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### 041330Z APR 07 PRT BAGRAM Suspicious Activity Directed against PRT (MOD)

To understand what you are seeing here, please see the Afghan War Diary Reading Guide and the Field Structure Description
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-editors@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, 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 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

Help us extend and defend this work

Reference ID | Region | Latitude | Longitude
--- | --- | --- | ---
AFG20070304n599 | RC EAST | 35.01440811 | 69.16419983

Date | Type | Category | Affiliation | Detained
--- | --- | --- | --- | ---
2007-03-04 13:01 | Suspicious Incident | Tests of Security | ENEMY | 0

| Enemy | Friend | Civilian | Host nation
--- | --- | --- | --- | ---
Killed in action | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0
Wounded in action | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0

`

    (S//REL USA, GCTF, ISAF, NATO)  At around 1700L on 4 April 2007, Bagram PRT conducted a convoy consisting of 4 x M-1114s to the Governors compound (42S WD 14981 74654) in Charikar, Parwan Province.  While proceeding northbound on MSR Hawaii, the convoy noticed a man taking pictures of the convoy as it passed him approximately 100 meters south of the ANP checkpoint (no grid given) in Charikar.  The man was described as wearing typical Afghan clothing, dark brown or black in color.  While most people on the street waved as the convoy drove past, the individual held a camera at his side with both hands, pointing it at the convoy.

    (S//REL USA, GCTF, ISAF, NATO)  When the convoy reached the Charikar traffic circle (42S WD 157 746) and executed a west-bound turn, a man on a red and silver motor scooter waited at one of the connecting streets.  The rider was described as wearing a black leather jacket with a black button-down shirt with silver pin stripes and black pants and sunglasses and having curly big hair.  When the last vehicle in the convoy passed him, he pulled out and sped up after the convoy.  When the gunner in the rear vehicle conveyed to him to slow down, the individual stopped and stared at the convoy for a few seconds before turning right down a side road.  20 minutes later the same individual came down the same road without his leather jacket and sunglasses (driving west-bound).  He pulled over to the left side of the street (on-coming traffic side) and stopped just before reaching the compound.  He then continued west-bound on the same road.  10  15 minutes later, the same man on the motor scooter proceeded past the compound headed east.

    (S//REL USA, GCTF, ISAF, NATO)  While at the Governors Compound (42S WD 14981 74654), a civilian male in his 30s approached one of the soldiers.  It was apparent to the soldier that the man approaching was limping.  The man asked the soldier what he was doing and the soldier replied, Im just hanging out.  The man repeated the question and the soldier again replied, Im just hanging out.  The man then asked what they were doing in the governors compound and the soldier replied that he did not know.  The man then shook the soldiers hand and said hows you hand?  The man then limped away for approximately 150 meters and then continued walking without limping.

    (S//REL USA, GCTF, ISAF, NATO)  When the convoy left the governors compound, they proceeded east-bound toward the Charikar traffic circle (42S WD 157 746).  Upon execution of the south-bound turn onto MSR Hawaii, a gray van with curtains in the windows parked on the side of the road pulled out behind the convoy and followed it down MSR Hawaii.  The time was early evening and all other vehicles on the road had their headlights on, but the gray van did not.  The van maintained speed with the convoy and passed other cars as the convoy did.  Each time the van passed another vehicle, it flashed its headlights.  After a period of five minutes of slowing down and speeding back up to the convoy, the gunner lowered his gun to just above the roof line of the trailing van.  The van put on its flashers and pulled over to the side of the road until it was out of sight.  The gunner stated the van contained only the male driver and no other occupants.

    Summary:  Reports of suicide VBIEDs and suicide IEDs are on the rise throughtout the AO.  Taking pictures of the convoy and trying to look inconspicuous while doing it

` `

    Report key: 641A5A26-5339-4D33-9E6E-D84F5F4D3C54
    Tracking number: 2007-094-182632-0316
    Attack on: ENEMY
    Complex atack: FALSE
    Reporting unit: PRT BAGRAM
    Unit name: PRT BAGRAM
    Type of unit: None Selected
    Originator group: UNKNOWN
    Updated by group: UNKNOWN
    MGRS: 42SWD1498174654
    CCIR:
    Sigact:
    DColor: RED

`