October 15, 2001	Monday	Rajab 27, 1422

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window).

PESHAWAR, Oct 14: Mud-houses and shanties, turned into piles of debris with flames still rising from the burnt wreckage, reflect the volume of intense airstrikes by US bombers on the Korhum village of the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan.

“The village presents a scene of total destruction”, a Pakistani   journalist, presently on a visit to Afghanistan, told Dawn by the telephone from Jalalabad.

According to Taliban authorities, the total number of the civilians killed by the US attacks on the Korhum village on Thursday was 200 — the figure referred to by the people interviewed by members of a Taliban-sponsored team of Pakistani and foreign journalists, presently visiting the civilian areas hit by US airstrikes.

The media team, said the journalist, had been taken to the site of the devastated village, a graveyard, where the victims of the US attacks had been buried, and a Jalalabad hospital to which over 20 injured villagers had been admitted.

Besides, the team was also shown an un-exploded bomb and unidentified victims’ limbs, collected from the ruins.

“The scene of the ruined village vindicates that a large   number of civilians got killed in the Thursday’s attacks”, said the journalists, working for a foreign news television network.

“Some 200 villagers were killed and about 250 are still missing”, said one of the journalists, while quoting a middle-aged Afghan, Mohammed Shafih, one of the few survivors from the Korhum village.

The cavalcade of the media team, escorted by Taliban security personnel, was pelted with stones by the enraged people of at least three villages on way to the site of the Korhum village, some 35km west of the eastern Jalalabad city.

The villagers, while chanting slogans against the United States and Pakistan, staged demonstrations to lodge their protest and show their support to the Taliban and the Saudi dissident, Osama bin Laden.

Spread on a large area and comprising about 50 houses made with mud, stones and wood, the Korhum village, situated on a hilly terrain, was heavily bombarded by the US fighter planes on Thursday night for having been used to house a military training camp.

Villagers, young and old Afghans, who survived the Thursday’s attack, were seen removing the wreckage and collecting reusable items from the ruins.

The surviving population of the ill-fated village, after having   been deprived of their abodes, said the journalist, had moved on to the Kakrak village at a distance of four kilometres from Korhum.