Afghanistan documents by the numbers

We’re working to get the big and small stories contained in the tens of thousands of Afghan war documents leaked this week. It's obviously taking time to work through all the field reports and verify what we can, so we thought we'd also try a different, quicker, tack to get an insight into these documents – the search button.

Here's the number of times various words appear in the papers released publicly by WikiLeaks.org. Make of them what you will. They are not all the documents that were leaked to the media in the past few days. Al-Qaeda (or in military spelling al-Qaida) appears more than 30 times, the current and former presidents just 8 times between them. There are more reports about opium than Iran. Perhaps one insight into the daily life of troops there is that the word "ambush" appears 3,914 times and IED (military-speak for a crude bomb, or Improvised Explosive Device) is mentioned 37,599 times.

• [President] Obama – 2
• [President] Bush – 6
• [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar – 7
• [Insurgent leader Gulbuddin] Hekmatyar – 11
• [Afghan President] Karzai – 260
• VBIED [Vehicle-borne improvised explosive device] – 476
• Pakistan – 2,197
• Taliban – 3,567
• Ambush – 3,914
• IED – 37,599