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US Marine on patrol in Southern Afghanistan (Photo: Ben Gilbert)
Operations around the southern Afghan city of Kandahar have stepped up a notch recently. The fighting has escalated without a great deal of fanfare but a lot of firepower has been deployed and international forces say they are killing a lot of bad guys. The World’s Ben Gilbert is at an outpost in Zari district from Kandahar City. Download MP3
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LISA MULLINS: The US continues to fund, big time, the war in Afghanistan. In fact, military operations around the southern city of Kandahar have been stepped up during the past three weeks. Thousands of troops are scouring the countryside west of Kandahar for insurgents, and targets are being hit with 2,000 pound bombs. The World’s Ben Gilbert is at a US military outpost in the area of operations, in Zhari district. He says this is where the Taliban movement was born.
BEN GILBERT: The area that troops are clearing right now has been called the “heart of darkness” for several years now. And when I was here about a year ago with US troops, and there were only about a thousand here then, now there are five thousand troops in this same area in Zhari district. When I was here then basically US troops couldn’t go south of their base, where I’m standing right now, and now they’re pushing into these areas where there have never, ever been coalition troops present.
MULLINS: So why are they making the move specifically right now?
GILBERT: The overall focus is to secure the second largest city, Kandahar City. And these areas to the west are seen as kind of transportation lines, ways for the Taliban to get in and out of the city, to harass people, to make it insecure. And this is kind of seen as what the military calls their [INDISCERNIBLE] locations, which basically means their hideouts, areas they control, command and control areas, areas where they make bombs, and areas where they can set up checkpoints and basically have a free reign. So that’s the purpose is to kind of get the Taliban in there homeland, in their historical area where they’ve never actually been challenged and to kill those who won’t put down their weapons and to convince those who will put down their weapons to join the government or to cooperate with the Afghan government which the coalition forces back.
MULLINS: So how successful were those aims?
GILBERT: Well, that’s difficult to tell at this point because the media has been blocked out of several weeks of operations, on purpose or not on purpose, it’s difficult to tell at this point. The embedded journalists who were scheduled to go with the US military in the Arghandab District for the last two weeks, their embeds were cancelled. Apparently there’s a new batch of journalists who were supposed to go back in to the Arghandab the second half of this month. Several of their embeds were cancelled. So, there’s been a lot of information that these operations are being successful, but it’s hard to judge since there are no real independent observers on the ground there.
MULLINS: And Ben, what do we know about the amount of people who have been detained, Afghans have been detained, or are killed?
GILBERT: What I heard from a source of mine is that several dozen Taliban fighters have been detained and we do know of at least one, in kind of another strange turn to all of this, what the military calls a high-value target, who was killed on Saturday night. The news came out yesterday that he was killed Saturday night and it was quite mysterious. There was a press release put out by the military that he had died in his jail cell at a US military base in the Arghandab District. Today, it appears that President Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, has said that he was possibly, and it appears probably, killed by US troops. It’s unknown exactly what happened, but it appears that something not very good happened in the Arghandab District.
MULLINS: Well, we should say, since the President Hamid Karzai is talking about this and the military’s responding that whenever a death in detention like this happens, it’s extremely controversial and gets much notice in Afghanistan.
GILBERT: Yes, absolutely. I mean that’s why I say allegedly the president’s office is still being very careful to say may have been killed by US troops or coalition troops, so obviously treading very lightly on that. But this obviously would not be a good thing for the US military or the other international coalition members here at this time.
MULLINS: Alright. The World’s Ben Gilbert speaking to us from Zhari district, which is a rural area just west of Kandahar City in Afghanistan. Ben, thanks.
GILBERT: Thank you, Lisa.
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