Two things I learned when dealing with both Afghani's and Iraqi's (mostly military types):
1) Never believe the first report
2) Combat math is skewed (i.e. "Well, Chief, we were on patrol in town last night and were ambushed by 25 ali-baba. We returned fire but they all escaped"....en realidad for my daily SITREP to higher we divide everything by 10 and come up two guys shooting at our IA patrol from a speeding vehicle