Posted on 05/23/2006 8:53:03 AM PDT by radar101
BAGRAM, Afghanistan – Fighting in Kandahar province yesterday inflicted the first major civilian casualties in Afghanistan in many months, causing the governor to say: “I urge people not to give shelter to the Taliban.”
As many as 80 Taliban fighters and 16 civilians were reported killed early yesterday by U.S.-led forces attacking from the ground and air in Kandahar province, the epicenter of a broadening swath of fighting in southern Afghanistan.
Weeping villager Zurmina Bibi told The Associated Press that about 10 people were killed in her home, including three or four children.
“There were dead people everywhere,” Bibi said, holding her wounded 8-month-old at a hospital in Kandahar city.
Asadullah Khalid, the governor of Kandahar province, told journalists, “These accidents happen during fighting, especially when the Taliban hide in homes.”
The clash – part of the bloodiest surge of combat since the U.S.-led military ouster of Taliban rule in late 2001 – raised the death toll from attacks across the country since Wednesday to almost 250. The fighting has included the torching of a district headquarters in Helmand province and a suicide bombing outside Kabul, the capital.
Kandahar, Helmand and two other southern provinces are rapidly shaping up as a summer battleground between Afghan and NATO-led forces on one side and a variety of anti-government groups on the other, including Taliban fighters, other Afghan militia groups, opium poppy traders and foreign Islamic fighters.
Khalid said Taliban fighters used civilian compounds near the village of Azizi as “trenches” to fire at U.S.-led forces, which provoked counter-fire, and later, airstrikes that he said killed 15 civilians and wounded 16 others.
A U.S. military statement said troops, while searching for suspected terrorists after two recent attacks in the volatile Panjwai district of western Kandahar, met “organized armed opposition” and responded with ground attacks and strafing runs by U.S. A-10 jets. It said they had “only targeted armed resistance, compounds and buildings known to harbor extremists.” Military statements said 20 Taliban fighters were killed and that as many as 60 others may have died.
U.S. military commanders and the Afghan government are expressing new concerns about the strength and determination of the revived Taliban movement, whose purported spokesman, Mohammed Hanif, vowed two weeks ago that “our sacred land is going to turn into an inferno” unless international military forces withdraw from Afghanistan.
The country's south was relatively calm and politically stable in the initial years after the pro-Western government was appointed in Kabul in 2001. U.S. and Afghan officials said the new flare-up stemmed from public disillusionment with the government, an increase in drug trafficking and efforts by Islamic extremists to terrorize residents in the south as NATO troops prepare to assume command over security there.
Some people in the religiously conservative area support the Kabul government, while others cooperate with the insurgents because of fear, old tribal relationships, economic need or outright support for their goal of overthrowing the Kabul government.
Military officials said that despite the growing frequency and geographical spread of violence, they believed these groups were not acting in coordination. They described the violence as a “pushing back” response to increasing encroachment by Afghan and foreign troops into the vast and rugged tribal region.
“What has changed is the permanent introduction of force and government presence,” U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, commander of U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, said in an interview yesterday. “The bad guys see that the window of opportunity to turn things around is closing.”
By the end of summer, when NATO assumes command of the south, there will be more security forces in the region than ever before.
Freakley estimated that there are no more than 1,500 hard-core Taliban fighters, whom he described as inspired by Mullah Mohammed Omar, the fugitive Taliban leader, and organized by a council based in Quetta, Pakistan. He said most others were local Afghans who either were forced or offered cash to join the insurgents.
“The leaders are those who don't want things to progress, who don't want girls to go to school, who see change as a threat,” Freakley said.
But he also said coalition forces often “capture guys on the battlefield who tell us they were just looking for a job to feed their family, and someone came and asked if they wanted to make $4 a day shooting Americans.”
U.S. and Afghan analysts said the Taliban movement was now far less religiously motivated than when it ruled most of Afghanistan for five years, ending in 2001. This difference was evidenced by the movement's growing alliance with opium traffickers, the use of suicide bombings and the mutilation of bodies after battle, all of which are commonly considered sinful by Afghans.
In his recent comments, Hanif said the Taliban group viewed suicide bombers as “martyrs” and that Western drug abuse was the real cause of drug trafficking.
“We are happy with any means of combating Western societies,” he told Italy's La Repubblica newspaper.
It's war. Learn to live with it. Blank happens.
And there was a wedding going on in that hut right?
A man makes his choice and he has to live (or die) with it. TFB.
I guess it never really was about religion anyway.
It was always about power, religion was just a pretense.
I'm sure it wasn't nearly as bad as Dresden -- and no one on our side cried about that.
I can't tell if the dude on the stretcher is a civilian or a terrorist. Maybe they should wear uniforms.
Liberal thinking would have our soldiers follow the same rules police officers have here in the States. That is; You have to wait until they shoot at you to return fire.
These Islamofascits understand immediate, overwhelming brute force--nothing else.
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