AFGHANISTAN: WAR CASUALTIES

November 2001 – 6’06’’

Reporter: Jill Colgan

JILL COLGAN: The skies above Kabul are finally still. For more than a month, the people here waited frightened day and night, listening for the sound of planes and bombs falling.

Now it's over, there's a tentative peace of sorts, but it's come at a high price.

This is a family trying to put back together more than their home, their house and lives were torn apart on the last night of the American air strikes as the Taliban fled Kabul.

A couple, married just six weeks, were sleeping in the front room. Saed, a tailor, and his bride, Bibi. At 11:30, the night exploded as a bomb hit the house.

Saed's brother went looking for him, finding nothing but rubble.

SAED AMIN (TRANSLATION): I entered the room calling them, but they didn't answer. Everything was broken, the doors, windows all devastated.

I made my way to their bed, still calling them. I put the light to their faces and thought for one moment they were still asleep.

SAED MOKHTAR (TRANSLATION): If we condemn Americans, we will not be able to have the lives of our young couple back. It's the will of God, a gift from God and we accept what God's will is.

JILL COLGAN: They are not allowed to grieve. As Muslims, they believe Saed and his wife have been martyred. To mourn them would be to dishonour their martyrdom.

But they cannot help but utter their disbelief, that after so many years of suffering, they should again become victims.

SAED MOKHTAR (TRANSLATION): We would not wish these rockets to be used on Muslims or non-Muslims. We are creatures of Allah. We are human beings.

It is enough we have suffered for 25 years, we do not want anyone else to suffer.

JILL COLGAN: These are the faces of other innocent victims of this war.

Aziz Mohammed came to Kabul to buy clothes for his brother's wedding just days after the first bombs fell on the city.

AZIZ MOHAMMED (TRANSLATION): The Bomb exploded far away, but other parts of it kept exploding. I don't know if it was a cluster bomb or something else.

But I was hit and injured for three hours.

JILL COLGAN: A labourer, he has no assets and now crippled, no job.

His only hope, he says, is the promise God will feed him and his family.

AZIZ MOHAMMED (TRANSLATION): I haven't committed any sin against America, the Americans were saying Osama and the Taliban have committed this terrorism.

But none of them, either Osama or the Taliban have been destroyed. The poor have been killed at random.

JILL COLGAN: It wasn't the American bombs alone that caused the deaths and damage in Kabul, but a combination of the bombing, the shelling by Northern Alliance forces, and small arms fire around the city.

This is one of many hospitals around Kabul that has only now begun sending home the bomb victims and war injured.

Now this is the hospital's admission book. Let me read to you from just one 24-hour period.

"Gunshot injury wound, shell injury, shell injury, shell injury, "mine injury, gunshot wound, gunshot wound, gunshot wound, bomb injury, "shell injury," and so the list goes on.

It reads like the admissions from a hospital in a war zone and this is what it is, except this war zone is in the middle of suburbia.

About 15 children were admitted here to this children's hospital.

The worst cases were the skull injuries, caused during the bombings.

Those children who had no chance of survival or who were dead on arrival, were not included in the hospital records.

Those who were admitted, had to be treated with scarce medicines by staff working only out of charity.

DR MASOOD ALSWI, KABUL CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL: We need surgery instrument and also we need to drugs, special drugs, for emergency cases.

JILL COLGAN: How many months now since staff got paid?

DR MASOOD ALSWI: I think this time I haven't received payment or salary for about four or five months.

JILL COLGAN: So they work for no money?

DR MASOOD ALSWI: Yeah. They are just working without salary, yeah.

JILL COLGAN: And you also?

DR MASOOD ALSWI: Yes, I am one of them, yes.

JILL COLGAN: Just two years in this job, this doctor says the images of the injured children will stay with him for life.

DR MASOOD ALSWI: It is a tragedy in our country. Everybody, not only a doctor, everybody in society have their fears about these people.

JILL COLGAN: It has been impossible to determine the real number of dead and injured in Kabul during the air strikes.

Families like that of Saed and his wife Bibi, buried their dead the very day they died.

Though family members still gather here at the couple's gravesite, there is no formal record of their deaths.

It is only true to say that there were hundreds who died, or were injured.

There may never be an official attempt to find out.

It's not in the interests of either the Americans or the Northern Alliance to determine the so-called collateral damage in their war on terror.

Instead, Afghans will be left to honour their martyrs and silently pray that the days of martyrdom are coming to an end.