BOP 2006 > Still Photography Winners > International News
- HM2
EMBEDDED WITH THE 173RD AIRBORNE (War On The Mind)-US troops burn dead Taliban fighters
US forces of 1st Battalion, 508th Infantry Regiment of the 173rd Airborne Brigade burn the bodies of two dead Taliban following an ambush on their convoy outside Gonbaz village. While the bodies burned anti Taliban/Islam messages were broadcasted by the Psych Ops men. Shawali-Kot in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan.
October 1st 2005.
STORY SUMMARY
I was embedded with the US 173rd Airborne in Kandahar Province, Southern Afghanistan. My aim was to photograph US military operations and show what type of war is going on in this country. I was attached to a Psychological Operations Unit on this combat operation. It became very clear that it was not just the fightiing that needed to be captured, more imporatantly it was the methods of war used on the local people and the unseen enemy. Through interrorgations and psychological means this was a battle on the enemy's mind. Following and ambush and battle on US and Afghan Forces, American soldiers set fire to two dead Taliban near the village of Gonbaz, Kandahar Province. The most inflammatory spin on the grisly act didn't come from Muslim fundamentalists, but from a loudspeaker attached to the roof of a US Humvee near the smoldering corpses: "Attention, Taliban, you are all cowardly dogs. You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burned." The incendiary bit of propaganda, implying a deliberate defilement of Islamic burial practices, was the brainchild of the army's little known Psychological Operations unit. Intended to "smoke out" Taliban rebels, instead sparked an international outrage, prompted a cessation of all 'PsyOps" in Afghanistan, and provided a rare and disturbing look behind the basic psychology of psyc war.
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