The French in Afghanistan
This ain't good.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26281580
SUROBI, Afghanistan - Insurgents ambushed a group of French parachutists outside Kabul, sparking a battle that killed 10 of the soldiers in the biggest loss of life for international forces in combat in Afghanistan in more than three years, officials said Tuesday.
Meanwhile, a team of suicide bombers tried unsuccessfully to storm a U.S. military base near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in a daring attack on a major American installation.
The French soldiers from the 8th infantry parachute regiment were on a reconnaissance mission in the Surobi district, an area known as a militant redoubt about 30 miles east of the Afghan capital.
Qazi Suliman, the district chief in Surobi, said the ambush sparked a three-hour gunbattle. French president Nicolas Sarkozy confirmed that 10 were killed and 21 wounded in the clashes.
An Afghan official said that four of those soldiers had been kidnapped by insurgents and killed. 1The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't supposed to release the information.
Suliman said he had a report that 13 militants were killed.
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Khost attacks
In the attack on the U.S. base just a few miles from the border with Pakistan, militants failed to gain entry to Camp Salerno in Khost city after launching waves of attacks just before midnight on Monday, said Arsallah Jamal, the governor of Khost.
The attacks came a day after a suicide bomb outside the same base killed 10 civilians and wounded 13 others.
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Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi, the Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman, said Afghan soldiers, aided by U.S. troops, chased and surrounded a group of insurgents, and that six militants blew themselves up when cornered. Seven other militants died in those explosions and a rolling gun battle,2 he said.
"(The Afghan National Army) is saying that anytime we get close to them, they detonate themselves," Jamal said.
Comments
1. AQ's new manual suggests taking hostages and killing them in gruesome ways.
2. Sounds like these bombers are deliberately luring our people in close. I wonder if the militants running where the same ones who had the suicide charges or if it was a bait-and-switch.
It also appears that either the reporter or
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Rank amateur
It appears that the bad guys aren't afraid of tanks.
the French defense minister or both don't know that neither the French nor US SF have any tanks in-country...
Given the current penchant for reporters to call a Frigate a 'Battleship' this is not surprising.
Even if there had been tanks, why should anyone be afraid of them?
Thanks. That tracks with the probabilities
so it's perhaps pretty accurate. Given 2d REP and the 8th RPIMa plus the Chadian; US SF and Afghans, I guess C3 problems were virtually guaranteed and ANA reinforcements firing up everyone seems to be par for the course. CAS close is always dicey. Surprised that with vehicles, they ran out of MG Ammo, though.
French mission possibly betrayed by interpreter
More here.
Quote:
New information surfaced Wednesday on the death on August 18 of 10 French soldiers who, while on a reconnaissance mission in Eastern Afghanistan, were ambushed by Taliban insurgents. French satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné, reputed for its investigative reporting and political scoops, suggested that the French patrol may have been betrayed by their Afghan interpreter. 'A few hours before the soldiers departed on their mission on August 18, the interpreter who was supposed to accompany the small patrol disappeared,' said an article on Wednesday [27 August 2008] in Le Canard Enchaîné. According to FRANCE 24 sources, this version of the facts was given to journalists by soldiers who had participated in the mission while they were being treated at the French military hospital in Kabul. According to the newspaper, French officials speaking anonymously admitted that the insurgents knew about the French patrol’s mission 'through the missing interpreter, or through Afghan police or soldiers.
Italian link to the French killings....
Here's the same story from today's Foreign Policy:
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/...ff_the_taliban
Did Italy pay off the Taliban?
But the larger question is: why is this so damming? Isn't this now part of our strategic calculus to consider paying off those same Taliban when necessary to achieve our larger withdrawal aims?
I'm inclined to believe this is one of those much ado incidents.
We, the British, the Spanish, the Italians AND the French have all paid for quiet from time to time according to several who have been or are there. I suspect there's more to it than meets the eye -- and I'd also bet there's a domestic political angle for surfacing it at this time...