afghan war diary / wikileaks today released over 75,000 secret us military reports covering the war...

8/9/2019 Afghan War Diary / WikiLeaks today released over 75,000 secret US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan.

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Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010

WikiLeaks today released over 75,000 secret US military

reports covering the war in Afghanistan.

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010

The Afghan War Diary an extraordinary secret compendium of over 91,000 reportscovering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The reports describe the majority oflethal military actions involving the United States military. They include the number ofpersons 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 andmajor weapon systems used.

The Afghan War Diary is the most significant archive about the reality of war to haveever been released during the course of a war. The deaths of tens of thousands isnormally only a statistic but the archive reveals the locations and the key events behindeach most of these deaths. We hope its release will lead to a comprehensiveunderstanding of the war in Afghanistan and provide the raw ingredients necessary tochange 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 relatedinformation from Marines intelligence, US Embassies, and reports about corruption anddevelopment activity across Afghanistan.

Each report consists of the time and precise geographic location of an event that the USArmy considers significant. It includes several additional standardized fields: The broadtype of the event (combat, non-combat, propaganda, etc.); the category of the event asclassified by US Forces, how many were detained, wounded, and killed from civilian,allied, host nation, and enemy forces; the name of the reporting unit and a number ofother fields, the most significant of which is the summary - an English languagedescription of the events that are covered in the report.

The Diary is available on the web and can be viewed in chronological order and by byover 100 categories assigned by the US Forces such as: "escalation of force", "friendly-fire", "development meeting", etc. The reports can also be viewed by our "severity"measure-the total number of people killed, injured or detained. All incidents have beenplaced onto a map of Afghanistan and can be viewed on Google Earth limited to aparticular window of time or place. In this way the unfolding of the last six years of warmay be seen.


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The material shows that cover-ups start on the ground. When reporting their ownactivities US Units are inclined to classify civilian kills as insurgent kills, downplay thenumber of people killed or otherwise make excuses for themselves. The reports, whenmade about other US Military units are more likely to be truthful, but still down playcriticism. Conversely, when reporting on the actions of non-US ISAF forces the reportstend to be frank or critical and when reporting on the Taliban or other rebel groups, badbehavior is described in comprehensive detail. The behavior of the Afghan Army andAfghan authorities are also frequently described.

The reports come from US Army with the exception most Special Forces activities. Thereports do not generally cover top-secret operations or European and other ISAFForces operations. However when a combined operation involving regular Army unitsoccurs, details of Army partners are often revealed. For example a number of bloodyoperations carried out by Task Force 373, a secret US Special Forces assassination

unit, are exposed in the Diary -- including a raid that lead to the death of seven children.

This archive shows the vast range of small tragedies that are almost never reported bythe press but which account for the overwhelming majority of deaths and injuries.

We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from total archive as part of aharm minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reportswill be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually, in full, as the securitysituation in Afghanistan permits.

Additional information from our media partners:

Der Spiegel: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,708314,00.html The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/afghanistan-the-war-logs The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/war-logs.html

Afghan War Diary - Reading guide

The Afghan War Diary (AWD for short) consists of messages from several important USmilitary communications systems. The messaging systems have changed over time; assuch reporting standards and message format have changed as well. This reading

guide tries to provide some helpful hints on interpretation and understanding of themessages contained in the AWD.

Most of the messages follow a pre-set structure that is designed to make automatedprocessing of the contents easier. It is best to think of the messages in the terms of anoverall collective logbook of the Afghan war. The AWD contains the relevant events,occurrences and intelligence experiences of the military, shared among manyrecipients. The basic idea is that all the messages taken together should provide a fullpicture of a days important events, intelligence, warnings, and other statistics. Eachunit, outpost, convoy, or other military action generates report about relevant daily


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events. The range of topics is rather wide: Improvised Explosives Devices encountered,offensive operations, taking enemy fire, engagement with possible hostile forces, talkingwith village elders, numbers of wounded, dead, and detained, kidnappings, broaderintelligence information and explicit threat warnings from intercepted radiocommunications, local informers or the afghan police. It also includes day to daycomplaints about lack of equipment and supplies.

The description of events in the messages is often rather short and terse. To grasp thereporting style, it is helpful to understand the conditions under which the messages arecomposed and sent. Often they come from field units who have been under fire or underother stressful conditions all day and see the report-writing as nasty paperwork, thatneeds to be completed with little apparent benefit to expect. So the reporting is kept tothe necessary minimum, with as little type-work as possible. The field units also need toexpect questions from higher up or disciplinary measures for events recorded in the

messages, so they will tend to gloss over violations of rules of engagement and otherproblematic behavior; the reports are often detailed when discussing actions orinteractions by enemy forces. Once it is in the AWD messages, it is officially part of therecord - it is subject to analysis and scrutiny. The truthfulness and completenessespecially of descriptions of events must always be carefully considered. Circumstancesthat completely change the meaning of an reported event may have been omitted.

The reports need to answer the critical questions: Who, When, Where, What, Withwhom, by what Means and Why. The AWD messages are not addressed to individualsbut to groups of recipients that are fulfilling certain functions, such as duty officers in acertain region. The systems where the messages originate perform distribution based

on criteria like region, classification level and other information. The goal of distributionis to provide those with access and the need to know, all of the information that relevantto their duties. In practice, this seems to be working imperfectly. The messages containgeo-location information in the forms of latitude-longitude, military grid coordinates andregion.

The messages contain a large number of abbreviations that are essential tounderstanding its contents. When browsing through the messages, underlinedabbreviations pop up an little explanation, when the mouse is hovering over it. Themeanings and use of some shorthands have changed over time, others are sometimesambiguous or have several meanings that are used depending on context, region or

reporting unit. If you discover the meaning of a so far unresolved acronym orabbreviations, or if you have corrections, please submit them to [email protected].

An especially helpful reference to names of military units and task-forces and theirrespective responsibilities can be found athttp://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/enduring-freedom.htm


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The site also contains a list of bases, airfieldshttp://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/afghanistan.htm Location names are alsooften shortened to three-character acronyms.

Messages may contain date and time information. Dates are mostly presented in eitherUS numeric form (Year-Month-Day, e.g. 2009-09-04) or various Euro-style shorthands(Day-Month-Year, e.g. 2 Jan 04 or 02-Jan-04 or 2jan04 etc.).

Times are frequently noted with a time-zone identifier behind the time, e.g. "09:32Z".Most common are Z (Zulu Time, aka. UTC time zone), D (Delta Time, aka. UTC + 4hours) and B (Bravo Time, aka UTC + 2 hours). A full list off time zones can be foundhere: http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/military/

Other times are noted without any time zone identifier at all. The Afghanistan time zoneis AFT (UTC + 4:30), which may complicate things further if you are looking upmessages based on local time.

Finding messages relating to known events may be complicated by date and time zoneshifting; if the event is in the night or early morning, it may cause a report to appear tobe be misfiled. It is advisable to always look through messages before and on theproceeding day for any event.

David Leigh, the Guardian's investigations editor, explains the online tools they havecreated to help you understand the secret US military files on the war in Afghanistan:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/datablog/video/2010/jul/25/afghanistan-war-logs-video-

tutorial

Understanding the structure of the report

The message starts with a unique ReportKey; it may be used to findmessages and also to reference them.

The next field is DateOccurred; this provides the date and time of theevent or message. See Time and Date formats for details on the usedformats.

Type contains typically a broad classification of the type of event, likeFriendly Action, Enemy Action, Non-Combat Event. It can be used to filter

for messages of a certain type. Category further describes what kind of event the message is about.

There are a lot of categories, from propaganda, weapons cache finds tovarious types of combat activities.

TrackingNumber Is an internal tracking number. Title contains the title of the message. Summary is the actual description of the event. Usually it contains the

bulk of the message content. Region contains the broader region of the event. AttackOn contains the information who was attacked during an event.


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ComplexAttack is a flag that signifies that an attack was a largeroperation that required more planning, coordination and preparation. Thisis used as a quick filter criterion to detect events that were out of theordinary in terms of enemy capabilities.

ReportingUnit, UnitName, TypeOfUnit contains the information on themilitary unit that authored the report.

Wounded and death are listed as numeric values, sorted by affiliation.WIA is the abbreviation for Wounded In Action. KIA is the abbreviation forKilled In Action. The numbers are recorded in the fieldsFriendlyWIA,FriendlyKIA,HostNationWIA,HostNationKIA,CivilianWIA,CivilianKIA,EnemyWIA,EnemyKIA

Captured enemies are numbered in the field EnemyDetained. The location of events are recorded in the fields MGRS (Military Grid

Reference System), Latitude, Longitude. The next group of fields contains information on the overall military unit,

like ISAF Headquarter, that a message originated from or was updated by.Updates frequently occur when an analysis group, like one thatinvestigated an incident or looked into the makeup of an ImprovisedExplosive Device added its results to a message.

OriginatorGroup, UpdatedByGroup CCIR Commander's Critical Information Requirements If an activity that is reported is deemed "significant", this is noted in the

field Sigact. Significant activities are analyzed and evaluated by a specialgroup in the command structure.

Affiliation describes if the event was of friendly or enemy nature. DColor controls the display color of the message in the messaging

system and map views. Messages relating to enemy activity have thecolor Red, those relating to friendly activity are colored Blue.

Classification contains the classification level of the message, e.g. Secret

Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010

Release date

July 25, 2010

Summary

25th July 2010 5:00 PM EST WikiLeaks has released a document set called the Afghan War

Diary, an extraordinary compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan

from 2004 to 2010.


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The reports, while written by soldiers and intelligence officers, and mainly describing lethal

military actions involving the United States military, also include intelligence information,reports of meetings with political figures, and related details.

The document collection is available on a dedicated webpage.

The reports cover most units from the US Army with the exception of most US Special Forces'

activities. The reports do not generally cover top secret operations or European and other ISAF

Forces operations.

We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm

minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be

released, with occasional redactions, and eventually in full, as the security situation in

Afghanistan permits.

The data is provided in HTML (web), CSV (comma-separated values) and SQL (database)formats, and was rendered into KML (Keyhole Markup Language) mapping data that can be

used with Google Earth. Please note that the checksums will change.

Complete dump of the website, HTML format 75 MB

o (SHA1: 80adb634a0d218bd0f9a0f22734e3d2e7e67acfc)

o This is a complete dump of the website at http://wardiary.wikileaks.org. Extract

this to your local hard disk and open it with your web browser. Please check theproject website http://wardiary.wikileaks.orgfor the most recent version.

All entries, CSV format15 MB

o (SHA1: d6b82f955a7beb9589f92e9487c74669d1912a34)o Raw data in comma-separated value format for further processing.

All entries, SQL format16M MB

o (SHA1: 9463f73ebbcd3f95899a138d6ba9817e1b6b800d)o Raw data in SQL format for further processing.

All entries, KML format16 MB

o (SHA1: 34562c0c7722522161e40330d80ac9082014845f)

o This archive contains all events in one KML file. This file needs much memory if

opened with Google Earth.

All NATO entries, KML format209 kB

o (SHA1: 088ff8999a316f30e5e398021375fa3b4fc6349e)

o Contains the events that were tagged with NATO. Entries by month, KML format16 MB

o (SHA1: 01a5c0639e1e1e844b10e962a44849b2a521d092)

o This archive provides the entries split by month. This makes it easier to browse

the data in Google Earth on low power machines.

Entries with scale filter, KML format981 kB

o (SHA1: 4669c721b87775a44472f6688e768305c686beff)

o File that will show a scale corresponding to the number of incidents in GoogleEarth. Each incident begins with a 0.5 base score, and 0.1 has been added for each


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incident involving humans. This set of data provides only events that have a

scaling of 1.5.

afghan war diary / wikileaks today released over 75,000 secret us military reports covering the war...

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