Foreign journalists risk lives in Afghanistan
PESHAWAR- Lives of foreign journalists are considered to be at risk, as the Taliban and suspected al-Qaeda fighters intensified their guerrilla attacks on the US and its allied forces in different parts of Afghanistan.
Reports suggest that plans have allegedly been drawn by armed Afghan groups to hold the westerners hostage and subsequently swap them for release of their arrested colleagues. Eyewitnesses disclosed from Gardez that local Afghans are turning against the Americans and all foreign nationals in the entire southern belt of Afghanistan. The two attacks on reporters covering the ongoing fighting between Taliban and al-Qaeda on the one side and the US and its allied forces in Shahi Kot district of Paktia province on the other side are indicative of the emerging scenario. Reporters working for Newsweek, Washington Post, Associated Press, Toronto Star and others were attacked twice near Gardez, the sources claimed.
“The attackers were planning to hold these reporters hostage after they failed to kill them in a grenade attack near Gardez”, revealed an Afghan translator accompanying the group of foreign journalists to Shahi Kot. “I heard the attackers communicating in Pashto that the arrest of these journalists could help release of some of our arrested commanders,” the interpreter said, requesting anonymity.
He said one of the female reporters was missing for almost four hours after the convoy came under attack. Later we found out that the Asia correspondent for Toronto Star, Kathleen Kenna, had been badly injured in the attack. “The attackers threw the hand grenade inside the vehicle carrying the group, but fortunately it went out of the car and exploded a couple of yards away from us,” said the eyewitness. “I believe the local population is turning against outsiders, specially the Americans,” he observed. “The foreign journalists were refused space at the US military base in Gardez due to security reasons and they had to look for other arrangements during the night after their planned trip to Shahi Kot was put off in wake of the attack,” a source close to the group of journalists claimed.
However, the report could not be confirmed from US officials. Not only Paktia, Paktika and Khost provinces are becoming trouble spots for the US forces, but guerrilla war has been expanded to Logar, south of Kabul and the central Ghazni province as well. “There was an attack on the US forces at Qarabagh district in Ghazni the previous night and suspected hideouts of the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters are continuously under heavy bombardment since then,” Sami Yousafzai, our correspondent in Kabul, said on telephone.
He said that no details of casualties from either side were immediately available. However, an Afghan soldier, who was injured in the attack on the American-Afghans military convoy near Gardez, told reporters at his hospital bed in Kabul that the attackers took them by surprise because they were expected to be hiding up in the mountains instead of planning ambush in the plains. “The Americans were the first to run for cover when the attack was launched by the Taliban-al-Qaeda fighters,” said Mir Waiz, the injured Afghan soldier. “It was so sudden and intense that we hardly had enough time to retaliate or run for shelter,” he said.
The Afghan believed that majority of the resistance force led by Saifur Rehman Mansoor, the younger son of late Maulvi Nasrullah Mansoor, comprised Afghans than Arabs or other foreign nationals.
Locals in Khost and Paktia provinces say that tribesmen were not happy with the attitude and treatment of US forces with their Afghan supporters and the ambush on the convoy has further heightened the existing tension between the two sides. “45 Afghan soldiers should not have been put on a truck while passing through a hostile territory.
Two were killed and 28 others injured when a rocket hit the truck,” said Mir Waiz. Reports reaching from Gardez suggest that the mood of people there is defiant and the local administration is finding it difficult to control the situation.
An Arabic website “Al-Neda” has put the statistics of the three-day fighting in Shahi Kot on display, which claims that 15 vehicles including tanks have been destroyed from the US-Afghan forces while 27 fighters have embraced martyrdom. It claimed that a total of 300 mujahideen, a reference to Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters are taking part in the resistance and blamed that US forces were sending Afghans to the forward lines instead of leading the attacks themselves.
Sources from Jalalabad claimed that leaflets had been distributed in some mosques in the city Monday night asking the people, particularly Pashtoons, to rise against the US and other foreign forces. The administration in Jalalabad is tight lipped about the handbills, but search for those distributing the letters is on, Afghans in contact with Jalalabad said. The leaflets also asked Pashtoons to revolt against the Hamid Karzai government, as it was against the rights and recognition of Pashtoons.
Source: The News
Date:3/6/2002
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