Who is He Taliban

July 3 -- U.S. troops pushed deeper into a Taliban stranglehold in southern Afghanistan in a bid to root out insurgent and stabilize the region, after one Marine was kill on the operation’s first day.
Forces superior into three district centers and are chatting with local leaders to find out what they “want and need,” Captain Bill Pelletier said by telephone today from Camp Leatherneck, a Marine base in Helmand province. Again today, troops face only “light skirmishes” with gunmen who then fled, he added.
The Helmand disagreeable began before dawn yesterday when about 4,000 U.S. personnel and 650 Afghan soldiers poured into the Helmand River valley in helicopters and armored vehicles. The process is the first test of President Barack Obama’s new strategy to defeat the insurgency and involves holding Taliban- under enemy control areas to let Afghan forces and official restore the authority of the Afghan government.
U.S. troops and weapons bound for Afghanistan will be allowable to fly over Russian territory, providing a significant new corridor, the New York Times reported today; cite unidentified Russian and U.S. officials. The accord will be announced when Obama visits Moscow next week, the Times said.
Opium Crop
The assault also threatens a financial pillar of the Taliban group. By today, Marines, Afghan and allied British forces held positions along a 120-mile (193-kilometer) stretch of the Helmand River, whose water irrigates farms that last year grew two-thirds of Afghanistan’s opium crop.
Opium, the uncooked form of heroin, has earned the Taliban and other drug smugglers as much as $470 million a year, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
The Marines advanced as far as Khanishin, a town on the Helmand River from where grime roads used by Taliban and smugglers stretch 80 miles south across the desert to the Pakistani border. Pakistan’s army is “reorganizing” its forces near Helmand to ensure that “Taliban fleeing the U.S. process cannot cross the border,” armed spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said by telephone from the capital, Islamabad, yesterday.
One Marine died and more than a few others were upset yesterday, Pelletier said. Two U.K. troops were killed in a blast during a parallel process by their units near Lashkar Gah on July 1. They were identified late yesterday by the Ministry of Defence as trooper Joshua Hammond and Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe. Thorneloe was commanding official of the 1st Battalion Welsh Guards and the highest ranking Army officer to be killed in action since the 1982 Falklands war.
Man Shot
An Afghan man was shot and injured yesterday when he walk toward a group of Marines at a “rapid pace” and didn’t stop after a caution shot was fired, Pelletier said in an e-mail today. The man was taken to a Lashkar Gar hospital, where he is in stable state, Pelletier said.
The government of President Hamid Karzai controls only eight of Helmand’s 13 districts, provincial government spokesman Daud Ahmedi said by telephone from Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital. The U.S. forces are in the main inhabitants centers in the districts of Nawa, Garmsir and Khanishin and will soon be following by civilian officials from non-governmental organizations.
Missing Soldier
In the country’s east, forces are “very tiring all available resources” to recover a U.S. soldier missing since June 30, the armed said in a statement, addition that officials believe he was “captured by militant forces.”
The Helmand unpleasant is the first major operation since the Obama administration shifted emphasis from the war in Iraq to combating Taliban and al-Qaeda extremists in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan.
Before the operation, international forces in the districts were incomplete to a few British bases. Insurgents have slowly regain control since the Taliban regime was ousted in late 2001, forcing out local Afghan government and police official.

Related Posts by Categories

Widget by BFI Pakistan