zondag 1 juli 2007

Nederland en Afghanistan 137

Photos from NATO bomb victims by Maso Notarianni at the Emergency Hospital in Lashkar Gahmore photos and details ( http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/latest.htm ) Photos Index ( http://www.rawa.org/s-photos.htm )
Het gaat lekker met de Afghaanse wederopbouw, die geen wederopbouw is maar een vechtmissie waarbij elke week talloze burgers gedood worden. Het christelijke, sociaaldemocratisch kabinet lijkt van zins te zijn de missie te verlengen. Onduidelijk is waarom, gezien het feit dat het enige dat het Westen bereikt heeft de geweldige toename is van de opiumproduktie waarmee de Afghaanse krijgsheren annex drugsmafia zichzelf nog meer verrijken. Dat alles dankzij de westerse militaire en financiele steun.
'Up to 80 Civilians Dead" After US Air Strikes in Afghanistan
By Jason Burke
The Observer UK
Sunday 01 July 2007
Witnesses claim a village in British-run Helmand was bombed for three hours after the Taliban attempted to ambush a US-Afghan army convoy.
Air strikes in the British-controlled Helmand province of Afghanistan may have killed civilians, coalition troops said yesterday as local people claimed that between 50 and 80 people, many of them women and children, had died.
In the latest of a series of attacks causing significant civilian casualties in recent weeks, more than 200 were killed by coalition troops in Afghanistan in June, far more than are believed to have been killed by Taliban militants.
The bombardment, which witnesses said lasted up to three hours, in the Gereshk district late on Friday followed an attempted ambush by the Taliban on a joint US-Afghan military convoy. According to Mohammad Hussein, the provincial police chief, the militants fled into a nearby village for cover. Planes then targeted the village of Hyderabad. Mohammad Khan, a resident of the village, said seven members of his family, including his brother and five of his brother's children, were killed.
'I brought three of my wounded relatives to Gereshk hospital for treatment,' he told the Associated Press news agency by phone. The villagers were yesterday burying a 'lot of dead bodies', Khan said.
He spoke as American forces in Iraq also found themselves heavily criticised over civilian deaths when eight people died, apparently caught in crossfire from a gunfight between insurgents and soldiers in Baghdad's Sadr City yesterday. But residents, police and hospital officials said eight civilians were killed in their homes and angrily accused US forces of firing blindly on innocent people. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki condemned the raids and demanded an explanation for the assault on a district where he has barred American operations in the past.
In Afghanistan, the civilian deaths caused by US and Nato-led troops have infuriated local people and prompted President Hamid Karzai to publicly condemn foreign forces for careless 'use of extreme force' and for viewing Afghan lives as 'cheap'. The increasingly fragile President has urged restraint and better co-ordination of military operations with the Afghan government, while also blaming the Taliban for using civilians as human shields.
Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations Secretary-General, raised the issue of civilian casualties on a four-hour visit to Afghanistan on Friday on which he met the senior Nato commander there, the American General Dan McNeill.'

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Peter Flik en Chuck Berry-Promised Land

mijn unieke collega Peter Flik, die de vrijzinnig protestantse radio omroep de VPRO maakte is niet meer. ik koester duizenden herinneringen ...