Dateline, Quetta: “The Taliban are slaughtering Afghans who try to flee the country, gunning them down in cold blood.”
Dateline, Quetta: Afghan refugees “said sympathies toward the Taliban remain strong in part because of perceptions among many Afghans that the U.S. bombing campaign has hurt civilians as well as military and terrorist targets.”
FNC's Brit Hume highlighted the contrast in the two stories filed the same day from Quetta. The first came from an Agence France-Presse report, noted by James Taranto in his “Best of the Web” column on OpionionJournal.com, the second from the front page of the Washington Post.
An excerpt from the November 7 French story, which began:
QUETTA, Pakistan: The Taliban are slaughtering Afghans who try to flee the country, gunning them down in cold blood, refugees who have made it to Pakistan say.
On the outskirts of this south-western Pakistan town, near the Afghan border, thousands of “invisible” refugees exist in abject poverty.
They have fled because of the bombing of Afghanistan and a severe drought. But more than anything, they have fled to avoid persecution by the ruling Islamic militia.
Of a dozen Afghans interviewed, all had tales of random killings, human rights abuses and persecution.
Some told of mass murders.
Ovr Mohd, 65, fled to the hills from Bamiyan to avoid the rampaging Taliban. When he returned he said he found his three sons shot dead.
Mohd said they were targeted because they were ethnic Hazaras, whose sympathies lie with the opposition Northern Alliance.
“When we decided to leave Afghanistan we saw the Taliban attacking people who were fleeing. People were gathering on the road to leave and they were shot. We have seen this,” he said.
“I saw 50 people in front of me who were killed. They were women, children and men,” Mohd added, claiming the killings happened a month ago.
“I hate the Taliban for doing this.”…
For the entire Agence France-Presse dispatch as published in English in an Australian newspaper, go here.
“Support Deepens For the Taliban, Refugees Report” read the headline over the front page story in the November 8 Washington Post. The subhead: “U.S. Errors Fuel Sympathy.”
An excerpt from the top of the story by Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran:
QUETTA, Pakistan, Nov. 7 –Afghans who have entered Pakistan in recent days say that a month of U.S. airstrikes has failed to diminish popular support in central and southern Afghanistan for the ruling Taliban militia, which they say continues to exert a firm grip over the civilian population despite a heavy loss of military equipment.
The arriving Afghans, interviewed in Quetta, near the Afghan border, said sympathies toward the Taliban remain strong in part because of perceptions among many Afghans that the U.S. bombing campaign has hurt civilians as well as military and terrorist targets. Those views appear to have been stoked by U.S. bombing errors, compounded by an aggressive Taliban propaganda campaign casting the conflict as an American attack on Islam.
“The Americans said they would only target Osama bin Laden's bases,” said Abdul Mohammed, a shop owner who lives in the southern city of Kandahar, the Taliban's stronghold. “But now they are killing ordinary Afghan people, so people think that the Afghan people are America's enemy, not just the Taliban and bin Laden.”…
For the Washington Post story in full, go here.
(This update courtesy of the November 9 Media Research Center newsletter.)
