The mission to clear explosive traps ringing a US base in Afghanistan ended disastrously with one soldier wounded by a mine and several others hurt after their armored convoy hit a roadside bomb.
Outpost Nolen, a small disused mud-walled school in the middle of grape and pomegranate fields providing insurgents with perfect cover, has experienced some of the most intense fighting in Arghandab district, a key Taliban insurgency route on the way to Kandahar city.
PHOTO: REUTERS
TALIBAN STRONGHOLD
It is in the heart of the Taliban’s spiritual home, and typical of the area the 150,000 strong NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) must first secure for any hope of official governance or development to arrive.
A soldier brought in to help clear the area around the base was evacuated by medical helicopter after he stepped on an anti-personnel mine hidden by a gate in a deserted village used by Taliban fighters.
The still unidentified soldier was on his first clearance mission at Nolen, where several soldiers of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the US 101st Airborne Division have been hit by Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), some losing limbs.
“We’d all walked right past it, we’d all stepped over the bitch. It happened when we were backtracking over it,” Sergeant Hunter Wilkie said.
The blast triggered sporadic clashes, with insurgents firing a rocket propelled grenade (RPG) at the base, and US helicopter gunships firing rockets and machine guns in reply at suspected Taliban positions in Charqulba village.
SMUGGLING ROUTE
The outpost was set up as a base for patrolling in the area, which military commanders believe is used also to cache weapons and smuggle them on to Kandahar, but the village and walled fields are now a fire base for insurgents.
The lead armored truck in a supply and explosives disposal convoy was lucky to escape another insurgent RPG which was fired as it left the base and exploded in a nearby grape field.
But the same vehicle shortly afterward struck an IED estimated at around 25kg buried at the end of a small stone irrigation canal bridge.
The blast hurled it into the air and triggered a fire that eventually engulfed it.
The four passengers in the all-terrain MATV, built to resist roadside bombs, escaped with relatively minor injuries. However, the blast set off another clash in which US soldiers fired mortars at Charqulba.
LUCKY SURIVORS
“These guys were so lucky. In this instance, the vehicle worked,” said explosives expert Staff Sergeant Craig Cohen, 27, from Fort Campbell.
The fighting highlights the difficulty US and NATO troops have had in countering the bomb threat in Kandahar, despite shipping more than US$3 billion worth of counter-IED technology to Afghanistan.
Insurgents have been making bombs with difficult to detect plastics and wood casings and the area around Nolen has been particularly heavily seeded.
While the bombs are smaller than the armored vehicle breaking bombs favored by Iraq insurgents, their use reached a high across Afghanistan late last month with more than 300 exploded or located, up from about 50 a week in mid-2007.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS