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 reports
covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The reports describe the majority of
lethal military actions involving the United States military. They include the number of
persons 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 and
major weapon systems used.

The Afghan War Diary is the most significant archive about the reality of war to have
ever been released during the course of a war. The deaths of tens of thousands is
normally only a statistic but the archive reveals the locations and the key events behind
each most of these deaths. We hope its release will lead to a comprehensive
understanding of the war in Afghanistan and provide the raw ingredients necessary to
change 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 related
information from Marines intelligence, US Embassies, and reports about corruption and
development activity across Afghanistan.

Each report consists of the time and precise geographic location of an event that the US
Army considers significant. It includes several additional standardized fields: The broad
type of the event (combat, non-combat, propaganda, etc.); the category of the event as
classified 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 of
other fields, the most significant of which is the summary - an English language
description 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 by
over 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 been
placed onto a map of Afghanistan and can be viewed on Google Earth limited to a
particular window of time or place. In this way the unfolding of the last six years of war
may be seen.
The material shows that cover-ups start on the ground. When reporting their own
activities US Units are inclined to classify civilian kills as insurgent kills, downplay the
number of people killed or otherwise make excuses for themselves. The reports, when
made about other US Military units are more likely to be truthful, but still down play
criticism. Conversely, when reporting on the actions of non-US ISAF forces the reports
tend to be frank or critical and when reporting on the Taliban or other rebel groups, bad
behavior is described in comprehensive detail. The behavior of the Afghan Army and
Afghan authorities are also frequently described.

The reports come from US Army with the exception most Special Forces activities. The
reports do not generally cover top-secret operations or European and other ISAF
Forces operations. However when a combined operation involving regular Army units
occurs, details of Army partners are often revealed. For example a number of bloody
operations 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 by
the 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 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.

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 US
military communications systems. The messaging systems have changed over time; as
such reporting standards and message format have changed as well. This reading
guide tries to provide some helpful hints on interpretation and understanding of the
messages contained in the AWD.

Most of the messages follow a pre-set structure that is designed to make automated
processing of the contents easier. It is best to think of the messages in the terms of an
overall collective logbook of the Afghan war. The AWD contains the relevant events,
occurrences and intelligence experiences of the military, shared among many
recipients. The basic idea is that all the messages taken together should provide a full
picture of a days important events, intelligence, warnings, and other statistics. Each
unit, outpost, convoy, or other military action generates report about relevant daily
events. The range of topics is rather wide: Improvised Explosives Devices encountered,
offensive operations, taking enemy fire, engagement with possible hostile forces, talking
with village elders, numbers of wounded, dead, and detained, kidnappings, broader
intelligence information and explicit threat warnings from intercepted radio
communications, local informers or the afghan police. It also includes day to day
complaints about lack of equipment and supplies.

The description of events in the messages is often rather short and terse. To grasp the
reporting style, it is helpful to understand the conditions under which the messages are
composed and sent. Often they come from field units who have been under fire or under
other stressful conditions all day and see the report-writing as nasty paperwork, that
needs to be completed with little apparent benefit to expect. So the reporting is kept to
the necessary minimum, with as little type-work as possible. The field units also need to
expect 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 other
problematic behavior; the reports are often detailed when discussing actions or
interactions by enemy forces. Once it is in the AWD messages, it is officially part of the
record - it is subject to analysis and scrutiny. The truthfulness and completeness
especially of descriptions of events must always be carefully considered. Circumstances
that completely change the meaning of an reported event may have been omitted.

The reports need to answer the critical questions: Who, When, Where, What, With
whom, by what Means and Why. The AWD messages are not addressed to individuals
but to groups of recipients that are fulfilling certain functions, such as duty officers in a
certain region. The systems where the messages originate perform distribution based
on criteria like region, classification level and other information. The goal of distribution
is to provide those with access and the need to know, all of the information that relevant
to their duties. In practice, this seems to be working imperfectly. The messages contain
geo-location information in the forms of latitude-longitude, military grid coordinates and
region.

The messages contain a large number of abbreviations that are essential to

understanding its contents. When browsing through the messages, underlined
abbreviations pop up an little explanation, when the mouse is hovering over it. The
meanings and use of some shorthands have changed over time, others are sometimes
ambiguous 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 or
abbreviations, or if you have corrections, please submit them to wl-
office@sunshinepress.org.

An especially helpful reference to names of military units and task-forces and their
respective responsibilities can be found at
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/enduring-freedom.htm
The site also contains a list of bases, airfields
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/afghanistan.htm Location names are also
often shortened to three-character acronyms.

Messages may contain date and time information. Dates are mostly presented in either
US 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 + 4
hours) and B (Bravo Time, aka UTC + 2 hours). A full list off time zones can be found
here: http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/military/

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

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

David Leigh, the Guardian's investigations editor, explains the online tools they have
created 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 find

messages and also to reference them.
• The next field is DateOccurred; this provides the date and time of the
event or message. See Time and Date formats for details on the used
formats.
• Type contains typically a broad classification of the type of event, like
Friendly 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 to
various 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.
 • ComplexAttack is a flag that signifies that an attack was a larger
operation that required more planning, coordination and preparation. This
is used as a quick filter criterion to detect events that were out of the
ordinary in terms of enemy capabilities.
• ReportingUnit, UnitName, TypeOfUnit contains the information on the
military 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 for
Killed In Action. The numbers are recorded in the fields
FriendlyWIA,FriendlyKIA,HostNationWIA,HostNationKIA,CivilianWIA,Civili
anKIA,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 that
investigated an incident or looked into the makeup of an Improvised
Explosive 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 special
group 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 the
color 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.
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 the
project website http://wardiary.wikileaks.org for the most recent version.
• All entries, CSV format 15 MB
o (SHA1: d6b82f955a7beb9589f92e9487c74669d1912a34)
o Raw data in comma-separated value format for further processing.
• All entries, SQL format 16M MB
o (SHA1: 9463f73ebbcd3f95899a138d6ba9817e1b6b800d)
o Raw data in SQL format for further processing.
• All entries, KML format 16 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 format 209 kB
o (SHA1: 088ff8999a316f30e5e398021375fa3b4fc6349e)
o Contains the events that were tagged with NATO.
• Entries by month, KML format 16 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 format 981 kB
o (SHA1: 4669c721b87775a44472f6688e768305c686beff)
o File that will show a scale corresponding to the number of incidents in Google
Earth. Each incident begins with a 0.5 base score, and 0.1 has been added for each
incident involving humans. This set of data provides only events that have a
scaling of 1.5.