Nederland en Afghanistan 45

Dit is verhelderend om even te lezen zodat we weten hoe de Nederlandse militairen in Uruzgan ontvangen gaan worden en wie er de dienst uitmaakt. 'No one wants them there. They don't talk to anyone. They drive around maybe six or seven vehicles together in a convoy stopping to search houses. Everyone is afraid of them."
-- Abdul Ahmed Safi, official of the provincial Konar government. The Americans are no different from the Russians, one hears in Uruzgan and Kandahar. U.S. Army Special Forces were first deployed in Afghanistan on October 19 in northern Afghanistan to serve primarily as spotters for U.S. bombing missions. On that same day, in a very embarrassing start to their Afghan ground campaign, the elite Delta Force suffered 12 casualties when ambushed by Taliban troops using machine guns and RPGs.(3) The Delta team had landed by helicopter on Mullah Omar's summer retreat in the hills above Kandahar. According to The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, several of those who participated in the raid called it a "total goat fuck" - which, we are told, is "military slang meaning that everything that could go wrong did go wrong."(4) Special Forces units played a key role in directing deadly U.S. airstrikes [using lasers and GPS coordinates] upon Taliban front lines around Mazar and Taloquan between Nov. 5 and 10.(5) By mid-November a couple hundred such elite troops had been inserted into the battlefields around Mazar and Kunduz working with Dostum's and Mohammad Atta's Northern Alliance troops. On November 14, a U.S. Special Forces team is sent into Tarin Kot to protect Hamid Karzai. In late November, they participated in the slaughter of prisoners in the Qala-i-Janghi prison fort in Mazar-i-Sharif. Recent evidence reveals that also they were involved at least as passive observers, in the infamous container convoys of death bringing prisoners from Mazar to Sheberghan.(6) Luke Harding recently noted, "Dostum has been on the US payroll for nearly a year."(7) An elite team from the 5th Special Forces Group first met up with Dostum last October, when its members were dropped by Chinook helicopter at his mountain redoubt. The 595 A-team coordinated the Northern Alliance assaults upon Mazar and later Kunduz. Harding reports that this unit paid repeated visits to Sheberghen prison. Reportedly, a dust-covered Special Forces vehicle pulled up 500 meters away from where Dostum's bulldozers were burying the Taliban prisoners who had been executed.' Meer verhalen kunt u hier lezen: http://www.cursor.org/stories/vietnam_redux.htm En hier: http://www.islamawareness.net/Persecution/Afghanistan/stop.html