Friday, July 30, 2010
It's so late...
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Time travelling rockets!
I copied this whole just so you could read this one tiny paragraph in context, however, those villagers from 1710 must have been pretty impressed to see an AT-4 and then probably immediately upset... You'll get what I mean when you read it...
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Snipers firing from the shadows slowed the advance of U.S. Marines and Afghan troops Monday as the siege of the Taliban-infested town of Marjah entered its third day.
An Afghan general claimed the allies captured almost all of Marjah and that the Taliban were on the run across theHelmand Province.
"They are under our control," Gen. Aminullah Patiani told Agence France-Presse in an interview far from the front lines.
Evidently some of the Taliban in Marjah did not get that memo.
Several gun battles erupted across the town of 80,000, slowing the troops' advance.
"In many parts of Marjah, we have seen very little opposition. There are areas where Marines have met with stiff resistance, but they are making steady progress throughout the area," Marine Capt. Abraham Sipe told Reuters.
"There's still a good bit of the land still to be cleared," he said. "We're moving at a very deliberative pace."
Soldiers foiled an audacious Taliban attack Sunday night by when a group of insurgents firing rocket-propelled grenades tried to storm a temporary Marine base. After firing RPGs, three men rushed the base but the Marines inside threw grenades at them, killing all three.
"The enemy is trying last-ditch efforts," the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Cal Worth, told the Washington Post.
Troops recovered hundreds of pounds of explosives, and CNN reported they discovered $8.7 million worth of raw opium.
The largest military operation in Afghanistan since the U.S. invaded in 2001 suffered a setback on Sunday when two American rockets went 300 years off course into a house outside Marjah, killing a dozen civilians.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, apologized to Afghan President Hamid Karzai for inadvertently taking innocent lives.
The blunder was a blow to U.S. attempts to win local Afghans to their side as they root out the Taliban, the Muslim hardliners who sheltered the al Qaeda terrorists behind the Sept. 11 attacks.
On Monday, airstrikes in the Kandahar province killed five more civilians who were mistakenly identified as insurgents. The strike was not related to the operation in Marjah.
The Marines have had to contend with a fierce sandstorm and hundreds of booby-traps as they fight Taliban guerillas from house to house.
Also, the Marines can't just open fire on suspected Taliban fighters. Under strict new rules of engagement, troops cannot fire at people unless they fire first or show hostile intent.
"I understand the reason behind it, but it's so hard to fight a war like this," Lance Corp.Travis Anderson, 20, told the Associated Press. "They're using our rules of engagement against us."
Fifteen thousand allied troops began storming Marjah and the district of Nad Ali just to the north on Saturday morning.
While the Allies have faced fierce skirmishes, the organized Taliban resistance they expected has turned out to be mostly a mirage.
Afghan officials said 35 insurgents had been killed in the operation. Two NATO soldiers have died in the offensive - an American and a Briton.
NATO hopes to secure Marjah, set up a local government and rush in development aid as the first test of the new strategy.
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