Category: Afghanistan war

A search on “Iran” in the Afghan War Diary gives about 150 hits – more, actually, but I cleared a bunch that were place names that have the string “iran” in them, like Faqiran, and any entries about how the US raids a weapons cache and uncovers Iranian-manufactured weapons (there are a lot of those cache raids in the record).

Continue reading “Iran in the Afghan War Diary”

In the phonetic alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot, golf, hotel, india…), the letter “i” is represented by “india”. This makes searching for “India” in the Afghan War Diary a bit of extra work, as grid systems and nomenclatures that use alphabetical numbering and reach the letter “I” end up having US military units or areas around bases that have nothing to do with India, called “India”. When you go through that and cut those out, I got about 82 entries. Almost all of them have to do with Indian road construction company and other contractors, NGOs, and other business operations in Afghanistan, the Indian Consulate or Embassy, and India’s positions in meetings with NATO or the US or Pakistan.

One interesting one I did find, dated October 23, 2007:

“At 1150Z, TF Nimroz reported 1x insurgent on a motorcycle crashed into a car belonging to a construction company at grid 41R MQ 431 527, in the Chakhansor district, Nimroz province. The motorcycle exploded. 1x construction worker was killed and 1x wounded. The ANP sent a QRF. The QRF struck an explosion possibly remote controlled IED, which killed 11x ANP, 1x Indian officer. 3x ABP and 4x ANP were wounded in the second explosion. It is unknown if the Indian officer was armed forces or police. ISAF tracking # 01-082.”

Seems that there was some kind of Indian military presence, perhaps associated with the Embassy or Consulate.

[More analysis of Wikileaks Afghan War Diary]. Looking through the 200- entries in the Afghan War Diary that specifically mention Canada, I noticed that most of them mention one of three task forces: TF Aegis, TF Paladin, and TF Kandahar. Searching for each of those terms gives a 1000-3000 hits each. It seems that these task forces are multinational NATO efforts with regional commands. From some quick searching, Task Force Aegis seems to have been under the command of a Canadian general. Task Force Paladin seems to be a specific anti-IED unit. Task Force Kandahar is a bigger force that had a large presence of UK troops as well as Canadian and US troops. I think the different TFs might have operated at different times during the war.

[More analysis of the Wikileaks Afghan War Diary]. I tried searching the database for any of these keywords: narc, opium, heroin, drug, poppy. It came up with 800 hits, which look like this:

Note the concentration in the south (Hilmand) and the east.

Now let’s zoom in on one of the areas, one the clusters of points you see in the south:

Continue reading “The Drug War in Afghanistan – some maps”

[More analysis of Wikileaks’s Afghan War Diary]

Continue reading “References to Pakistan in the Afghan War Diary – a map”

Searching on CDN in Afghanistan instead of CF, which means Coalition Forces, gives a much more modest picture of Canadian Forces around Kandahar. Apologies for the error. Incidents are in red, roads in grey.

[More analysis of the Afghan War Diary]

Analyzing NATO/US casualties (“Friendly Killed In Action” or FriendlyKIA) by type of unit gives the following. Coalition Forces (CF) casualties have more wounded than killed.

TypeOfUnit Data

(empty) Sum – FriendlyKIA 28
Sum – FriendlyWIA 29

ACM Sum – FriendlyKIA 6
Sum – FriendlyWIA 15

ANSF Sum – FriendlyKIA 20
Sum – FriendlyWIA 23

ANSF / CF Sum – FriendlyKIA 1
Sum – FriendlyWIA 0

CF Sum – FriendlyKIA 782
Sum – FriendlyWIA 983

CF / ANSF Sum – FriendlyKIA 17
Sum – FriendlyWIA 15

CIV Sum – FriendlyKIA 14
Continue reading “NATO deaths in Afghanistan”

[More analysis of the Wikileaks Afghan War Diary]

I was looking at situations where Enemy Killed in Action was greater than 0, which gave 3729 incidents. I expect that if there are more civilian deaths than are encoded in the database, they are here, as armed people tend to classify those they kill as combatants, sometimes when they are not. But let’s take the data for what it says, and say that who they say were combatants are, for now.

Continue reading “At least 15219 Afghans killed in combat”