{"id":194,"date":"2010-03-13T21:03:01","date_gmt":"2010-03-14T03:03:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elegans.uky.edu\/blog\/?p=194"},"modified":"2010-03-13T21:03:01","modified_gmt":"2010-03-14T03:03:01","slug":"the-missing-city-of-marjeh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/?p=194","title":{"rendered":"The missing city of Marjeh"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is odd and sort of funny.  And a little old.  In Afghanistan, the US military has been conducting an offensive in Helmand Province.  Apparently the propaganda push got a head of the facts.  The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/02\/13\/world\/asia\/13afghan.html?scp=67&#038;sq=marjah&#038;st=cse\">official accounts<\/a> had the US battling to clear the Taliban out of the Marjeh, a moderate size city of 80,000 to 125,000 people.<\/p>\n<p>I ran across articles saying that the city didn&#8217;t exist.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bagnewsnotes.com\/2010\/03\/surge-update-major-us-victory-in-where-city-was-that-again.html\">BAGnewsNotes<\/a> had a picture of an isolated farm in Marjah, ostensibly showing that the place wasn&#8217;t a city.<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"pics\/BAGnewNotes_Marjah.jpg\" alt=\"farm in Marjah, Afghanistan\" \/><\/p>\n<p>BAGnewsNotes linked to a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.truthout.org\/fiction-marja-city-was-us-information-war57470\">story on the truthout.com site<\/a>.  But this article didn&#8217;t have any pictures at all.  Now this a story that really needs a picture, and there are easy sources, Google Maps for one.  Here&#8217;s the farming village of Marjeh (or Marjah, or Marja, the name can be written different ways in english):<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"pics\/Marjeh3.png\" alt=\"Marjeh, Arghanistan\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Just a collection of farms, no city at all.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"pics\/Marjeh2.png\" alt=\"Marjeh, Arghanistan\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"pics\/Marjeh1.png\" alt=\"Marjeh, Arghanistan\" \/><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/maps.google.com\/maps?f=q&#038;source=s_q&#038;hl=en&#038;q=Marjeh,+Helmand+Province,+Afghanistan&#038;sll=33.967566,67.461977&#038;sspn=0.01009,0.016844&#038;ie=UTF8&#038;cd=1&#038;geocode=FUvs4AEdM07SAw&#038;split=0&#038;hq=&#038;hnear=Marjeh,+Helmand,+Afghanistan&#038;ll=31.476695,64.319458&#038;spn=0.664072,1.078033&#038;t=h&#038;z=10\">Zooming out<\/a> further shows that it is the biggest town in the area, so it makes sense that news of a big military operation in the area would talk about it happening in Marjeh, but it&#8217;s certainly no city.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is odd and sort of funny. And a little old. In Afghanistan, the US military has been conducting an offensive in Helmand Province. Apparently the propaganda push got a head of the facts. The official accounts had the US battling to clear the Taliban out of the Marjeh, a moderate size city of 80,000 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}