Word: soldier
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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...
...years the Taliban have redoubled their efforts to get back their former power bases in southern provinces like Uruzgan. That has brought the ISAF into the area in force and increased the number of clashes - and casualties. In the past year, three Australians, nine Dutch troops and a U.S. soldier have been killed in Uruzgan. More than 100 Afghan civilians have died in the fighting, and some 1,600 families have fled their homes...
...leaflets and broadcast messages telling villagers how to protect themselves during the operation, which involved Australian, Dutch, Afghan and British forces. Rietdijk says Spin Ghar uncovered many weapons caches without a single civilian casualty. But Australian SAS sergeant Matthew Locke was shot dead on a reconnaissance mission, and Dutch soldier Ronald Groen was killed by a mine. Rietdijk concedes that giving notice of the operation might have put troops at risk, but says "the advantage of avoiding casualties among civilians was more important." An Australian Defence spokesman declined to comment, but said its operational planning always involves "assessing the risk...
...That brings us to Saudi Arabia, another soldier in our Iran picket line. The $20 billion in arms that Bush agreed to sell Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states is meant to deter the Iranians from taking the Gulf. All well and good. But the question remains, as always, whether the Arabs will figure out how to use them. They didn't in the last war in the Gulf (1990-91), when the Kuwaiti army collapsed in a blink. As the Saudi army did when Saddam attacked Khafji. Both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia at the time were armed with...
Luckily, my translator had a booming voice, and he shouted at the crowd to calm down. He explained that it had all been a big mistake, the soldier had not intended to insult their national flag, he had merely been misinformed by his Kurdish translator. To my relief, the Iraqis were mollified. Some laughed, others made wisecracks about Kurds...