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.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the