Afghanistan: Paris Match Pictures 'promoting Taliban'

A magazine photo spread of Taliban fighters posing in the uniforms of dead French soldiers sparked controversy yesterday as new accounts emerged of army failings in the ambush that saw 10 members of the French military killed last month.

Paris Match ran photos of a group of Taliban fighters and their commander, "Farouki", wearing French army uniform and helmets and carrying French army assault rifles, walkie-talkies and even a watch belonging to a dead soldier.

The commander claimed to have been behind the Taliban ambush on August 18 in the Sarobi district 40 miles east of Kabul, which left 10 French soldiers dead and 21 wounded. It was the deadliest ground fighting for Nato troops since they arrived in Afghanistan in 2001 and the biggest single death toll for the French army in 25 years, causing an outpouring of emotion and debate over the human cost of sending troops to Afghanistan. Nicolas Sarkozy has since promised to maintain the fight against the "medieval" and "barbaric" Taliban.

In the Paris Match report Farouki said the Taliban would kill all the 3,000 French troops in Afghanistan unless they immediately withdrew.

France's defence minister, Hervé Morin, accused the magazine's reporters of helping the Taliban. "Should we be doing the Taliban's promotion for them?" he asked. But Eric de Lavarene, the journalist who interviewed the insurgents, denied that the magazine had been manipulated.

"No one talks of propaganda when we set off embedded with Nato troops, yet information is always very tightly controlled on those occasions," he said. The socialist MP Pierre Moscovici found the Paris Match report "troublesome", and the Green MP Daniel Cohn-Bendit warned of an element of "abject voyeurism".

Joël Le Pahun, father of one of the soldiers killed, said it was despicable to see the pictures but hoped it would heighten awareness of the Taliban threat.

The ambush has highlighted the need for better intelligence and reconnaissance resources. Le Monde yesterday said a gendarmerie investigation had discovered a delay of three to four hours in getting reinforcements to the ambushed troops. The paper said some soldiers had died from knife wounds or slit throats.