Taliban units on patrol in Afghanistan. The resistance movement to US/NATO occupation has issued a "Code of Conduct" manual. Casualties are mounting among both the Afghan people and the imperialist troops.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
Swift and bloody: the Taliban’s revenge
Rebels have returned to terrorise a former stronghold with shootings and beatings, raising doubts about America’s ability to secure Kandahar
Marie Colvin, in Marjah, Afghanistan
London Times
The sniper’s aim was merciless. Lieutenant Brandon Barrett was shovelling sand into bags to fortify his post in the Helmand town of Marjah when a Taliban gunman slotted a bullet between armoured vehicles pulled around for protection, hitting him in the chest.
Although the sun was setting and the fierce heat of the day had softened, it was still hot and Barrett and LanceCorporal Marcus Lounello had taken off their flak jackets as they worked.
The sniper’s second bullet hit Lounello in the chest.
The call came in to the US marines’ forward operating base (FOB) Marjah at 6pm last Wednesday: “Two down, gunshot wounds to the chest, non-responsive.”
Barrett, 27 and unmarried, from Indiana, was dead before the medical team reached them. Lounello, 21, lost a kidney, his spleen and part of his diaphragm but will survive.
“It’s surreal,” Captain Tony Zinni, Barrett’s commanding officer in the 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, said yesterday outside his tented office on a barren base. “I keep expecting him to walk around the corner, big smile on his face.”
Barrett had been running a post that checked traffic coming in and out of Marjah, a former Taliban stronghold that was taken by the marines and their Afghan allies with an overwhelming show of force in February. A small, wiry officer, he was a favourite at FOB Marjah at the centre of the market town.
Zinni held his emotions in check as he described his last visit to Barrett’s post. “It was a really boring duty but he was good about it,” Zinni said, smiling at the memory.
Some elders arrived and Barrett had chatted to them. “I said where the hell did you learn Pashto,” Zinni recalled. Barrett had been visiting the neighbourhood’s elders, trying to win them round, learning words and phrases.
Zinni thinks the lieutenant was targeted and it makes him angry. “Everyone in the block knew him, knew he was the officer,” the captain said. Barrett had 60 days left in Afghanistan. His was the first death in Marjah for the battalion’s weapons company.
That night Zinni gathered Barrett’s platoon for what he said had been one of his toughest moments in his 10 years in the Marine Corps. One of the men still had blood on his trousers.
The 41 soldiers had been together since they were at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, where Barrett held weekend parties at his beach house. He would dress up as a penguin with aviator sunglasses and a cigar to make people laugh. There were only tears last week.
“I don’t even know what to say to you. Our loss is so great,” Zinni said. “But I do know that Barrett would have wanted us to make a success of this mission.”
Last week was the worst in living memory for weapons company, the first unit to enter Marjah on D-Day, February 13.
Hours before the sniper killed Barrett, another 13-man squad in the company had been walking down a dusty street in the fierce morning heat, spread out on either side of the road so that only one of them would die if anyone stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED), when an insurgent jumped out from behind a building 40 yards ahead and fired three shots.
One bullet hit Lance-Corporal Matthew Hunter, the point man, in the stomach, just below his flak jacket. The second skidded around the armoured vest of a lucky Lance- Corporal Kyle Schneider, leaving him uninjured. Hunter, known in the squad for his 60 socks, which he would wear for two days and then discard, was seriously injured but survived.
On Thursday a member of the elite Afghan National Civil Order Police, which works side by side with the marines, was also shot and killed. The unidentified officer had arrived at FOB Marjah only two days earlier, determined to get his men out of the checkpoints and onto the streets.
Marjah was supposed to be safe. When 5,000 marines and their Afghan national army partners rolled in to oust the Taliban who had ruled the town for almost three years, the fighting lasted just two weeks.
“If you go to Marjah today, you will find a city that is free of the Taliban, that has schools that are open, a marketplace, a bazaar,” Major-General Richard Mills, commander of the US Marine Corps in Afghanistan, said just last month.
Marjah has indeed improved. The idea was to set up “security bubbles”, to get the economy and normal life going inside them in the hope that at some point the locals would throw in their lot with the government. Major David Fennell, a civil affairs officer for the marines, explained that his men had moved as soon as the fighting eased.
“We decided to get in there immediately and spend money. To use money as a weapon system,” Fennell said. He started a project paying $5 (£3.40) a day to clean the canals. Only a few nervous locals turned up on the first day, but when cash started to flow, 1,000 workers soon came on board, defying Taliban threats.
Contractors are now engaged in what the marines call “quick impact projects” — bridges, wells, mosque restorations, anything that shows tangible improvement.
Last week hundreds flocked to the unpainted concrete villa that is the district government’s headquarters, a building said to have been commandeered from a local drug lord.
Some farmers received cash in hand for destroying their poppy crop. Others pushed new wheelbarrows full of cheaply purchased mung beans, alfalfa seeds and huge 50kg (110lb) bags of fertiliser. Down the street the stalls of the once shuttered Loy Chareh bazaar lined the street with wooden crates spilling okra, tomatoes, chilli peppers, mint, watermelon.
All that progress is threatened by the Taliban “surge”. There were always fears that they would re-emerge, bolstered by poppy taxes levied from farmers. But nobody expected their return to be so swift and bloody.
My first night in Marjah had left little doubt that the Taliban were back. On Tuesday I walked out of FOB Marjah with a weapons company squad charged with “rolling up” an IED-maker called Izra, or “signature” in Pashto, probably a nom de guerre.
Izra was thought to be sleeping in a small local mosque. There was no moon and it was pitch black. After 20 minutes a light glowed on a rooftop, a suspicious sight in an area where there is no electricity and everyone sleeps during the hours of darkness.
The flashlight followed our progress. Corporal Josh Hurst, the squad leader, realised we had been spotted by the Taliban when his point man saw four men slipping through the tree line. Hurst motioned the squad down a path to a field of dry furrows and mud channels. I realised why I was slipping and sliding while the marines remained sure-footed — they all had night-vision goggles.
I slid noisily into a canal that I had not noticed. LanceCorporal Tim Ryan hauled me out by the scruff of my flak jacket. Dogs barked. I was terrified that we were walking into an ambush.
After three hours we found the mosque, but Hurst decided to move on because of the danger. “It just kept getting worse and worse and worse,” Hurst said with good humour when we were back on base.
The strength of the Taliban’s presence is gradually becoming clearer. One of their targets is Wafa Aghasheran, a contractor for the marines who builds bridges and wells. He sat cross-legged in his cream-coloured shalwar kameez and dark wool vest last week recalling how Hazrat Gull, 19, his young business partner, had been killed by the Taliban several weeks ago.
“They pulled up on a motorcycle at our project, asked who is the contractor and shot him in the head,” Aghasheran said. “I ran to the bridge and found him. His head was in the canal. All our workers had run away.”
More recently two motorcycles carrying four Taliban converged on Aghasheran’s truck and pointed Kalashnikovs at the driver. They broke both the driver’s arms with the butts of their guns and set fire to the vehicle. Their aim was to stop anyone from working with the Afghan government and marines.
They then put up a letter to Aghasheran in the local mosque saying: “Stop your business or we will kill you and your family.” He smiled and said that he could not afford to stop: at 42, he has three wives and 18 children.
The Taliban are growing bolder. A man in his early twenties known only as Sharitulla was at home about two weeks ago when the Taliban came knocking in broad daylight. When he refused their demand for taxes, they took him out to the desert and beat him to death. His body was left on the doorstep of his elderly father.
While they may not want the Taliban back, many of Marjah’s people are reluctant to commit themselves to the administration that has replaced them. “The local residents don’t trust we will provide security,” said Naimatullah, the acting district governor of Marjah, in a late-night interview.
“They are taking a wait-and-see attitude to the government,” he said, fingering black worry beads. “The people are worried that the Taliban will return and punish them for supporting the government.”
The offensive in which Marjah was captured was the largest in Afghanistan since 2001, when the Taliban regime was driven out by US-supported Afghan warlords after the September 11 attacks on America.
After that victory, Afghanistan was largely neglected as America and Britain became bogged down in the war in Iraq. Only last year did attention shift back. Heavy-handed military operations that killed civilians helped the Taliban to reestablish support and organise a virulent insurgency.
General David Petraeus, who came up with the idea of the “surge” that quelled the violence in Iraq, has tailored his theory to Afghanistan at a pivotal moment in the nine-year war. The Obama administration is deploying 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan as part of a shift to a counterinsurgency strategy.
Until recently Marjah was seen as a success story that could serve as a template for an expected operation against the Taliban in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban.
“In many ways [the Marjah operation] is a model for the future: an Afghan-led operation supported by the coalition, deeply engaged with the people,” General Stanley McChrystal, leader of Nato and American forces, said.
Yet worries are growing in the Pentagon that if thousands of marines and Afghan security forces cannot entirely defeat the Taliban in Marjah, a town of only 50,000, securing the far larger prize of Kandahar may be an even greater struggle than has been foreseen.
This week Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, flies to Washington for a meeting with President Barack Obama. The two men know that success in Kandahar will be crucial both to persuading the Taliban to the negotiating table and to enabling Nato forces to leave.
Yet after Marjah, McChrystal is playing down expectations. Last week he warned that it could be the end of the year before any progress is seen.
Additional reporting: Christina Lamb, Washington
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