The Afghan War Diaries
Exposed many war crimes of the US and thousands of unaccounted civilian deaths.
Sunday, July 25 2010 5pm EST.
WikiLeaks today released over 75,000 secret US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan.
The Afghan War Diary is an extraordinary secret compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The reports describe the majority of lethal military actions involving the United States military. They include the number of persons internally stated to be killed, wounded, or detained during each action, together with the precise geographical location of each event, and the military units involved and major weapon systems used.
The Afghan War Diary is the most significant archive about the reality of war to have ever been released during the course of a war. The deaths of tens of thousands is normally only a statistic but the archive reveals the locations and the key events behind each most of these deaths. We hope its release will lead to a comprehensive understanding of the war in Afghanistan and provide the raw ingredients necessary to change its course.
Most entries have been written by soldiers and intelligence officers listening to reports radioed in from front line deployments. However the reports also contain related information from Marines intelligence, US Embassies, and reports about corruption and development activity across Afghanistan.
Each report consists of the time and precise geographic location of an event that the US Army considers significant. It includes several additional standardized fields. The type field specifies the event as combat, non-combat, propaganda, and so on. The category field gives a more specific classification from the US Forces. Further labels detail how many were detained, wounded, and killed from civilian, allied, host nation, and enemy forces, give the name of the reporting unit, and other information. The most significant field is the summary, which is an English language description of the events that are covered in the report.