Category Afghanistan
Taliban fighters being taught at secret camps in Iran
The Sunday Times THE Taliban fighters scurried up the craggy mountainside. As they neared the top, their 30-strong platoon split into three sections and they launched a ferocious assault on an enemy fort, opening fire from numerous positions. The bullets they sprayed at the fort’s mud-coloured walls were blank, however. They merely pretended to fire […]
Afghan family killed as special forces defy ban on night raids
The Sunday Times THE two helicopters swooped low over a cluster of mud homes, whirling in the cold night sky before landing in a wheat field on the edge of the small Afghan village. From his home nearby, 23-year-old Najibullah Omar strained his eyes in the darkness as he made out the faint shapes of […]
Death and swift revenge
The Sunday Times THE patrol set off in darkness. Through fields of poppy and wheat, 100 men from the Brigade Reconnaissance Force stumbled towards their target, a strip of compounds that had been used by the Taliban to fire on British troops. “Right, lads, the Taliban are waking up. They’ve already pinged our position,” said […]
Petraeus’s rogue militia robs and slays Afghans
The Sunday Times The assassin’s bullet shattered the window and pierced the neck of Gulam Jan, a village elder, as he sat listening to the radio in his living room. On hearing the shot ring out, his wife rushed into the harshly lit room. She found her 47-year-old husband, who had just returned from evening […]
How this suicide bomber opened a new front in Al-Qaeda’s war
The Sunday Times By Christina Lamb and Miles Amoore It was the week after Christmas and there was a line of paper Santas hanging in the small chow house at Forward Operating Base Chapman, sent to Afghanistan by loved ones back home. Among the CIA agents waiting in the morning chill, amid the exercise bicycles […]
Miles Amoore 