Newsday
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — There are no rooms to be found in Peshawar’s main hotels and guesthouses, which have been jammed since mid-September with foreign journalists watching the fallout of the attacks in the United States. But spare beds abound at the city’s major hospitals, which reserved hundreds of bunks in anticipation of civilian casualties from Afghanistan that have yet to materialize.
That’s not to say there haven’t been civilian victims since the U.S. bombardment of Taliban-controlled territory in Afghanistan began Oct. 7. Four men working for a U.N. funded land mine clearing agency died when a U.S. bomb hit their compound in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Oct. 8. On Monday night, a civilian man died in a Peshawar hospital of wounds suffered four days earlier, a doctor said, and the Red Cross said Tuesday that a U.S. misfire had blasted one of its warehouses in Kabul and injured a man. The Taliban said 13 civilians died in U.S. attacks Monday night and that hundreds have been wounded in other airstrikes, statements that could not be confirmed.
Hard-line Islamic groups say that proves the United States is targeting innocent Muslims, generating sometimes violent protests across Pakistan and revving up popular anger toward the government for assisting the U.S. mission.
But puzzled doctors in Peshawar, just 30 miles from the Afghan border, say the flood of victims they had expected to pour over the border simply does not exist. So scarce are war-wounded here that one of two able to speak — a man with an arm wound — fled the Naseer Teaching Hospital a few days ago because he was tired of repeating his story to the journalists seeking him out, said Dr. Ahmed Zeb.
"He was only a single man. If there were 10, the pressure would not have been so bad, but he was fed up," said Zeb as he led a visitor through the hospital’s empty wards, where 60 of the 200 beds have been set aside for war casualties that haven’t come.
There are some theories for the small number of wounded at the three hospitals equipped to handle serious casualties: that victims are being treated in Afghanistan; that they’re being barred from crossing the border, or that the Taliban’s charges that hundreds of civilians have been wounded are not true.
The last one is the one U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld supports. He told Qatar’s Al-Jazeera television in an interview broadcast Wednesday that there was no truth to Taliban claims of massive civilian casualties and that many of those that had occurred may have been the result of Taliban fire.
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