Afghan civilian deaths likely in hundreds

By Laura King

Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan — The cemetery is little more than a scattering of stones across a dusty hillside. A few tattered green flags flutter in the winter wind, marking the resting place of casualties of war.

Such grave sites are haunting reminders of civilian deaths that have scarred the U.S. air war in Afghanistan.

But authorities have not calculated Afghanistan’s civilian death toll in the war on terrorism, and the dimension of this tragedy is not fully known. Although estimates have placed the civilian dead in the thousands, a review by The Associated Press suggests the toll may be in the mid-hundreds, a figure reached by examining hospital records, visiting bomb sites and interviewing eyewitnesses and officials.

That number will surely rise as more exhaustive surveys are compiled by independent bodies. Neither the U.S. nor the Afghan government is attempting a tally, but two Afghan nongovernmental groups are. The New York-based group Human Rights Watch also plans a study.

One factor in some inflated estimates was the distortion of casualty reports by the Taliban regime. Afghan journalists have told AP that Taliban officials systematically doctored reports of civilian deaths to push their estimate to 1,500 in the first three weeks of the war on the Taliban and Osama bin-Laden’s al-Qaida.

The U.S. military has several times owned up to errors that killed Afghan civilians, but the Pentagon stresses they were never deliberately targeted.

"Any loss of innocent life is a shame," said Gen. Tommy Franks, the U.S. war commander. At the same time, he declared, "This has been the most accurate war ever fought in the nation’s history"

Franks, speaking last week to the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that of the 18,000 bombs dropped on Afghanistan, 10,000 were precision munitions — the largest percentage in any war. Still, some went astray.

The bombing hit all the cities and large swaths of countryside, and AP reporters visited many of these areas to gather data on civilian casualties. Their reporting and other reliable counts — by no means complete — in the months since then suggest a civilian death toll ranging from 500 to 600.

In some places where the bombing ceased months ago, the toll may be close to complete. In Kabul, the capital, an independent aid group put the total at 67, and AP’s count was 70. Both took into account hospital tallies as well as some families’ practice of simple burials without documentation by a morgue or hospital.

Besides the 70 counted in Kabul, the AP tally of civilian deaths includes: 81 in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar; 55 in the eastern city of Jalalabad; 10 in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif; 18 in the western city of Herat; 25 in and near Spinboldak, a town south of Kandahar; and 55 in the village of Karam, near Jalalabad. An additional 167 were killed in three villages in the heavily bombed Tora Bora region: 155 of those in Kama Ado, five in Agom and seven in Pacir.

In Paktia province south of Kabul, at least 27 died in the December bombing of a convoy and roadside villages. In later airstrikes in and around the village of Niazi in Paktia’s Zawar district, local officials put the civilian toll at several dozen, with at least 18 of those confirmed by an Afghan nongovernmental group called AREA — whose count was cut short by continuing bombardment. AP saw 35 destroyed houses there.

Earlier in the war, in villages near what had been the Taliban front lines north of Kabul, nine were killed, hospital and aid workers told AP.

At the height of the bombing, even firsthand reporting could not always yield certainty. On Oct. 14, the Taliban took journalists to Karam to view the aftermath of an airstrike it claimed had killed 200 civilians. But reporters counted 35 graves, and villagers said 20 other victims had been taken to their ancestral villages for burial.

During the bombardment, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef repeatedly accused the United States of genocide. He was the source of the claim that 1,500 Afghan civilians had died in the airstrikes.

Afghan journalists for the official Bakhtar news agency, whose reports were used as a basis for Taliban claims, now say their dispatches were freely doctored.

Mohammed Ismail, then a Bakhtar reporter, said that in one typical instance, he went to the scene of an airstrike in the city’s Khair Khana neighborhood on Oct. 20 and saw eight bodies.

"But it was changed in our dispatch to 20," he said. When he heard the report later on Taliban-run radio, the figure had gone up to 30, he said.

Bakhtar journalists also said they were ordered to report military deaths as civilian ones.

Reporter Younis Mihireen recalled a direct hit on a Taliban and al-Qaida housing complex in the west of the city in late October, in which about 60 fighters were killed.

"I saw it with my own eyes — there were no civilians anywhere nearby, and I reported this," he said. "But the dispatch said all the dead people were civilians, not fighters."

Zaeef himself sometimes called the Taliban’s Information Ministry, which oversaw Bakhtar, for details on actual locations of airstrikes that killed or injured civilians, but always inflated the figures when he relayed them to the world press, Ismail said.

International news organizations, including AP, reported fast-mounting Taliban casualty claims, always with the caveat that Afghanistan was almost completely closed to the outside world, and the figures could not be verified.

In some cases, such dispatches became the basis for research. A University of New Hampshire economist, Marc Herold, in December cited news reports in arriving at a total of up to 5,000 civilian dead. He has since revised the figures downward to between 3,100 and 3,800.

Other counts were significantly lower. The Cambridge, Mass.-based Project on Defense Alternatives, a private think tank that studies defense strategies, estimates the number to the end of December at 1,000 to 1,300. The study was based on selected Western media and discounted any reports based on Taliban figures.

The Pentagon says counting civilian casualties is impossible without onsite investigations that cannot be carried out in wartime. The Afghan government is too short of cash and resources to carry out a comprehensive count. The United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross also say they have not compiled any nationwide figure.

The totals, though, may become clearer as Afghan-based humanitarian organizations — well positioned to deal with cultural complexities and the lack of formal record keeping typical in rural areas — start their counts.

The Afghan Red Crescent said it is mobilizing workers for an exhaustive survey of civilian deaths in every province.

AREA, a nongovernmental group that gets German government funding, is already counting casualties in two hard-hit provinces. But the more time passes, the harder it will be to get anything approaching an accurate count, said Khial Shah, AREA’s Kabul director.

"It’s winter now. Physical signs fade. Families become harder to trace. Everyone’s recollections get confused," he said. "We need direct observation to be as accurate as possible. So sooner is better — much better."