Monday, September 18, 2006

Who you gonna believe?

On Sunday, Nato said they had driven Taleban militants out of Panjwayi district, after a two-week offensive codenamed Operation Medusa. Nato said at least 400 Taleban fighters had been killed in the operation, the biggest offensive since Nato took over southern Afghanistan from US-led forces at the end of July.

The deaths cannot be independently verified.


The BBC are SO scrupulous about verification. Wowsa. They never ever just take peoples say-so and report is as fact.

"Don't worry, I'm just parking!" shouts the driver. He is Kassem Shaalan. He knows what it is like to be hit by a rocket. On the evening of 23 July, he and two other medics answered a call to rendezvous with an ambulance from Tibnin, in the hills to the east, to relay three civilian patients down to Tyre. Both ambulances were struck precisely by separate rockets as they were stopped at the roadside near Qana for the transfer. It was 2230 at night. There was nothing else on the road. They were clearly marked, and lit up with flashing blue lights and illuminated Red Cross flags. Kassem, his two colleagues, the three medics in the other ambulance, and the three Lebanese patients, were all injured. One of the patients, 38-year-old Ahmad Fawwaz, lost his leg in the ambulance. His mother Jamileh, 58, and son Ahmad, 8, were both seriously injured.


And right there at the end, as you can see, it says, in huge block capitals, 'The injuries and rocket explosions cannot be independently verified.'

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