Posted on 07/31/2005 3:34:52 AM PDT by prairiebreeze
KABUL, Afghanistan Thousands of rockets, mortars and anti-aircraft ammunition have been seized in central Afghanistan in the largest cache of militant weapons discovered in months, a government spokesman said Sunday.
The arms were to be used to subvert crucial legislative elections on Sept. 18, Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammed Saher Azimi said.
The raid in Ghazni province's Khogyani district Saturday netted some 2,000 surface-to-surface rockets, 3,000 mortar rounds, 500 artillery shells and 100 boxes of anti-aircraft bullets, he said.
"The enemy planned to use them to sabotage the elections," Azimi said. "This was a very important operation to prevent the killing of civilians."
He declined to give any other details about the find, including whether the Taliban were suspected to have stockpiled the cache or whether anyone had been arrested.
Afghan officials have warned that the Taliban and al-Qaida have launched a joint campaign to disrupt the September elections _ the next key step toward democracy after a quarter century of war. Since March, a major upsurge in fighting has left more than 800 people dead, more than half of them suspected insurgents, according to U.S. and Afghan officials.
Nice find.
Bump
ping
Good find! Saved lives..
These weapons are coming from somewhere. They don't grow in poppy fields.
Great news!
Good News *bump*
Sweet.
Yes : every day we read of new Caches being found, No way all of this could have been buried years ago, Who is doing the buying, and who is doing the selling.?
I would assume that either Pakistan or Iran is providing the weapons, with Pakistan being my best guess.
That would be my guess as well. Certainly it should be reasonable easy to determine who is doing the suppling.
Maybe Condi should pay them a visit.
Lots of drug and oil money floating around the middle east. I'm sure much of the oil money is coming from Saudi pockets.
We need to cut off the supply side of these transactions. The buyers can have as much money as possible but if there is no one willing to pay the price to sell, the problem is at least partially solved.
The weapons can be traced to their origin via stampings and case markings. They should leave a trail.
I read the other day that Iraq's terrorists get their funding from accounts in Syria. I bet the same is happening here. Couldn't a hacker go in and drain the accounts? Of course, that's if we knew the account number.
Iran is very well supplying weapons to old-taliban - As for the Pakistan side of the equation, these weapons aren't being supplied via the "State/Gov't" of Pakistan (as is the case coming out of Iran) however weapons are definitely coming across into Afghanistan via the Pakistan border region (though this region in large part is autonomous from the Pakistan Gov't and has been for nearly a century).
Additionally the origin of these weapons are mainly Russian built and Chinese built equipment.
Stopping weapons from coming into these Nations (Iraq and Afghanistan) is virtually impossible. In that weapons are in such abundance (irregardless of the numbers official State Gov't even have). Simply from the numbers of weapon suppliers / smugglers.
Though we have done a good job in a variety of ways of keeping certain arms either out of these Countries (or more accurately greatly reduced in numbers).
The boxes were probably stamped "Made in France"
Next Sarah Brady will be telling us that these weapons were purchased at US gunshows and shipped over there.
I hope I didn't fail to catch your sarcasm, but in a very real sense, they do indeed.
BTW, why do democracies grow poppies?
Because they can't grow mommies?
Because they can.
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