at his
bare desk in a shabby newsroom now run by the American-backed
interim Afghan government. "We knew it. Ordinary people knew
it. But what could we do? All our bosses were Taliban."

While most Western agencies characterized such reports as
unsubstantiated, they were often presented as fact in the Arab
and Muslim worlds. With the Taliban clinging to control of the
capital, there were few Western reporters to counter them.

Taliban propaganda contributed to a portrait in many parts of
the world of an indiscriminate U.S. bombing campaign. On Oct.
31, just 24 days after the airstrikes began, the Taliban's
ambassador to Pakistan claimed that they had already killed
1,500 to 1,600 civilians. The envoy, Abdul Salam Zaeef,
accused the United States of genocide.

There is no doubt that, at the very least, hundreds of
civilians died in U.S. airstrikes, and many more were wounded.
Thousands of Afghans lost their homes. Leftover cluster bombs
and other unexploded ordnance continue to maim and kill
civilians.

The Taliban's misinformation campaign put the Pentagon on the
defensive early in the war. It also helped fan resentment and
outrage among Muslims worldwide that persist months later.

Some reports from the Taliban's Bakhtar News Agency were
inadvertently incorporated into tallies of civilian deaths by
Western news organizations, then included in lists published
by academics. In some lists, the same reported deaths were
counted more than once.

Sometimes reports of the same incident cite different casualty
totals. A tally by University of New Hampshire economics
professor Marc W. Herold originally listed 25 civilians -- not
the nearly 100 reported by the Taliban -- killed in the
Darulaman attack, based on a report by the Pakistan Observer,
a newspaper in Islamabad. Herold began looking into civilian
casualties in October because he was not satisfied with news
reports, and his analyses are frequently cited and debated by
journalists and relief organizations.

The Darulaman garrison was in a closed military area with no
civilian homes within two miles, making it highly unlikely
that civilians were killed.

"Twenty-five dead civilians?" said Mustafa Turgul, a military
officer now stationed next to the wrecked garrison. "That's
impossible. There were no civilians anywhere near here."

Based on updated information, Herold says he now believes that
the 25 dead were Al Qaeda fighters from Pakistan. He said the
deaths are no longer included in his overall civilian totals.

Herold's analysis of news reports of civilian casualties
attributed to U.S. attacks found the number of reported deaths
ranged from 3,050 to 3,500. A Times review of more than 2,000
news stories covering 194 incidents found a civilian death
total of 1,067 to 1,201. The Times survey omitted Taliban
reports that were not substantiated by independent reporting,
and 497 deaths not identified as either civilian or military.

Relief officials with the interim Afghan government say no
formal count has been completed, but they estimate the death
total at 1,000 to 2,000.

On Oct. 11, the fifth day of the American campaign, the
Taliban's Voice of Shariat radio said the "barbaric
bombardment" of hospitals and homes "shows the USA's seditious
goal ... [to] murder the people of Afghanistan."

Two false Taliban reports about hospital deaths were
particularly effective in portraying American bombing as
callous.

On Oct. 8, U.S. warplanes destroyed a Taliban antiaircraft and
air defense radar station atop a hill overlooking the Wazir
Akbar Khan hospital in central Kabul. Reports circulated
through the city and the Arab world that 13 to 19 women were
killed in the hospital's maternity ward when American bombs
slammed into the facility.

"Lies -- all lies," said Ghulam Hussain, an emergency room
nurse who said he was on duty that night. "Not a single person
in this hospital was hurt. No rockets, no bombs, no missiles.
Not even a window was broken."

According to Hussain and a fellow nurse, Said Ibrahim Hashimi,
the false report was the work of Mullah Ekhtiar Mohammed, a
Taliban official who was the hospital's director. He summoned
Arab reporters to his office and told them of the casualties,
the nurses said.

The story was reported as fact in the Arab world and the 13 to
19 deaths incorporated into Herold's original tally, which
cited the India Express newspaper. Herold said the deaths have
since been dropped from his total because of subsequent
reporting. "I think the real number is probably zero," he
said.

Nurses and local residents say civilians were killed by a U.S.
bomb nearby on that day. As many as 10 civilians died in a
home in the Bebe Mahru district just below the radar site,
they said.

On Oct. 31 in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, Taliban
officials escorted selected journalists to what they said was
a clinic destroyed by an American airstrike. The journalists
reported that 10 to 15 civilians had died. The story received
widespread circulation in the Arab world via the Afghan
Islamic Press, a pro-Taliban agency.

The site actually was an Al Qaeda military post and a small
clinic for Taliban wounded located next to a private home,
according to an Afghan security guard who said he witnessed
the bombing. Interviewed at the site, guard Abdul Salam said
several Al Qaeda fighters and two or three civilians from the
private home were among those killed.

Khalid Pushtoon, an official with the new Kandahar government,
said when asked about the incident: "A clinic? That was no
clinic. That place was full of Arabs," a reference to foreign
Al Qaeda fighters.

Qara Big Izid Yar, a Taliban foe who is now president of the
Afghan Red Crescent aid agency, was in Germany and Denmark
during most of the bombing campaign. He said news reports
there led him to believe that civilian deaths were in the many
thousands.

"The Taliban propaganda created a huge distortion in the
outside world, especially early in the war," Yar said.
"Civilians were killed, of course, but not nearly as many as
the Taliban said, or in the way they said."

Yar said he asked his fieldworkers across Afghanistan to file
reports on civilian deaths caused by American strikes, as
documented by local councils. He said he believes that the
final death toll will be slightly more than 1,000.

"The Americans were careful and their bombs were very
accurate," Yar said. "They checked to see for sure that they
were targeting Taliban or Al Qaeda bases or convoys. The
people who died -- it was accidental, not deliberate."

False claims by Afghan civilians seeking compensation also
have contributed to exaggerated death tolls. The claims were
incorporated into informal or anecdotal accounts by Western
relief agencies and nongovernmental organizations that work
closely with the Red Crescent and the Afghan Ministry of
Martyrs. The relief agencies and NGOs were used as sources for
early news accounts, particularly in Britain.

The Ministry of Martyrs and the Disabled pays up to $6.50 to
survivors of civilians killed in wars. Survivors also receive
rations of wheat, cooking oil, tea, sugar, soap and tarps.

Baz Mohammed Zormati, the agency's deputy minister, said his
staff tries to verify applications, but he conceded that some
false claims have slipped through. Many Afghans believe that
claiming deaths from American airstrikes could entitle them to
generous U.S. payments. Zormati estimated that perhaps 2,000
civilians have been killed by U.S. bombings, although he said
his ministry lacks the resources for an accurate count.

Yar said, "These are very poor people, and this is a lot of
money for them, so sometimes they will say anything to get
it."

Mehrin and his fellow reporters said they went to bombing
sites to gather fresh firsthand evidence. They said they
turned in accurate reports to their Taliban editors, who
rewrote them.

Reporter Mohammed Ismail Qanay dug into a file room at the
Ministry of Information and Culture and emerged with a
dogeared folder labeled Archive File 67. Inside was the neatly
typed Taliban report of the Darulaman garrison bombing
describing nearly 100 dead civilians.

"Our bosses called this the war against the Christian
crusaders," Qanay said. "They thought that if the people were
told that the Americans were deliberately bombing civilians,
they would rise up and kill the invaders."

Wasy, a spokesman for the interim government, who goes by one
name, said previous Afghan governments also exaggerated
civilian casualties.

"If you added them all up, maybe they'd exceed the population
of Afghanistan," Wasy said. "The Taliban were following this
tradition, trying to prove the American 'smart' bombs weren't
so smart and the Americans wanted to terrorize the
population."

Zabiullah Alam, another former Taliban reporter, said
journalists joked among themselves about the alchemy their
superiors performed with numbers. "The standard rule was: If
five civilians were killed, 15 more would 'die' on the radio
report, for a total of 20," he said.

If the reporters had insisted on filing accurate stories, Alam
said, "We'd have been ... " and he slashed his finger across
his throat.

With Western reporters massed in Pakistan last fall, trying to
get into Afghanistan, United Nations officials in Islamabad
also provided reports on civilian casualties. Stephanie
Bunker, a U.N. spokeswoman, said the U.N. reported only
casualties confirmed by witnesses, such as U.N. Afghan
staffers or officials with nongovernmental organizations.

Bunker said false Taliban reports were picked up by some news
agencies and repeated by independent computer analyses,
inflating the total deaths reported. "It wasn't multiple
sources. It was the same source -- Bakhtar -- reported over
and over again," she said.

Through it all, the reporters from the Taliban news agency
dutifully rode their bicycles to the Information Ministry at
dawn every day, then piled into rattletrap government cars to
race to the latest bombing site.

Qanay recalled visiting a Taliban military fuel depot in the
north Kabul neighborhood of Wazir Abad after it was destroyed
by U.S. warplanes Oct. 20. He said he found no evidence that
anyone had been killed, either fighters or civilians.

But the next day, he said, the Taliban's Voice of Shariat
radio reported 10 civilians killed.

Ten days later, Qanay said, he visited a home attacked by
American planes in the northwest Kabul neighborhood of Khair
Khana. Residents told him that five pickup trucks with Taliban
fighters had been parked outside the house. Three vehicles
were destroyed by a U.S. warplane, killing several Taliban
fighters. The other two vehicles escaped. Five civilians in
the house were killed, Qanay said.

His Taliban bosses deleted the vehicles and fighters from his
report, he said, and issued a bulletin saying 15 civilians had
been killed.

Qanay has been promoted to bureau chief for the Ministry of
Information and Culture, now run by the interim government.

Gone from the newsroom are the sayings of the Taliban leader,
Mullah Mohammed Omar. The office now features a portrait of
the assassinated Northern Alliance commander, Ahmed Shah
Masoud.

Qanay keeps a photo of himself from his days as a reluctant
co-conspirator in the Taliban's propaganda factory, when he
was required to wear the tunic and pantaloons, a turban and a
flowing beard. Qanay is now cleanshaven, bare-headed and wears
a gray pinstripe suit.

He still covers the war and its aftermath. His dispatches are
edited, he said, but they are no longer distorted or entirely
rewritten.

"The government is our boss, and the government still decides
what the news is," Qanay said, seated in the newsroom. "Our
only orders are to try to tell the truth."