Taleban fighters' 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
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
“Our country has been occupied by
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
Jihadigram for Omar!
Mullah Farouqi, 35, also claimed that
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" |
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