Word: australian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...small country town. Women in burqas shepherd gawking children through the bazaar, and grizzled farmers in battered four-wheel-drives jostle for road space with flocks of sheep and motorbikes decked with flowers and bright seat rugs. But "it's dangerous going out" of town, says an Australian soldier at the governor's compound who asked not to be named. "You'll go somewhere once, twice - and the third time you're dead.'' The compound, with its neatly tended rose garden, is ringed by high walls, double checkpoints, machine-gun emplacements and blast barriers, and guarded...
...went immediately to his neighbor's house. "There was blood everywhere, Faiz recalls. "There were dead bodies." He says six members of the Daad family had been killed - three men, two women and a young girl. Australian Defence officials say the house, in Chenartu village in southern Afghanistan's Uruzgan province, was raided by Australian troops of the Internatonal Security Assistance Force (ISAF) because it was an "extremist Taliban compound." They said several of the people inside - including one of the women killed - were armed and that they initiated a fierce firefight. Australian commando Luke Worsley was shot dead...
...Australian and Dutch troops responsible for security in Uruzgan are using an "ink blot" counterinsurgency strategy, securing small areas and steadily expanding them. Outside the secure zones, they aim to disrupt the enemy with regular attacks and win people's trust with aid projects. The Taliban are reading from the same playbook, even installing governors and Sharia judges in areas they control. But while the ISAF operates under strict rules of engagement, the Taliban visit savage retribution on anyone they suspect of collaborating with the ISAF or Afghan government forces. Thousands of families face an impossible choice: cooperate with...
...years. The number of Taliban fighters in Uruzgan is unknown - estimates range from 300 to 3,000 - but there is no doubting the effectiveness of their terror tactics. In November, on the vital highway between Tarin Kowt and Kandahar, capital of the adjacent province, five Afghan police manning Australian-built checkpoints were killed and their corpses strung up as a warning against collaboration with the authorities. Tribal elders say the only way to travel the road safely now is in a secure convoy organized by police...
...Australian special forces, on the other hand, have been accused of fighting too aggressively. Few question their effectiveness at disrupting the enemy and tracking and killing "high-value targets." The previous Taliban boss of Uruzgan, Qari Faizullah Mohammed, was sitting under an almond tree at Tora Chena, about 8 km from Tarin Kowt, when "somehow the Australians managed to target his seat under the tree and dropped a bomb on it," says elder Obeidullah. "They killed 33 Taliban that day." After tracking Taliban leader Mullah Pi Mohammed into the mountains near Deh Roshan, Australian troops killed him and most...