Monthly Archives: December 2010
Last hope for the crossfire children
The Sunday Times On the day Nazia’s two-year-old son fell ill with acute diarrhoea, American soldiers engaged in a shootout with the Taliban near the family home in Helmand province. Terrified of being killed in the crossfire, Nazia sheltered indoors for five days before braving the dirt track that led to the local clinic. By […]
The devil gets his playground back
The British Army’s forward operating base at Wishtan — known as the Devil’s Playground because of the high number of casualties suffered there — is one of those abandoned by US marines. At the height of the Taliban’s onslaught, the British saw a man killed or wounded on one in every three patrols into the […]
US humbled in bloody Sangin
The Sunday Times The platoon was only 200 yards from its base when Lieutenant Robert Kelly, the 29-year-old son of a US Marine Corps general, hauled himself out of an irrigation ditch and on to a Taliban mine buried in the mud bank. The force of the blast hurled him back into the ditch, slicing […]
Casualties soar as US steps up airstrikes
The Sunday Times The two Afghan farmers were gathering alfalfa in their fields when a convoy of heavily armoured American vehicles rolled through the outskirts of their hamlet. Suddenly Taliban gunmen unleashed a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades and mortars at the American soldiers. As the insurgents fled, attack helicopters and fighter jets roared overhead. Sensing […]
Miles Amoore 