http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-060302badnews.story THE UNTOLD WAR In the Taliban's Eyes, Bad News Was Good Asia: Civilian deaths from U.S. bombing were exaggerated to sway opinion. By DAVID ZUCCHINO Times Staff Writer
June 3 2002
Second of two parts
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."