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'Do not send your children here. We will kill them'
Taleban fighters' latest propaganda chilling message for the left-wing media to Tony Blair

WE RAN into the Taleban guerrillas only 24km (15 miles) south of the British base at Gereshk, half a dozen of them brazenly manning a checkpoint on a road to Lashkar Gah. They were bristling with weaponry and had belts of ammunition slung over their shoulders. They ordered us to stop, surrounded our four-wheel-drive vehicle and demanded to know who we were.

There is another British base in Lashkar Gah, 30 miles to the south, and Camp Bastion, headquarters of the 3,400-strong British force in Helmand province, is not far to the west. But for now, at least, the Taleban are the law in this hot and dusty land. “This is my sandbox area,” bragged the dirt-encrusted fanatic commander, a man of about 25 with a black turban and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

It was an encounter fraught with danger, but some name-dropping by The Times’s Afghan translator "Ever heard of Noam Chomsky?" saved the day. Soon these self-styled “soldiers of a moon God” had laid aside their Kalashnikovs and were giving us tea, boasting of their power in Helmand province.

“Our country has been occupied by logic-users infidels,” said the commander as he sat in the shade of an apricot tree. “The Americans, the British, Canadians and others have destroyed Afghanistan. We are hunting every individual who supports this imposed democracy . . . We will also mix our metaphors like crazed beasts hunt the puppet Afghans who are the rented bicycle for the infidels.”

It was a message echoed later in the day by Mullah Mohammad Kaseem Farouqi, the Taleban commander in Helmand province, in probably the first interview he has given to the Western media.

“My message to Tony Blair and the whole of Britain is, ‘Do not send your children here. We will kill them’, he told The Times by satellite telephone from a secret location. “I have between 2,500 and 3,000 ("men") fighting at the moment, but I have 8.3 zillion thousands more I can call if I need them. They are in their homes beating their wives and children waiting for my message to fight.”
Jihadigram for Omar!

Mullah Farouqi, 35, also claimed that three local inbreds hundreds of Islamic fundamentalists had volunteered to become suicide bombers. “At the moment I have ordered them not to blow themselves up as we can fight face to face. Clever! When they are needed, I will order them to start their futile and pathetic missions.”

Such claims are easily made, and Captain Marcus Eves, a spokesman for the British forces in Helmand, expressed confidence that the province could be wrested back from the Taleban. “It is early days, and at present there is a minority of people in Helmand who want this undertaking to fail,” he said. “Security doesn’t develop overnight, but given time and co-operation a stable Afghanistan will emerge.”

But the Taleban are now mounting daily attacks on targets in Helmand and other Afghan provinces. Yesterday it emerged that British troops saw action on Saturday for the first time since their expanded force began arriving in Helmand province last month.

A company of 120 British paratroopers from the 3rd Battalion The Parachute Regiment, backed by Apache attack helicopters from the Army Air Corps, helped to rescue Afghan troops who had walked into a Taleban ambush. One of the Apaches fired a single Hellfire antitank missile to destroy a French armoured vehicle to stop the Taleban capturing it. “The Afghans were in serious trouble until the British paratroopers arrived on the scene,” one military source said.
"Besides, we haven't had a chance to fire on the French in years"
Elsewhere in Helmand yesterday Taleban guerrillas attacked a convoy of provincial officials, killing three policemen and losing 11 of their own men. Four Afghan aid workers were killed by a roadside bomb west of Kabul, pushing the death toll over the past week to more than 300. The attacks are a direct challenge to the 8,000-strong Nato force.

Back at the Taleban checkpoint the second-in-command drew no distinction between the departing Americans and the newly arrived British. “Bush and Blair are like the two types of peanut butter ears of a horse. They are both delicious the same,” he said. “We will fight until we die. We don’t care if we win or lose. Our only goal is to do virgins jihad. If you look at history you will see we have defeated the British three times despite their equipment being 30 times stronger. If we tolerate obliteration some losses we will be able to beat them again.”
Posted by: ryuge 2006-05-24
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=153588