U.S. Operations In Eastern Afghanistan Kill 19 Al Qaeda/Taliban, AP Just Talks About

[darrels joy]

U.S. Operations In Eastern Afghanistan Kill 19 Al Qaeda/Taliban, AP Just Talks About Civilians That Must Have Been Killed





Okay, this is a damn good bit of good news as U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan nailed an al Qaeda cell including its leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani killing 10 of them while in other operations, another 9 Taliban were killed. So, with that kind of precision and superior fighting power, you'd think the AP article on this would be all about the tactics, the operation, the battle, right? Oh no, AP has to beat to death the fact that Afghan civilians just HAD to have been killed in this operation. Even though there is not ONE SHRED of evidence of a single civilian killed or even hurt, watch how this AP writer won't let go of it....I'm going to excerpt the entire article here and highlight every reference in the story to this AP writer's obsession with civilian casualties and I'll leave it up to you to determine the fairness of this reporting:

US says it killed 19 militants in Afghanistan

Nov 1 10:25 AM US/Eastern
By JASON STRAZIUSO
Associated Press Writer

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - A series of operations by U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan targeted an al-Qaida leader and a bomb-making cell, killing 19 militants, the coalition said Saturday.

Afghan police said they had investigated unconfirmed reports that civilians may have been killed and found that only militants died.

The operations took place Friday in Nangarhar and Khost provinces, volatile regions along the Pakistan border.

In the deadliest operation, the coalition said it killed 10 militants during a strike against a bomb-making cell under the command of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a fierce militant leader believed to operate out of Pakistan.

Wazir Pacha, the spokesman for Khost's provincial police chief, said a delegation of police had been sent to investigate whether civilians had been killed and had found no such evidence.

The governor of Khost, Arsallah Jamal, said it was unlikely that civilians would have been in the region where the operation took place.

Lt. Cmdr. Walter Matthews, a U.S. military spokesman, said his office had not received any reports of civilian injuries or deaths.

"We go well out of our way to plan those operations and we do whatever we can to make sure we don't harm any civilians," he said.

Civilian deaths have long been a problem in Afghanistan for U.S. and NATO forces, and President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly pleaded with international troops to avoid such killings, saying they undermine support for the government and turn Afghans against the U.S. and NATO.

In a separate operation in Nangarhar, the U.S.-led coalition said it targeted a known al-Qaida leader believed to have helped move foreign fighters and weapons into Kunar province. The coalition said militants engaged the force with gunfire. Coalition troops returned fire and killed five militants, including an armed female, it said.

Afghanistan is suffering through one of the most violent years since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban's hard-line Islamist regime for sheltering al-Qaida.

More than 5,300 people have died in insurgency-related violence this year, according to an Associated Press count of figures from Western and Afghan officials.

Elsewhere, a Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said the militant group released two aid workers from Bangladesh whom they had kidnapped in Ghazni province late last month. Zabiullah said Bangladesh has no troops in Afghanistan and there was no reason to hold the men.

Kidnappings in Afghanistan have skyrocketed over the past year. Some are carried out by the Taliban, while others are conducted by criminal gangs seeking lucrative ransom payments.

So there you have it, the section of the article dealing with the 19 jihadists killed in those eastern Afghan operations, over 75% of the writing is regarding this writer's hope that some civilians had been killed.

And did you notice the headline this scumbag AP writer used? That the U.S. "says" it killed 19? And this isn't just some kind of rare bias here by the AP, I go through probably a dozen of these types of stories each day from AP, API, Reuters and the whole lot of them and at least 50% of the articles are just like this. This is simply anti-war propaganda put out by a supposed news reporting network. This isn't news, it's editorial opinion.

http://holgerawakens.blogspot.com/20...ghanistan.html