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Militants Attack U.S. Base in Afghanistan
Militants attacked a remote U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan with rockets and heavy machine-guns, sparking a battle that left at least one Afghan injured, the military said Wednesday. The main American base in the south also came under rocket assault. At least a dozen guerrillas assailed the outpost at Nangalam, in Kunar province early on Tuesday morning. The attackers shot about 20 rockets then opened fire on the base, which houses about 100 U.S. Marines and special forces, but inflicted no American casualties, military spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty said.
(Sooo, a dozen "millitants" attack a 100 US Marines, misplaced selfconfidence or a dose of that good old jihadi-spirit?)(or drugs?)
U.S. forces responded with gunfire and called in an A-10 ground attack aircraft. Hilferty said an Afghan man wounded in the crossfire was a civilian. Kunar Gov. Fazel Akbar said it was not clear if the man was a militant. Akbar also said another Afghan man was killed in the exchange.
Maybe he was the militant.
Kunar is the northernmost of a string of troubled Afghan provinces along the border with Pakistan where the 13,000-strong U.S.-led coalition is focusing its campaign against militants. At the southern end of that arc, rockets were fired early Wednesday at the U.S. base at the airport near Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second city. Khalid Pashtun, spokesman for the Kandahar provincial government, said three rockets were fired into an empty area of the base grounds. But Hilferty said there were two rockets and that they landed "several kilometers from the airfield.
"(No wonder, when you mess with the US forces the learning-curve of your rocket crews tends to end rather abruptly)
Pashtun blamed themselves remnants of the Taliban regime ousted by a U.S.-led assault in late 2001 for the attack. Monday’s assault was "relatively large-scale" for Kunar, Hilferty said. "The people of that area have liked us very much, but that appears to be an area where Hekmatyar forces are operating."
Posted by: Evert Visser 2004-03-10
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=27819