Training Should Have Averted Afghan Koran Burning: General
Troops involved in a Koran-burning incident in Afghanistan should have known to check with cultural advisers attached to their units to determine how to properly dispose of religious material, a spokesman for the NATO-led force said on Wednesday.
German Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson, the spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force, said members of the 50-nation coalition provide cultural and religious sensitivity training to all troops before and after they deploy to Afghanistan.
“The training of forces before their deployment and their training on deployment are regulated by the troop-contributing nations, but they all involve standards of cultural awareness,” Jacobson said in a teleconference from Kabul with reporters at the Pentagon.
“We have … regulations that very clearly deal with predeployment training and cultural awareness,” he said, calling the burning of the religious material, including copies of the Koran, “completely unintentional.”
“Somewhere in the chain of command or right down to the personnel who has given the order to dispose of this material, somebody did not recognize the importance and the nature of the material, which right from the beginning should have led to the involvement of cultural advisers,” Jacobson said.
The incident led to a second day of protests and violence on Wednesday, with six people shot dead and dozens wounded despite an appeal for calm by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
The incineration occurred on Tuesday when “a considerable amount” of religious material, including copies of the Islamic holy book, were placed into a burn pit at NATO’s main Baghram air base north of Kabul.
A senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters on Tuesday that the material had been removed from a library at Parwan detention center at the base because of concerns that some was extremist in nature and was being used to pass messages among prisoners.