Innocent Victim Of War

Wars often throw up many innocent victims, and when that war is with fanatics, then the number of innocent victims rises.
 

Colonel - Prisoner Of War

 
So perhaps, given the mediaeval outlook of many of the protagonists, its not a surprise that the Islam wars of the last decade or so have probably produced the greatest proportion of civilian death, injury, and displacement than any wars since the middle ages.

 

But perhaps the saddest and most forlorn of these innocent victims is the US Army dog captured by the Afghan Taliban, who is being paraded for propaganda videos by a senior Taliban Warlord. 

 

Its obviously a very frightened animal, and given the fact that like so many things in that religion, dogs are considered 'unclean' (its amazing, considering the things that Islam apparently does condone, that some animals can be classed as 'unclean'), its future is at best uncertain, and very probably a cruel end, it probably has good reason to be scared.

The dogs name is apparently 'colonel' and when captured it was wearing a GPS tracking device, a torch and small camera, and this suggests that it was a US Rangers dog - the fate of its handler is not known. Its own likely fate isn't helped by the fact that with the usual ignorance of the Middle East, there is a widespread belief that all allied dogs are spies, and also the widely held belief among Taliban fighters, that the dogs are trained to kill.

 

There has apparently been at least one other similar incident, when Afghan insurgents captured a US Army dog alive, and held it for several months .... the final fate of that dog was not reported. Incidentally what was also interesting in the news reports, was that with the US and UK forces leaving soon, the insurgents are now happy to be seen full faced by the cameras ... they probably have the well founded belief that they will soon be back in control of the country within a few years, and certainly will not be captured by Afghan government forces.

However, animal distress aside, one has to decide whether the Taliban are being incredibly stupid, or very clever with this capture and the subsequent propaganda video of a whipped dog .... on the one hand, animal lovers in the West will be very upset (possibly more so than when a child dies), but on the other hand, they may turn their hatred on the Taliban even more ... whose to say how these kind of stunts turn out .... But one things for sure, if the Taliban suddenly turned 'publicity cute' and let the animal free at a US base, they would get a lot of good publicity for free. 

Sadly though, one suspects that this will not cross their evil little minds .....