Taliban threaten more war crimes against captive Christians

AP/Washington Times:

Taliban militants threatened yesterday to kill at least 18 kidnapped South Korean Christians, including 15 women, within 24 hours unless the Asian nation withdraws its 200 troops from Afghanistan.

In the largest abduction of foreigners since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, several dozen fighters kidnapped the South Koreans at gunpoint from a bus in Ghazni province on Thursday, said Ali Shah Ahmadzai, the provincial police chief.

"They have got until tomorrow at noon to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan, or otherwise we will kill the 18 Koreans," Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, who claimed to speak for the Taliban, told the Associated Press yesterday via satellite telephone from an undisclosed location. "Right now they are safe and sound."

The abductions came a day after two Germans and five Afghan colleagues working on a dam project were kidnapped in central Wardak province.

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Capturing non combatants and making threats against their lives in order to extort concessions is an obvious war crime, but the AP treats it as though it is just a political demand. There is no mention of the fact that it is a war crime. It is one of the ways the media has bent over backwards to treat the enemy "fairly."

There is a strong Christian tradition in Korea and not just in the South. The Christians were eager to help the US and its allies in the Korean war and provided valuable assistance an intelligence in the run up to the Inchon invasion. The Marines who were breaking out from the Chosin Reservoir in the North also encounter Korean Christians who wanted to escaped the communist atheist despots.

CNN is reporting that the Taliban actually murdered two Germans when their extortion attempt against the German government failed.

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The Taliban warned it would kill the Germans unless the German government promised to withdraw the more than 3,000 troops it has stationed in northern Afghanistan as part of NATO's International Security Assistance Force.

Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, speaking by phone to journalist Thomas Coghlan, said the first German was killed at five minutes past noon Saturday and that the second man was set to be killed an hour later unless they heard from the German or Afghan government.

"The second German was executed at 1:20 p.m.," Ahmadi said. "We waited an extra 20 minutes, but there was no contact from either the German government or the Afghan government. Therefore we killed him as we said that we would."

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The CNN story does not mention the Geneva Conventions are the Taliban's obvious war crime in the execution of prisoners in an attempt to extort concessions out of governments. This is a serious problem with reporting in this war. It is not a judgment call to call violations of the Geneva Conventions a war crime. What we have here is the media double standard where the Geneva Conventions are seen as a unilateral contract binding only our side in a war. It is also clear that the liberal premise that if we abide by them even when we are not bound to it will help captives is totally false and without merit.