Hundreds of Taliban killed, wounded in rout

Praxius

Praxius

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Dec 18, 2007
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'This will give them a good lesson,' Afghan governor said; operation expected to wrap up Friday

Afghanistan - Afghan authorities say hundreds of Taliban fighters have been killed or wounded after being routed in a battle begun Wednesday for a strategic area just northwest of Kandahar City that insurgents took over at the start of the week.

All that remained by Thursday was the mopping up of scattered small pockets of resistance, local political leaders and Afghan and Canadian military commanders said from a mountainside perch overlooking the entire battlefield in a wide river valley.

"This will give them (the Taliban) a good lesson," Kandahar Gov. Asadullah Khalid said. Khalid said residents who had fled the area when Taliban infiltrated from the mountains to the north will be allowed to return in the days ahead. The operation was expected to wrap up Friday.

Afghan authorities have to clear out landmines and roadside bombs planted by the insurgents, as well as fix destroyed bridges and culverts. The fighting interrupted the important harvest period in the agriculturally rich valley, and some farmers were already passing through road checkpoints Thursday to get back to the their crops and livestock.

Military officials did not want to divulge any numbers, but Khalid said no civilians were killed and two Afghan National Army soldiers were the only deaths among the more than 1,000 government and coalition troops who launched an assault across the Arghandab River Wednesday morning. There was a report of a civilian’s body recovered later in the day.

"The enemy is defeated, but the enemy is still present," Canada’s Joint Task Force Afghanistan commander, Brig.-Gen. Denis Thompson, using a much more cautious tone than the jubilant Afghan authorities. He said some of the insurgents had escaped the fight into adjoining districts.

"There is no doubt in my mind . . . that further insurgent attacks will take place in the months ahead. Even another event like we saw at Sarposa Prison last week is not unavoidable," he told Canadian reporters Thursday night, referring to last week’s spectacular prison raid.

"I’m encouraged by what I saw," Thompson said of the Afghan-led operation that saw Canadians and other NATO forces assume a supportive battle role, including providing helicopter gunship cover. The homegrown victory by Afghan army and police units "will help restore people’s confidence in their government institutions — ISAF (the 40-nation International Security Assistance Force) is going to leave one day," he said.

Thompson said Arghandab, while on the doorstep of the Taliban’s birth city, is "not a friendly area to the Taliban" and that Afghan forces were helped by intelligence reports being supplied by locals who wanted the invaders out. The combat zone remains off-limits to reporters, but as the generals spoke, Afghan and Canadian military convoys could be seen moving up and down the wide and mostly dry river bed below.

The Taliban had perhaps hoped that a series of recent assassinations of key local leaders might have eased the way for its fighters to move in and take control of an area that has always been an essential conduit for invaders targeting Kandahar City, Afghanistan’s second-largest city.


And they were probably also emboldened by their hugely successful raid last week on Sarposa Prison, in which 400 Islamic militants were among the 800 escapees.

The insurgents decided to dig in and fight, but as with every previous confrontation on the battlefield, including over this same piece of real estate last October, the insurgents suffered a stunning defeat. Khalid said numbers were hard to come by because more insurgent bodies were being recovered throughout the day.

A Canadian military source, however, said it did not appear there could have been more than 150 insurgents who had infiltrated the area, despite initial claims by the Taliban and local Afghan sources of more than four times that number.

Even with his cautionary tone, Thompson was pleased with the result of the clearing-out operation. "The citizens of Kandahar Province can sleep a little more soundly tonight as a result of our successes," he said.

"I can say that Arghandab is clear of the enemy," said ANA Corps commander Gen. Gul Agha Naibi, who said the government will ensure the insurgents never return to the area. The governor thanked residents for their co-operation with government authorities and said they will be rewarded with better security.

The international community is scrambling to help Afghanistan bolster the ranks of its national security forces, as well as professionalize those wearing army and police uniforms. Foreign military observers said what must happen now that didn’t - or couldn’t - in the past is to have a strong Afghan police presence in the area to ward off any future infiltration by insurgents.

It will still be several days before things return to normal - or as normal as things get in this strife-torn region - and discussions are already underway on resuming the many aid and reconstruction efforts disrupted by this week’s violence. While Thompson was on a terrace praising his Afghan counterparts, the Canadian commander of the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team was meeting elsewhere with Arghandab’s district chief to plan the resumption of numerous Canadian-funded development initiatives, including a new bridge across the river connecting to the district centre. And Thompson told Afghan media a number of smaller infrastructure projects will be started immediately, including repairs to smaller bridges and culverts destroyed by the insurgents and the fighting, which included overnight air strikes after the first day of fighting
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Good job Afghans
 
gerryh

gerryh

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Praxius said:
Apparently the afghan community who ratted them out and the army that killed them didn't think so.
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They may still be "Afghani's".... but it sure looks like the Afghan Government consider them enemy's of the people. Therefore thier respective original nationalities is moot.
 
dancing-loon

dancing-loon

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Oct 8, 2007
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Praxius OP is well written and presented to the Canadian public, although no reporters were allowed to be present. IF this report expresses the true reality, I will eat a broom!:p Being a little skeptical, though, I suspect it was felt by the Canadian authorities, whoever they are, to feed us a good-natured, down-to-earth logical success story to bolster our confidence in the capabilities of the combined forces after last weeks prison break, a huge success for the Taliban. It also emphasizes our humanitarian and good-will work being done to improve and normalize life for the Afghans, with Canadian money, in other words: We are doing good!

This report also comes after voices in Canada for our troops withdrawal have become louder and more widespread!! This is a nice little pacifier, meant to soothe our discontent with our governments continued commitment to a hopeless cause and undertaking.

It will soon be seven years of fighting in Afghanistan with very little to show for the huge effort and money expended. Why just now the headline of a great success of having killed hundreds of Talibans? Timing was of the essence here!

Sorry, I sound a little negative this morning. It is the mind-conditioning over the years that has made me suspicious.
 
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MikeyDB

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Jun 9, 2006
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Dancing_Loon

(Thanks for the get-well wishes..:)

The next thing you'll be asking us to believe is that Saddam Hussein had an Iiviso-Ray that made those huge stockpiles of WMDs invisible!

What could ever make you believe that the Canadian government would lie to you?

Millions absconded under the watchful eyes of good Liberal governemnt.... Decades of broken promises to everyone including natives?
 
Colpy

Colpy

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Nov 5, 2005
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dancing-loon said:
It will soon be seven years of fighting in Afghanistan with very little to show for the huge effort and money expended. Why just now the headline of a great success of having killed hundreds of Talibans? Timing was of the essence here!

.
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Very little to show?

Let's see..........terror camps smashed, the terrorist organization so disrupted that there has not been a successful attack on North America (the Great Satan and its Imps) in seven years. The Taliban government smashed, and a new MUCH kinder and gentler gov't installed, the Islamists left without a base country to plot, train, and execute from.........and, just to make the point, 3.7 MILLION Afghan refugees (who left during the Russian occupation and subsequent civil war and Taliban rule) have returned to Afghanistan.

Problems, oh a plethora of problems, a mass of misery, decades of "blood sweat and tears" to come, but to say there has been very little progress is to completely ignore the facts.
 
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MikeyDB

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How long was it before the attacks on the WTC (93 I believe) that there were attacks on U.S. soil? How many attacks on foreign soil have the Americans been responsible for in that same period?
 
Colpy

Colpy

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MikeyDB said:
How long was it before the attacks on the WTC (93 I believe) that there were attacks on U.S. soil? How many attacks on foreign soil have the Americans been responsible for in that same period?
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Well, they smacked Iraq..........which turned out to be a fiasco, but I am shedding no tears for the old regime.

And they've invaded Afghanistan.....in a perfectly legitimate act of self-defense.

I can't think of any others.............
 
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MikeyDB

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Jun 9, 2006
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Colpy

And during that same period overt American militarism was called "legal" right? I realize it's not the same timeframe..but we can ignore Iran-Contra? We can ignore the lengthy manipulation of Indonesia by America....a manipulation and practice of "regime-change" that saw blood-thirsty dictators guarding American interests...and that's different than a gang of criminals flying planes into the WTC?

Do the deaths of several hundred thousands at the hands of American supported dictatorships off-set the "terrorism" of an Al Qeada?
 
darkbeaver

darkbeaver

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Jan 26, 2006
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Praxius said:
Ok, I stand corrected, China and Israel.... any other's I missed? Oh how about the Swiss banks?
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Corrected! Another false claim. You're possibly irrepairable Prax. American and western money in general employ the Chinese to manufacture ****e that they're to cheap to manufacture in the western world.
 
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