Posts Tagged ‘Doab district’
What battle?
Back to the battle in Nuristan’s Doab district. Fresh details have emerged that seem to contradict ISAF’s public version of the battle, which took place in May this year.
An article in the Christian Science Monitor on Tuesday strongly suggests that the fight between US forces and insurgents for control of the district centre was far more violent than ISAF initially let on.
ISAF told me in June that there was no evidence to suggest that insurgents had reached the district centre or, needless to say, had the insurgents ever controlled the district centre. However, an American major general quoted in the CSM piece says:
At the end of the day, the insurgents held the district center for 24 hours…
The Americans dropped 14 bombs on insurgent positions, killing 200 of the 300 fighters, according to an F-15 fighter pilot interviewed for the same article. American forces on the ground were surrounded and outnumbered about 10-1, the article states.
The F-15 fighter pilot said:
It’s extremely rare that we find ourselves in a fight where we deploy all of our bombs. But that day we dropped everything we had….Our guys got really close to being overrun.
Sounds slightly more violent than the sanitised account provided in the ISAF press release about the battle. I’ve highlighted the bits in bold that are at odds with the Air Force and Army commanders’ accounts. Read the rest of this entry »
