US opens major Afghan operation

Hurriyet Daily News with wires

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Thousands of U.S. Marines poured from helicopters and armored vehicles into Taliban-controlled villages in southern Afghanistan on Thursday in the first major operation under President Barack Obama's strategy to stabilize the country. The offensive was launched in Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold and the world's largest opium poppy-producing area. The goal is to clear insurgents from the region before the nation's Aug. 20 presidential election.

It came as U.S. military announced that one of its soldiers was captured by insurgents in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday. The missing soldier was not involved in the Helmand operation. It was believed to be the first time militants had abducted an American soldier in Afghanistan since U.S. troops were deployed to oust the Taliban regime in 2001 and then remained to fight a growing extremist insurgency.

A commander of the Taliban's hard-line Haqqani faction told an Agence France-Presse reporter that his militia had captured a U.S. trooper and three Afghans in the province of Paktika, which borders Pakistan.

"One of our commanders named Mawlawi Sangin has captured a coalition soldier along with his three Afghan guards in Yousuf Khail district of Paktika province," the commander, named only Bahram, told AFP. "The coalition soldier has been taken to a safe place," he said.

U.S. officials described the offensive in Helmand as the largest and fastest-moving of the war's new phase and the biggest Marine offensive since the one in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004. It involves nearly 4,000 newly arrived Marines plus 650 Afghan forces. British forces last week led similar, but smaller, missions to clear out insurgents in Helmand and neighboring Kandahar province. "Where we go we will stay, and where we stay, we will hold, build and work toward transition of all security responsibilities to Afghan forces," Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson said in a statement.

Pakistan's army said it had moved troops from elsewhere on its side of the Afghan border to the stretch opposite Helmand to try to stop any militants from fleeing the offensive. It gave no more details, but U.S. and Pakistani officials have expressed concern that stepped-up operations in southern Afghanistan could push the insurgents across the border.

Transport helicopters carried hundreds of Marines into the village of Nawa, some 20 miles (30 kilometers) south of the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, in a region where no U.S. or other NATO troops have operated in large numbers.

Violent comeback

The troops took many insurgents by surprise, dropping behind Taliban lines, said Capt. Drew Schoenmaker, from Greene, New York.

"We are kind of forging new ground here. We are going to a place nobody has been before," Schoenmaker, who commands Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, told the Associated Press.

Southern Afghanistan is a Taliban stronghold, but also a region where Afghan President Hamid Karzai is seeking votes from fellow Pashtun tribesmen. The Pentagon is deploying 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in time for the elections and expects the total number of U.S. forces there to reach 68,000 by year's end. That is double the number of troops in Afghanistan in 2008 but still half as many as are now in Iraq. The Taliban have made a violent comeback, wreaking havoc in much of the country's south and east, forcing the United States to pour in the new troops. Pelletier said troops in Thursday's operation were sent in by a mixture of aircraft and ground transport under the cover of darkness. The operation aims to show "the Afghan people that when we come in, we are going to stay long enough to set up their own institutions," Pelletier said.