Significant Taliban casualties in air attack
News.com:
What this story also demonstrates is the weakness of the Taliban against the US coalition. It cannot mass its forces even for a public murder without risking destruction.
This Reuters reports quotes a British officer on the question of civilian casualties, "It is interesting there were no females.... We are very confident we hit a large meeting of Taliban and they are very sore about it."
The BBC has still not corrected its report from last night as of the time of this post.
THE Afghan government has said it believed more than 100 Taliban may have been killed in an air strike in the south of the country and did not rule out civilian casualties.Gen. Azimi makes the point I made last night when the first reports of this attack sounded more like Taliban propaganda than a news report. The question is whether the second day news cycle will compensate for the errors of the initial reports. The Taliban have been pushing their "civilian casualties" meme for weeks now and many news organizations have been buying into it as the BBC did last night.
But General Mohammad Zahir Azimi, a defence ministry spokesman, rejected some media reports that scores of civilians were killed or wounded in the US-led coalition strike Thursday in Helmand province.
Gen Azimi said it was unclear how many people had been killed in the attack on a large gathering of Taliban.
"But the enemy casualty is very high,'' he told a press conference in the capital, Kabul.
"There might be more than 100 killed.''
Hospitals in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand, and in the nearby city of Kandahar, said Friday that nearly 40 civilians had been brought in for treatment.
But Gen Azimi questioned this figure, saying: "Even if there were civilians, there were very few of them. Their number would not reach 10.''
He added: "How can you distinguish when someone is a civilian or not? When he has his gun laid on the ground, he's a civilian but when he has it on his shoulder, he is not?'' (Emphasis added.)
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What this story also demonstrates is the weakness of the Taliban against the US coalition. It cannot mass its forces even for a public murder without risking destruction.
This Reuters reports quotes a British officer on the question of civilian casualties, "It is interesting there were no females.... We are very confident we hit a large meeting of Taliban and they are very sore about it."
The BBC has still not corrected its report from last night as of the time of this post.
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