The Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera broadcast interviews with five U.S. soldiers being held in Iraq and images of what appeared to be the blood-stained corpses of four others.

Although Al-Jazeera is widely viewed across Afghanistan where an increasing number of the country's urban population have access to the satellite dishes, U.S. troops are unable to see the channel.

"We have no Al-Jazeera, the only thing that we receive is the Armed Forces Network," U.S. military spokesman Colonel Roger King told reporters at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul, the headquarters of U.S. operations in Afghanistan.

King said the U.S. military had never allowed pictures of captives to be shown during its 17-month campaign in the central Asian country.

"We are very concerned about how we may show people that we bring under controls," he said.

"We try to make sure that we don't show their faces, that there is nothing in the way they are shown or depicted that would in anyway bring any humiliation or discredit on them."

Elsewhere in Afghanistan, media coverage of the war in Iraq brought out anti-U.S. sentiments which have lain dormant among most of the population while the U.S. military plays a major role in countering instability.

In the southern city of Kandahar, once the stronghold of the former Taliban regime, residents crowded around televisions in cafes and restaurants voiced open support for Iraq.

A crowd watching a BBC broadcast in Kandahar's only Internet cafe erupted in cheers during a report showing footage of what appeared to be a downed U.S. helicopter in Iraq.

However, despite their twenty-first century technology, U.S. fighter pilots are keenly aware they may be taken prisoner if they are ever shot down, reported AFP.

Commodore Richard O'Hanlon took a fatalistic approach to the war when he said: "You have to prepare for the worst."

He explained that all aviators receive training in what the Navy calls survival escape resistance and evasion (SERE).

"They are taught basically how to act as a prisoner of war, how to attempt to escape, how to resist, all those other kinds of things," O'Hanlon said.

But he denied that fear of capture was uppermost in the fliers' thoughts. "It's on their mind but it is not affecting what they are doing currently," he added.

Before embarking on a mission over enemy territory, every pilot is issued with a handgun and two rounds of ammunition and a survival kit for use in the event of being shot down, crashing or being forced to eject.

The kit includes portable equipment to help potential rescuers pinpoint their position -- a radio transmitter, flares and smoke canisters -- as well as food and water.

A pilot identifying himself only as "Mongo", a member of the "Golden warriors squadron" which leads the assaults on Iraq, admitted to being "concerned" about being shot down and taken prisoner, especially as his plane came under Iraqi fire barely 48 hours earlier, reported AFP.

But he said: "I am not gonna shoot unless it's absolutely necessary to protect someone else I'm with, or realistically to get myself out of harm's way".

Facing up to the prospect of being shot down, he said: "First thing I'm gonna do is inventory myself, see if I've sustained any injuries in the fall, and then realistically I'm gonna try to find a place to hide real quick, get myself back together, collect my thoughts, inventory all my survival gear, and then start to come up."

He admitted that his combat experience in Afghanistan counted for little in the current conflict.

"There's a huge difference," he said. "The Afghan countryside wasn't completely protected by an air defense. They did have surface-to-air missiles and gunnery. However, it wasn't the magnitude of the effectiveness that Iraq has, so in effect we had more freedom over the skies in Afghanistan."

Meanwhile, several Japanese television networks on Monday justified their broadcasting of images of American prisoners of war, condemned as a violation of the Geneva Convention, as objective reporting.

At least four major Japanese broadcasters -- including public broadcaster NHK-- aired the footage of the POWs early Monday, and TV Asahi continued to run the clip on its war coverage long after the controversy emerged.

A senior official in charge of foreign news at the private Fuji Television network said editors decided to use the footage as "we are trying to report what happened in a objective manner."

"It is true that they were taken prisoner ... there was footage of them, and we used it. We did not use it for an imprudently long time. We cut the footage of each person to two-to-three seconds while we did not use the image of bodies," he said.