Ambush Catches Joint Forces By Surprise As They Patrol Taliban Heartland

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
April 10, 2007
Pg. 12
By C. J. Chivers
SURKH-MURGHAB, Afghanistan, April 4 — Capt. Abdul Rakhman peered over a chest-high mud wall as gunfire and shouts rose. Beside him were two Afghan Army soldiers and a Dutch marine. A few yards away another Afghan soldier knelt in the dirt, reloading a rocket-propelled grenade.
The patrol was stuck, enveloped in a poppy field in a Taliban ambush. Automatic rifle fire came toward them from a tree line about 175 yards to the west and from a row of mud-walled Afghan houses to the east and north.
The captain and Sergeant Leendert, a Dutch marine and the squad’s senior adviser, had dashed here when the shooting began six minutes before, leading an Afghan squad to cover.
Now neither side of the wall was safe. Bullets smacked the dried mud beside them; the rest of the squad was lying exposed in the field. Taliban fighters were on both flanks. More bullets whirred by, but many missed, as the Taliban demonstrated remarkably poor marksmanship against an enemy they had surprised.
The marine turned toward a building. “O.K.,” he said. “Go! Go! Go!”
The squad began to fall back.
This intense firefight, across poppy fields and against a fast-moving group of insurgents, began a 38-minute withdrawal under fire from a village out of the Afghan government’s control, like many here in the overwhelmingly Pashtun provinces of central, southern and eastern Afghanistan.
The patrol, an Afghan squad supported by a Dutch mechanized infantry platoon, had set out about an hour earlier from a small forward base in Poentjak, in Uruzgan Province, an isolated region of arid mountains and cultivated valleys that is one of the areas where the Taliban originated.
On this day, the Afghan patrol planned to walk to the edge of Surkh-Murghab, a pro-Taliban village beside the base. Sergeant Leendert hoped that Captain Abdul Rakhman, an Afghan intelligence officer, could arrange a meeting between the village’s elders and a reconstruction specialist. (Following Dutch military rules, Sergeant Leendert and other junior soldiers can be identified only by rank and first name.)
The Afghans stopped their three pickup trucks about 900 yards from the village and began to walk, crossing fields and groves of fruit and nut trees. Sergeant Leendert walked with the captain in the first fire team. Another marine, Sergeant John, trailed with the second fire team.
A Dutch machine-gun truck and an armored vehicle crawled forward, shadowing several Dutch engineers, who swept the road for mines. A forward observer watched from the base, prepared to provide mortar fire.
Captain Abdul Rakhman immediately sensed trouble. Usually, farmers and their livestock roam these fields. But the men and their animals had disappeared.
The patrol walked through the stillness toward a mud-walled compound. “Everybody follow me and watch closely,” the captain said over his two-way radio.
As the Afghan soldiers approached, women flowed away from the compound. Their blue burqas seemed to float through the thigh-high green grass.
The day before, the captain had met an Afghan police commander who told him that the father of the Taliban chief in Surkh-Murghab was a lame old man. Now, an occupant of the compound stepped outside and tried to follow the women. He was a lame old man.
More women were fleeing. The captain suspected that men were hiding under the burqas, too.
The captain stopped the old man. He said he was scared, and told the captain the whole village was aligned with the Taliban.
The captain directed the patrol toward a dirt road, hoping to walk on the village’s edge and avoid a trap between buildings.
They were crossing open ground when the Taliban attacked. The first shot was a 107-millimeter rocket, which flew overhead and exploded on the opposite side of the road. The captain and the marine bounded to the wall. The ambush began. Taliban fighters opened fire from the west, north and northeast.
The Dutch engineers had advanced nearby, and were caught in the open, too. Together, the Afghans and Dutch returned fire. More Taliban fighters joined in, now from the east, firing from the compound where the old man had stood.
The patrol was exposed on three sides, caught in a kill zone. But burst after burst flew wide. Stray shots buzzed past or thudded in the mud.
About 300 yards back, the Dutch platoon commander, First Lt. Marcel, directed fire from the vehicles’ machine guns and 25-millimeter cannons. The patrol began to make its escape.
Sergeant Leendert led the first team of the Afghan patrol over two walls toward a building. The second team broke for another, sprinting toward the road. A rocket-propelled grenade swooshed through the air toward them, struck and failed to detonate. The second team reached the wall, hopped it and returned fire.
The Afghans and Dutch were in view of one another, spread along 450 yards of road. Lieutenant Marcel gave the order to withdraw. A Dutch soldier near him fell, struck near the neck. Medics began treating him on the grass.
The 81-millimeter mortar section opened fire, trying to drop explosive rounds into a compound with several Taliban fighters. After finding the range, it began to fire shot after shot into the same place, 18 rounds in all.
With their heavier weapons, the Dutch had a firepower advantage. They suppressed the insurgents to the west. But the Taliban’s fighters were local men; they knew the ground. They moved through vegetation and ditches along the eastern flank and opened another angle of fire, giving themselves clear shots across the only withdrawal route.
For a few minutes there was a lull in the Taliban’s firing. But soon their shooting intensified, forcing the soldiers to run beside armored vehicles, using the armor as rolling shields.
A patrol that began as a slow and methodical walk had become a blur of sprinting, shooting, waiting, peeking around corners and catching breath. The soldiers shouted in four languages: Dutch, Dari, English and Pashto.
Captain Abdul Rakhman ran ahead, finding one firing position after another.
Another rocket-propelled grenade slammed near the armored vehicles and exploded, wounding two Afghan soldiers. Both continued on.
The platoon made a wall of vehicles around the downed Dutch soldier, Private First Class Rob, until medics bandaged him and loaded him into an armored ambulance.
Then the Dutch broke contact and reached a gully out of the line of fire.
Captain Abdul Rakhman shared news. “I shot one,” he said. He swept his hand from his belly to his neck, indicating where the enemy had been struck. The gesture resembled zipping a coat. He shrugged. “I think he is dead,” he said.
A Black Hawk helicopter landed, took on the wounded Dutch soldier and lifted away. The patrol was over.
The Dutch and Afghan soldiers drove back to their bunkers while smoke rose and drifted over Surkh-Murghab.
Word of the wounded Dutch soldier passed among the troops. He had been struck by the casing of a round fired from a Dutch 23-millimeter cannon, Lieutenant Marcel said. His wound was not severe.
Later, in a tent crowded with Afghan soldiers, Captain Abdul Rakhman spoke of the limits of their influence.
Several villages south of Poentjak tolerate the Dutch and the Afghan Army, and tribes have assigned young men to join the Afghan police. But in every other direction the Taliban is strong. These villages, the captain said, could never be won with such a small force. Seeing the Afghan patrol approach, the local men had ushered their families away and coordinated an attack, striking from multiple directions and with several different types of weapons.
They also maneuvered in the face of machine gun, rocket and mortar fire. And they used trickery, he said, to set up the attack. “Those people who walked under burqas, they were not all ladies,” he said. “There were men. Taliban. They went to take their firing positions.”
But the Taliban had also made mistakes, he said, including firing too soon. Had the Afghan patrol been allowed to walk farther into the ambush site it would have been encircled. Instead, the Taliban left a chance for escape, and fired with such poor aim that soldiers caught in the open were able to flee unharmed.
The captain still had questions he wanted answered.
Later, near darkness, he slipped off base in civilian clothes, to talk with shepherds passing through the fields. When he returned, he told his squad more news: two of the Taliban had been wounded, he said, and four had been killed.
 
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