Caught in the crossfire: The Forgotten Casualties of War in Afghanistan

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Some Afghans say foreign forces are as dangerous as Taliban
by Jon Boone in Lashkar Gah

The stooped and withdrawn 18-year-old breathed painfully as he relived the day last month when shrapnel from a missile ripped through his lung and bowels.

Although it was the day of the Afghan elections he, like everyone else in his neighbourhood, had no interest in voting in an area too insecure for polling stations to open. "I was just a few steps outside my front gate when about eight rockets landed," he says, sitting in a hospital in the provincial capital of Helmand, bandages around his chest. "I was hit and ran into the house where women and children were yelling because a rocket had also landed on one of the rooms."

He is convinced that it was a rocket from "foreign forces" ‑ something that the hospital cannot confirm, although they say the shrapnel was clearly from a rocket, possibly delivered from a helicopter.

With his lung filling up with blood and an equally potentially fatal wound to his lower abdomen all the village "medical worker" could do was wrap him up and begin the arduous business of moving him along roads littered with IEDs and checkpoints to a place where his life could be saved. It took more than a day for him to arrive at the Emergency Hospital in Lashkar Gah. The immaculate surgical facility run by an Italian charity, with a policy of not asking patients about how they received their injuries, does not turn away anyone. "He certainly would have died if he had not come here," says Mirco Barchetta, the hospital's head nurse, who is only allowed to travel between his nearby secure compound and the hospital in one of Afghanistan's most dangerous cities.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/09/07