KABUL: The calls come through nearly every two hours, always from a satellite phone and usually with some new claim of an attack that the reporter must check with the US-led coalition force in Afghanistan.

Sometimes they turn out to be false. Many times, they are true but exaggerated.

“I get between six to 10 calls a day from one or the other of the two Taliban spokesmen,” says a journalist based in the southern city of Kandahar, a focus of the movement’s insurgency launched after it was ousted in 2001.

“It is mainly them who tell us first of incidents,” he says.

This increasingly sophisticated propaganda strategy used by the Taliban marks a remarkable departure from one of the pillars of the movement when it ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001.

Under the regime, movies, videos, television or photographs of any living creature, even animals, were taboo, as they were seen as idolatrous.

But today the religious students not only watch such material, they produce and distribute it for free — usually high-quality video CDs of rousing speeches and Taliban attacks and what they call sacrifice for a “holy cause”.

More than a dozen VCDs obtained by AFP in the past 10 months all carry the logos of one of three studios — Omat (Nation) productions, Manbaul-Jihad (Source of Jihad) or Abdullah videos.

These shadowy outfits produce videos for the Taliban — and probably also for Al Qaeda — in the Arabic, Urdu and Pashto languages that are aimed at potential sympathisers in southern Afghanistan and the adjoining Pakistan tribal belt, and Arab extremists.

The emotionally charged videos play on deep ethnic and religious pride to win recruits, showing horrific images of Muslims killed in war or of alleged spies “confessing” before their throats are slit.

One kind preaches the religious rhetoric of the anti-foreigner jihad (holy war) that brought the Soviet army to its knees in Afghanistan in the 1980s and is now being used against the US-led coalition and Nato-led forces.

Another plays to Arab extremists who despise the United States and the West for their attitude towards the Islamic world, including Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories, and Iraq.

The videos, secretly handed out person to person, often start with religious a cappella and verses from the holy Quran.

There are images of sophisticated US military planes and armoured vehicles juxtaposed with others of the Taliban’s low-tech small arms and homemade bombs stuffed with nails, nuts and bolts.

New Taliban recruits are shown training in difficult terrain and under harsh conditions, while messages from Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri boom out promising success and, for “martyrs”, paradise.

Every film includes interviews with purported Taliban commanders who claim to have shot down US helicopters or to have killed US or Afghan soldiers.

Some show gruesome documentary footage of what are called civilian casualties of US bombings in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, or of Christians chopping off the heads and arms of Muslims in Indonesia’s religiously tense Poso district.

The clips focus on children, women and the elderly.

“Their targeted audience is a less-educated section of people with little power of political analysis who react religiously and emotionally,” MP and journalist Shukria Barikzai told AFP.

The images often work well to arouse passions, firing up feeling for the militants’ cause, she said, noting the Afghan government itself should be making better use of such an obvious strategy.

“It would help to balance things out and help people understand the Taliban if the government showed what Taliban do — the schools and clinics burned, people slaughtered, scholars, teachers and civilians killed,” Barikzai said.

The government lacks an effective strategy “not to censor but to guide the news to the truth,” admitted defence ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zahir Azimi.

“The psychological battle to win minds is very important — sometimes it can even change the outcome of a war.”

The insurgents have seized the news agenda, analyst Joanna Nathan said.

“There is an information vacuum which the insurgents are only too happy to fill,” she said.

The Taliban even fill that void by claiming responsibility for attacks that they may have had no part in, with many analysts saying it is not certain the movement was behind a recent series of minor bombings in the capital Kabul.

“The Taliban are often too happy to claim credit for anything,” she said.

Taliban videos, magazines and website aside, the movement’s spokesmen are happy to answer telephone queries 24 hours a day while their counterparts in the government can be less accessible.

The interior ministry has meanwhile banned provincial authorities from talking to the media.

And, with Taliban statements sometimes grabbing headlines, the government last month issued “guidelines” to local news outlets that barred interviews with Taliban leaders and criticism of foreign troops — a move that attracted wide condemnation and backfired.

By the time the ruthless Taliban were booted out of power, they were hated by the people they had ruled so brutally.

But the goodwill that met the new internationally backed government of President Hamid Karzai is ebbing away as security deteriorates and corruption persists.

All the while the Taliban’s propaganda planners — finely tuned to the complicated social, ethnic and religions sensitivities of this country — are capitalising on every weakness, playing on Afghans’ cherished notions of religion and liberty from foreign occupation. Their sophisticated campaign is beyond the capacity of the average illiterate Taliban fighter, said a high-ranking government official who refused to be identified.

“There are big hands and organisations behind them,” he said.

“To gather data, footage and intelligence and reproduce them for Taliban interests is not what the barefoot illiterate Taliban can do in caves and mountains. It is done in cities where they have backers.”—AFP