Civilian casualties -- is the Taliban a credible source??

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Martin--

please delete the poorly formated version (with too many typos) of this (just below, with same subject line.

Thanks --

JB

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Here is ONE of MANY reports from earlier this year -- PRE 9/11 and US attacks -- of what the Taliban does to Afghani civilians. The UN and other human rights groups have been keeping a record of these Taliban atrocities against the Afghani people for years.

Why woud they not lie?? Why wouldn't they kill more of their own people?? Why woud they not do ANYTHING to create propaganda against the US??

I would urge any and all -- who have any sense of objectivity about the US left -- to question the Taliban's unverifiable assertions of civilian causalities.

The village where they said there were 200 hundred killed by A US bomb (one time they tried to say 300) when toured/filmed 3 days later by journalists the Taliban picked and were "accompanied" by Taliban guards, the journalists reported no more than 18 or so graves.

The question about these graves also exists: all/some/any of the graves "occupied" or are they part of an effort to "DIS-inform" given the journalists tour was orchestrated by the Taliban.

I don't buy everything the US says..not by a long shot!!!

However, I'll be damned if I'll not question the claims of "gang" -- well known to be EXTREMELY brutal and ruthless against thier own people -- like the Taliban.

Seems a GREAT many of the media writers such as those posted here (they are not reporters, IMO) -- and critics America of all kinds -- have pretty low standards of what they accept as credible information...many of those are among those that frequent this board.

JB

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REMEMBER -- this report (below) was made long before the US were "involved"!!

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Washington Post, 2/20/2001

Many Witnesses Report Massacre by Taliban

By Pamela Constable Washington Post

Foreign Service Monday, February 19, 2001; Page A25

NEW DELHI, Feb. 19 -- The Hazara people of Yakaolang have seen much death, destruction and duplicity in the past several years as civil war has raged around them, with the ruling Taliban militia and its armed opponents fighting for control of their region of north-central Afghanistan.

But last month, Yakaolang was singled out for a special kind of horror: the systematic slaughter of about 300 unarmed Hazaras by Taliban forces, according to a report issued today by Human Rights Watch and numerous sources interviewed in Pakistan last week.

Taliban officials denied initial reports of the Jan. 8 killings, saying that any deaths were the result of fighting between their troops and opposition forces. They have refused requests by journalists to visit the area.

But witnesses and international aid workers in the region have provided detailed accounts of the mass killings, in which Taliban troops were repeatedly described as rounding up unarmed men and boys from their homes and work sites and shooting them in the head.

"They killed everyone they saw," said one foreign aid worker who has visited Yakaolang and was interviewed in Pakistan on condition of anonymity. "These people couldn't care less who was ruling them. They just wanted to be left alone. We are afraid to come forward, but if nothing is said, then nothing will be done to stop the next killing."

According to New York-based Human Rights Watch and interviews by The Washington Post, the killings appear to have been carried out partly in retribution against communities the Taliban believes supported its opponents, and partly in an ongoing sectarian crusade against Hazaras, a minority ethnic group that is Shiite Muslim. Members of the Taliban are Sunni Muslims who regard Shiites as infidels.

In the past three years, there have been reports of a half-dozen other mass killings of Hazaras by the Taliban in Afghanistan's central highlands. In the worst incident, Taliban forces reportedly slaughtered at least 2,000 civilians, mostly Hazaras, in August 1998 in retaliation for the execution of about 2,000 Taliban prisoners by ethnic opposition forces in May 1997.

The Taliban, a radical Islamic militia, seized control of most of Afghanistan in 1996 after two decades of war, first between Afghan forces and Soviet occupation troops and then among various Afghan factions. But opposition forces in northern and central Afghanistan, led by ethnic minorities, have continued to wage war against the Taliban, and the two sides have repeatedly gained and lost territory in several provinces.

The Yakaolang incident followed a period of seesaw combat between the Taliban and local opposition forces, led in part by a Hazara commander and Shiite cleric, Karim Khalili. Khalili retook the area in late December after more than two years of Taliban control. But beginning Jan. 7, Taliban troops regrouped and advanced on Yakaolang.

When the troops reached Nayak, the district center, they formed search parties and moved from house to house, rounding up men and boys and executing them, witnesses said. The dead included employees of a leprosy clinic, a tuberculosis clinic, several schools and the Center for Cooperation on Afghanistan, a Pakistan-based aid group.

One witness told Human Rights Watch he was in a group of about 100 men who were rounded up and ordered to move. "At first the pace was slow," he said, but then "the soldiers started to whip the detainees and ordered us to move more quickly." The report said the group was taken to a relief office in Nayak, where most were executed.

Other witnesses said they saw piles of bodies in surrounding villages as well as in the district center. They said several groups of village elders, including those from another ethnic group loyal to the Taliban, attempted to meet with Taliban commanders, but most of them were also killed.

According to a confidential report by a Pakistan-based aid group, the Taliban troops were "ordered by their commanders to kill any male person between 13 and 70." The Taliban returned the bodies to their villages and told female relatives to bury them.

Another report compiled by an aid agency identified 144 individuals from other villages who were killed.

A source in Pakistan whose family is from Yakaolang said his brother, brother-in-law and their three tenants were killed. He said they did not support the opposition and that they had not fled from the advancing Taliban troops "because they had good relations with the Taliban and were confident they would not be killed."

A foreign aid worker familiar with the complex history of ethnic and political alliances in the region said the killings appeared to be "both discriminate and indiscriminate." The source said that in addition to rounding up people who opposed the Taliban, the troops also targeted individuals who were loyal to the Taliban and even employed by them.

The source, who also requested anonymity, said the Taliban's primary motive seemed to be to "teach a lesson" to an area prone to "native rebellion," regardless of the allegiances of the individuals killed. However, the Taliban was driven out of Yakaolang by opposition forces only two weeks after the killings.

Human Rights Watch called on the United Nations today to investigate the killings. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan expressed concern in a recent statement about "credible reports of widespread summary executions of Hazara civilians by the Taliban." He asked the Taliban to "take immediate steps to control their forces" and bring those responsible to justice.

Human Rights Watch also detailed an incident last May in which it said Taliban forces executed at least 31 civilians, most of them Hazaras, near the Robatak Pass in the same region.

"The two massacres . . . constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law" and "raise grave concerns about the security of civilian populations in Taliban-administered areas," the report said. It described a "pattern of [Taliban] efforts to intimidate minority populations," and to deter them from cooperating with opposition forces by detaining and executing male civilians.



-- Jackson Brown (Jackson_Brown@deja.com), October 16, 2001

Answers

I was furious when I saw our media give credibility to the Taliban by passing on their propaganda. How dare they use our T.V.'s to give the Taliban air time? I will no longer listen to this garbage!

-- Judy/W (Judywhalen@aol.com), October 16, 2001.

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